Food writer Samin Nosrat says salt needs to be added in the right amount, at the right time, in the right form

Salt enhances flavour, makes food taste more of itself and brings it to life, writes ELAINE REEVES

TWO of my favourite food people — Yotam Ottolenghi for the recipes and Michael Pollan for the politics — have heaped praise on Samin Nosrat.

When Ottolenghi was here in February, he said he had just finished watching her Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat television series. That reminded me I had first encountered Nosrat in 2013, when Michael Pollan’s book Cooked came out. Nosrat had sat in on one of his food writing courses and he called on her when he needed cooking lessons.

Prompted by Ottolenghi, I went straight to the bookshop and the Netflix search function.

Salt, Fat Acid, Heat, (Cannongate $49.99) is not attention-grabbing, so easily overlooked in spite of its time on UK and US bestseller lists. It addresses the “cardinal directions in cooking”.

Nosrat writes: “I made it my job to develop exquisite familiarity with the way an ingredient or food behaved and then follow the crumb trail of kitchen science to understand why.”

Recipes are provided for “inspiration, context and general guidance”. The idea is that, with the principles absorbed, you will be “free from recipes and precise shopping lists”.

Salt, fat, acid and heat are “the four elements that allow all great cooks — whether award-winning chefs or Moroccan grandmothers or masters of molecular gastronomy — to cook consistently delicious food,” she writes.

For some reason fat comes first in the TV shows — a trip to Italy exploring olive oil and pork fat — but, says Nosrat, “salt has a greater impact on food than any other ingredient” and it kicks off the book.

Samin Nosrat, author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Picture: JENNIE GROOM

Learning to cook, Nosrat found that “most often when a dish fell flat the answer lay in adjusting the salt. Sometimes it was in the form of salt crystals, but other times it meant a grating of cheese, some pounded anchovies, a few olives, or a sprinkling of capers”.

Salt enhances flavour, makes food taste more of itself and brings it to life.

At her first kitchen job at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, she was given job of cooking the polenta. When told it was not salted enough she sprinkled in a few grains of salt “treating them with the preciousness I might afford, say, gold leaf.”

The senior chef quietly added three palmfuls of salt to the polenta. “Some indescribable transformation had occurred. The corn was somehow sweeter, the butter richer. All of the flavours were more pronounced … the word salty did not apply to what I tasted. All I felt was a satisfying zing! with each mouthful.”

Food police have ruled that salt is not good for us. I have tasted scones and porridge made awful by withholding salt, but Nosrat flings it around with seeming abandon. In fact, she is particular to add salt “in the right amount, at the right time, in the right form”.

She salts meat the day before it is to be cooked (three days before if it is a turkey) to season it from within. “A small amount of salt applied in advance [to meat] will make a much bigger difference than a larger amount applied just before serving. In other words, time, not amount, is the crucial variable,” she writes.

Cooking beans, she adds a prodigious amount of salt to the water, saying not to worry as most is thrown out with the cooking water. (And that generous amounts of salt in home cooking still are nothing compared to what is in processed foods.)

Samin Nosrat in the kitchen.

She explains the science of why properly salted cooking water encourages food to retain its nutrients, cook quicker and retain colour. Beans cooked in unsalted water will be bland, grey and less nutritious. Potatoes simmered for a little while in salted water before roasting will taste much better than those salted just before they go into the oven.

But a warning: “Though the absence of salt in food is deeply regrettable, its overt presence is equally unwelcome: food shouldn’t be salty, it should be salted.

In the TV series, for the Salt episode Nosrat travels to Japan, where they have 4000 different kinds of salt, not to mention soy sauce and miso. For Acid she explores citrus in Mexico and for Heat she is back in the US. In this episode, she makes buttermilk chicken, a whole chicken salted the day before, and conveyor belt chicken — thigh pieces salted only 12 minutes before you eat. Almost precise instructions for both recipes are in the book.