Think of any dish you absolutely love to eat. It probably has an ideal balance of Salt, Fat, and Acid, whether it’s a bowl of tortilla soup, Caesar salad, a bánh mi sandwich, a margherita pizza, or a bite of feta cheese tucked with cucumber into a piece of lavash bread. Since the human body can’t produce certain essential forms of salt, fat, and acid, our palates have evolved to seek these three
elements. This results in a universal appeal to food with Salt, Fat, and Acid all in balance, no matter the cuisine.
On their own, Salt, Fat, and Acid can give shape to the idea for a dish or even a meal. When deciding upon what to make, first answer the questions of which form (or forms) of each element to use, and how, and when. You’ll find yourself with a to-do list that resembles—wait for it—a kind of recipe. If you want to turn last night’s leftover roast chicken into chicken salad sandwiches, for instance, think first about whether you’re craving Indian, Sicilian, or classic American flavors. Once you decide, refer to The World of Acid to help you choose the forms of Salt, Fat, and Acid that will take you in the right direction. To evoke a taste of India, you might use thick, full-fat yogurt, cilantro, onions macerated in lime juice, salt, and a hint of curry powder. To conjure up a night on the shores of Palermo, you could use lemon juice and zest, onions macerated in red wine vinegar, aïoli, fennel seeds, and sea salt. Or try a chicken salad sandwich inspired by Cobb salad, with huge crumbles of bacon and blue cheese and slices of hard-cooked egg and avocado. Then dress everything with a red wine vinaigrette before loading it onto the bread.
If the thought of improvisational cooking scares you, take it slowly. Try the recipes I’ve included in this book, grow comfortable with a basic repertoire of dishes, and then start to play with one component at a time. Make Bright Cabbage Slaw enough times to memorize its ingredients and method, then adapt it as you like, by varying the Fat, Acid, or both. Use mayonnaise instead of olive oil to make a Classic Southern variation, and rice wine vinegar instead of red wine vinegar to make an Asian one.
Play to each element’s strengths: use Salt to enhance, Fat to carry, and Acid to balance flavor. Now, with the knowledge of how they affect various foods, add each to a dish at the right time in order to season it from within. Add salt early to a pot of beans, but acid late. Season meat for a braise in advance, then start it off on the heat with a dose of cooking acid. When it’s done and rich in flavor, lighten it with a garnishing acid.
Let Salt, Fat, and Acid work together in concert to improve anything you eat, whether you cooked it or not. Doctor a lackluster restaurant taco by asking for sour cream, guacamole, pickles, or salsa. Eye the dressings, cheeses, and pickles at the local salad bar with renewed interest. Use yogurt, tahini, pepper sauce, and pickled onions to amend a dry, bland falafel sandwich.
Harmonize these three notes, and invariably your taste buds will sing with delight.
W
hen aspiring chefs ask me for career advice, I offer a few tips: Cook every single day. Taste everything thoughtfully. Go to the farmers’ market and familiarize yourself with each season’s produce. Read everything Paula Wolfert, James Beard, Marcella Hazan, and Jane Grigson have written about food. Write a letter to your favorite restaurant professing your love and beg for an apprenticeship. Skip culinary school; spend a fraction of the cost of tuition traveling the world instead.There is so much to learn from travel, especially as a young cook: you collect taste memories, understand the flavors of a place, and gain a sense of context.
Eat cassoulet in Toulouse, hummus in Jerusalem, ramen in Kyoto, and ceviche in Lima. Make these classics your beacons so that when you return to your own kitchen and change a recipe, you know precisely how it diverges from the original.
Travel offers another extraordinary value, too: watch and learn from cooks around the world, and discover the universality of good cooking.
For the first four years of my cooking career, Chez Panisse was my only point of reference. Eventually, I couldn’t contain my curiosity any longer. I had to go to Europe and cook in the kitchens that inspired the chefs who’d taught me.
