The Four Elements of Good Cooking
he secret behind that zing! can be explained by some basic chemistry. Salt is a mineral: sodium chloride. It’s one of several dozen essential nutrients without which we cannot survive. The human body can’t store much salt, so we need to consume it regularly in order to be able to carry out basic biological processes, such as maintaining proper blood pressure and water distribution in the body, delivering nutrients to and from cells, nerve transmission, and muscle movement. In fact, we’re hardwired to crave salt to ensure we get enough of it. The lucky consequence of this is that salt makes almost everything taste better to us, so it’s hardly a chore to add it to our food. In fact, by enhancing flavor, salt increases the pleasure we experience as we eat.
All salt comes from the ocean, be it the Atlantic or a long-forgotten sea like the giant prehistoric Lake Minchin of Bolivia, home of the earth’s largest salt flat. Salt that is left behind when seawater evaporates is sea salt, whereas rock salt is mined from ancient lakes and seas, some of which now lie far underground.
The primary role that salt plays in cooking is to amplify flavor. Though salt also affects texture and helps modify other flavors, nearly every decision you’ll make about salt will involve enhancing and deepening flavor.
Does this mean you should simply use more salt? No. It means use salt better. Add it in the right amount, at the right time, in the right form. A smaller amount of salt applied while cooking will often do more to improve flavor than a larger amount added at the table. And unless you have been specifically told by your doctor to limit your salt consumption, you can relax about your sodium intake from homecooked food. When students balk at the palmfuls of salt I add to pots of water for boiling vegetables, I gently point out that most of the salt will end up going down the drain with the cooking water. In almost every case, anything you cook for yourself at home is more nutritious, and lower in sodium, than processed, prepared, or restaurant food.
What is Fat
Just after I began cooking at Chez Panisse, the chefs held a contest to see which employee could come up with the best tomato sauce recipe. There was only one rule: we had to use ingredients readily available in the restaurant’s kitchen. The prize was five hundred dollars in cash and an acknowledgment on the menu each time the recipe would be used . . . forever.
As a total novice, I was too intimidated to enter, but it seemed like everyone else—from the maître d’ to other bussers, porters, and, of course, the cooks—wanted to try.
Dozens of entrants brought in their sauces for a blind tasting by a team of “impartial judges” (i.e., the chefs and Alice). Some sauces were seasoned with dried oregano, others fresh marjoram. Some entrants crushed their canned tomatoes by hand while others painstakingly seeded and diced them. Others added chili flakes while still others channeled their inner nonnas and puréed their sauces, pomarola-style. It was tomato mayhem and we were all atwitter, waiting to hear who would be the winner.
At one point, one of the chefs came into the kitchen to get a glass of water. We asked him how it was going. I’ll never forget what he said.
“There are a lot of great entries. So many, in fact, that it’s hard to narrow them down. But Alice’s palate is so sensitive she can’t ignore that some of the best versions were made with rancid olive oil.”
Alice couldn’t understand why everyone hadn’t used the high-quality olive oil we cooked with at the restaurant, especially when it was always available to employees to buy at cost.
I was shocked. Never before had it occurred to me that olive oil would have much effect on the flavor of a dish, much less one as piquant as tomato sauce. This was my first glimpse of understanding that as a foundational ingredient, the flavor of olive oil, and indeed any fat we choose to cook with, dramatically alters our perception of the entire dish. Just as an onion cooked in butter tastes different from an onion cooked in olive oil, an onion cooked in good olive oil tastes different—and in this case better—than one cooked in a poorer quality oil.
My friend Mike, another young cook, ended up winning the contest. His recipe was so complicated I can hardly remember it all these years later. But I’ll never forget the lesson I learned that day: food can only ever be as delicious as the fat with which it’s cooked
While I was taught to appreciate the flavors of various olive oils at Chez Panisse, it wasn’t until I worked in Italy that I saw fat as an important and versatile element of cooking on its own, rather than simply a cooking medium.
During the olive harvest, or raccolta, I made a pilgrimage to Tenuta di Capezzana, the producer of the most exquisite olive oil I’d ever tasted. Standing in the frantoio, I watched rapt as the day’s olive harvest was transformed into a yellow-green elixir so bright it seemed to illuminate the dark Tuscan night. The oil’s flavor was as astonishing as its color—peppery, almost acidic, in a way I never imagined a fat could be.