Arriving in Tuscany, I was surprised by how familiar it felt to cook alongside Benedetta and Dario. Some habits seemed to be common to all good cooks.
Benedetta doted on her onions as they browned and brought roasts to room temperature before cooking them, just as the chefs at home had taught me to do.
Heating up a pot of oil for deep-frying, she tested its temperature not with a thermometer, but by dropping in a stale crust of bread to see how quickly it turned golden brown, just as I’d learned to do the first time I’d fried glimmering fresh anchovies at Chez Panisse.
Curious, I began to watch others who cooked the foods I loved to eat. Enzo, my favorite pizzaiolo in Florence, served only three classic pizzas: Marinara, Margherita, and Napoli. He worked alone, snapped at regulars and tourists alike, and eschewed all luxuries, cooking all night in a kitchen the size of a postage stamp. I never saw Enzo use a thermometer to gauge the temperature of his wood-burning oven. Instead, he paid attention to his pizzas. If they burned before the toppings cooked, the oven was too hot. If they emerged pale, he’d throw another log onto the fire. And his method worked: with its crisp, yet chewy crust and barely melted cheese, I’d never tasted a better pizza.
I left Italy and traveled to visit friends and family around the world. Late one night at a bustling roadside stand, I ate flavorful chapli kebabs —Pakistan’s mouthwatering answer to the hamburger. The cook flavored the meat with chilies, ginger, and cilantro, flattened each patty, and slid it into hot oil, monitoring the gurgling fat to decide if he should add more coal to the fire beneath the meter-wide iron pan. When the bubbles relented and the meat was as dark as the tea leaves in his cup, he pulled the kebab from the oil. He handed me one, wrapping it with a warm naan , and drizzling it with yogurt sauce. I took a bite: heaven.
I thought back to one of my first nights in the kitchen at Chez Panisse, when I’d watched Amy, a soft-spoken chef, grill steaks for a hundred guests, graceful and skillful as a dancer. She showed me how she watched the surface of each steak. If the meat didn’t sizzle as it hit the grill, she’d stoke the fire, pulling more coals beneath the metal grates. If the meat browned too quickly, she’d spread out the coals and wait for the grill to cool before continuing. Amy showed me how to ensure that the heat was just right so that the steaks browned evenly on the surface as the interior cooked, so that by the time they reached medium-rare, the outside was mouthwateringly charred, and the strip of fat lining the edge of each rib eye was perfectly rendered. It was no different than turning up or down the flame on the stove.
When I left Pakistan, I visited my grandparents’ farm on the coast of the Caspian Sea in Iran, where my grandmother spent all day in the kitchen. Though she loved to cook for her family, she nevertheless grumbled about how ours is the most labor-intensive cuisine in the world. She chopped mountains of herbs, peeled and prepared cases of vegetables, and tended to khoreshs , complex meat and vegetable stews, as they simmered on the stove for hours. My grandmother watched and stirred the bubbling pots constantly—never still, never boiling—
until finally the stews were done. My uncles, on the other hand, would spend all day smoking filterless cigarettes and telling stories before they lit the fire shortly before dinner. They’d thread chicken and lamb onto flat metal skewers and cook the kebabs quickly over grills so hot their arm hairs regularly caught fire. One kind of cooking took all day, the other, minutes. Both kinds were delicious. Our meals wouldn’t have been complete without either the tender khoreshs or the juicy, charred kebabs.
As I traveled, I noticed that in every country, whether I was watching home cooks or professional chefs, and whether they were cooking over live fire or on a camp stove, the best cooks looked at the food, not the heat source .
I saw how good cooks obeyed sensory cues, rather than timers and thermometers. They listened to the changing sounds of a sizzling sausage, watched the way a simmer becomes a boil, felt how a slow-cooked pork shoulder tightens and then relaxes as hours pass, and tasted a noodle plucked from boiling water to determine whether it’s al dente. In order to cook instinctually, I needed to learn to recognize these signals. I needed to learn how food responds to the fourth element of good cooking: Heat.