The following autumn I was in Liguria, a coastal province, during the raccolta. Olio nuovo pressed on the shores of the Mediterranean was wholly different: this oil was buttery, low in acid, and so rich I wanted to swallow spoonfuls of it. I learned that where olive oil comes from has a huge effect on how it tastes—oil from hot, dry hilly areas is spicy, while oil from coastal climates with milder weather is correspondingly milder in flavor. After tasting the oils I could see how a peppery oil would overwhelm a delicate preparation such as fish tartare, while the more subtle flavor of a coastal oil might not be able to stand up to the bold flavors of a Tuscan bistecca served with bitter greens.
What is ACID
In contrast to the revelations I experienced with Salt and Fat, I’ve learned the value of Acid gradually. It started at home, with the food my mom, grandmothers, and aunts cooked each night.
Maman, who’d grown up eating lemons and limes as an afternoon snack, never thought a dish tasted right unless it made her pucker. She always added a sour element to the plate, to balance the sweet, the salty, the starchy, the rich. Sometimes it was a sprinkle of dried sumac berries over kebabs and rice. With Kuku Sabzi, a frittata packed with herbs and greens, it was a few spoonfuls of my grandmother Parivash’s torshi, or mixed pickles. For No-Ruz, the Persian New Year, my dad would drive down to Mexico to find sour oranges for us to squeeze ceremoniously over fried fish and herbed rice. Into other classic dishes, Maman layered ghooreh, sour green grapes, and zereshk, the tiny tart fruits known as barberries. But mostly we used yogurt to achieve that desired tang, spooning it over everything from eggs to soups to stews and rice and, though I wince to think of it now, spaghetti with meat sauce.
I wasn’t like the other kids at school. Looking at my classmates’ peanut butter sandwiches next to the kuku sabzi, cucumbers, and feta Maman packed in my lunch box, it was clear that my home life was dramatically different from theirs. I grew up in a house filled with the language, customs, and food of another place and time. Each year, I eagerly anticipated my grandmother Parvin’s visits from Iran. I loved nothing more than watching her unpack while the room flooded with exotic aromas: saffron, cardamom, and rosewater mingled with the humid, slightly moldy Caspian air that had tucked itself into the fabric lining of her bags over the years. One by one, she’d pull out treats: pistachios roasted with saffron and lime juice, sour cherry preserves, sheets of homemade lavashak, plum leather so sour it made my cheeks hurt. Growing up, I learned from my family to delight in sour foods and let my palate become the most Persian part of me. But it wasn’t until I left home that I realized that there’s so much more to acid than just the pucker As part of my parents’ ongoing efforts to delay our assimilation for as long as possible, we never celebrated Thanksgiving. I first celebrated the holiday in college, with a friend and her family. I loved the hubbub involved in preparing and gathering for the meal, but the actual eating part of Thanksgiving was kind of a letdown. We sat down to a table piled high with food: a humongous whole turkey, roasted and ceremoniously carved; brown gravy made with the drippings; mashed potatoes thick with butter and cream; creamed spinach spiced with nutmeg; Brussels sprouts boiled so long that my friend’s nearly toothless grandmother could easily chew them; and stuffing packed with sausage, bacon, and chestnuts. I really love to eat, but these soft, rich, bland foods bored my palate after just a few bites. Spooning more cranberry sauce onto my plate each time the bowl passed my way, I kept eating in hope of tasting something satisfying. But it never happened, and every year on the fourth Thursday of November I ate until I felt mildly ill, like everyone else.
Once I started cooking at Chez Panisse, I began to spend the holiday with friends from the restaurant. At my first Thanksgiving with other cooks, my palate never became bored. I never felt like eating was a chore. I never felt sick afterward. This certainly wasn’t because the foods we’d cooked were somehow healthier or more virtuous. So what was it?
It hit me that the Thanksgiving dinners I’d spent with other cooks mirrored the traditional Persian meals I’d grown up eating. Acid had been tucked into every dish, and it had brought the meal to life. Sour cream lent a tang to mashed potatoes. A splash of white wine added just before serving lightened the gravy. Hidden in the big, beautiful mass of stuffing among torn sourdough croutons, greens, and bites of sausage were prunes soaked in white wine—secret caches of acid, most welcome. Roasted winter squash and Brussels sprouts were tossed in an Italian Agrodolce, a sauce made with sugar, chilies, and vinegar. The salsa verde featured fried sage, a welcome partner to the cranberry-quince sauce that I’d made with a nod to the Persian quince preserves Maman jarred every autumn. Even dessert, with a drizzle of dark caramel for the pies and a touch of crème fraîche folded into the whipped cream, had a tang. It dawned on me that the reason why everyone spoons so much cranberry sauce over everything at Thanksgiving is that on most tables, it’s just about the only form of acid available.
What is Heat
When 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.
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