Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Samin Nosrat

My favorite afternoon snack as a child in San Diego was a still-steaming flour tortilla purchased at the taqueria down the street from my school, and I've yearned for them ever since I moved away.

Inexpensive and forgiving, kosher salt is fantastic for everyday cooking and tastes pure.

The best - and most popular - recipe I've ever written has three ingredients: buttermilk, chicken, and salt.

The only good things I've seen emerge from a steamer are tamales, couscous, and dumplings - maybe the occasional artichoke or delicate fish fillet. But baby turnips with their tender greens still attached should be boiled in water as salty as the sea until their flesh is silky and soft.

No Persian meal is complete without an abundance of herbs.

I'd never been religious, but I'd always obeyed my elders. My decision to become an omnivore was fraught, not because it was a religious transgression but because it was my first act of self-assertion as a young adult.

Fried vegetables, often overbattered and undercooked, tend to disappoint me with their tough or soggy crusts.

Persian cuisine is, above all, about balance - of tastes and flavors, textures and temperatures. In every meal, even on every plate, you'll find both sweet and sour, soft and crunchy, cooked and raw, hot and cold.

Jessica Battilana has been my kindred cooking spirit for more than 10 years. Our careers as cooks and writers have taken us through the same Bay Area restaurants, bakeries, magazines, and newspapers.

The apricot's fleetingly short harvest - only a few weeks long - explains the urge to save the season in a jar. But cooked fruit, no matter how expertly preserved, can never measure up to the flawlessness of its fresh counterpart.

I've never tasted a store-bought tortilla that compares in texture or flavor with one made by hand, so I'm happy to invest some time. It's worth it just to see a friend take her first bite and understand, finally, that a flour tortilla is meant to be an essential component, not just a lackluster wrapper.

There are two proper ways to use garlic: pounding and blooming. Neither involves a press, which is little more than a torture device for a beloved ingredient, smushing it up into watery squiggles of inconsistent size that will never cook evenly or vanish into a vinaigrette. If you have one, throw it away!

A burger is a black dress; a kebab is a Met Gala gown.

There's a certain kind of dark-crusted sourdough bread I'm incapable of resisting. A sixth sense alerts me anytime I veer within a three-block radius of a bakery offering tangy country loaves with mahogany crusts. Without fail, I'll make my way inside and buy one, even if there's already half a loaf growing stale on my countertop.

I love the look of delight on my guests' faces when I serve them a bowl of olive-oil aioli alongside roasted potatoes or a grand Nicoise salad.

My mom, who left Iran in 1976, steeped us in the smells, tastes, and traditions of Persian cuisine.

After coating pasta with tomato-rich meat sauce, my mom would drizzle the bottom of a nonstick pot with oil and put it all back in to form a dark crust of tangled noodles. Once she unmolded it at the table like a cake, my brothers and I would excitedly cut into it, verbally laying claim to our preferred pieces.

Tart and sweet, tinged with the faint scent of almonds and flowers, the Blenheim is the ideal apricot for both eating and preserving.

By definition, comfort foods are rich and creamy or evocative of childhood pleasures.

I'm not the number-one fan of the heavy holiday meal. And also, I didn't grow up eating them, the traditional Western holiday meals, so it's just not something I have a nostalgic relationship to.

Throughout my time working in restaurants, I developed an illogical dread of some basic kitchen tasks. None of them - picking and chopping parsley, peeling and mincing garlic, browning pans of ground meat - were particularly difficult. But at the scale required in a professional kitchen, they felt Sisyphean.

Ours was a pork-free household. The rules were arbitrary but strict: No pork in the house, ever. Except for the occasional pepperoni pizza. Or maybe Hawaiian.

No one's born a good cook. You have to learn and practice.

I love mayonnaise. It's one of the first lessons I teach my cooking students. Turning eggs and oil into an emulsion - that creamy, satisfying third thing - feels like magic.

While a pot of boiling water may not offer the char or smoke of a grill, it does give the cook an advantage when it comes to seasoning food.

Unlike leftover pasta, leftover risotto is viewed by Italians as a gift. Cooks shape it into balls or stuff it with a pinch of stewed meat or cheese. Then they bread and deep-fry the fritters until golden brown, yielding arancini, the indulgent 'little oranges' I can never resist.

I get an especially acute case of agita at the thought of a mortar and pestle.

Growing up, I thought salt belonged in a shaker at the table and nowhere else.

Salt has a greater impact on flavor than any other ingredient. Learn to use it well, and food will taste good.

I'll eat anything, even foods I've always shunned, when a friend cooks it.

The cornerstone of every Persian meal is rice, or polo.

I love roast chicken, juicy summer tomatoes, and carrot cake slathered with tangy cream-cheese frosting.

Apricots are the most private fruit, loath to reveal their secrets.

I've always joked that my food memoirs will be titled 'Brutta ma Buona,' the phrase Italians use to describe food that's delicious but rustic-looking at best: ugly but good.

I love bitter broccoli rabe tossed with Calabrian chiles and hidden under a mountain of snowy shaved Parmesan.

The temperatures required for caramelization and browning almost always far exceed the boiling point of water. So the presence of water on the surface of a food, or on the bottom of a pan, is a signal that browning can't yet occur.

The higher a flour's protein content, the more structure and elasticity it will lend a dough.

Years of cooking have taught me that the harder a flour is, the 'thirstier' it is. In other words, harder flours tend to have a greater capacity to absorb water than their softer counterparts.

My inability to follow recipes as written - without obeying the devil on my shoulder telling me to replace ingredients or change the temperature - is well documented.

A successful shrimp boil requires layering ingredients into the pot so that everything is done cooking at once. A carefully timed choreography dictates the order in which ingredients are added to ensure no one has to eat raw potatoes or chewy shrimp.

Hello, my name is Samin, and I'm an artisanal-bread hoarder.

In sausage, fat is a source of both delightfully porky flavor and a springy texture. Without enough fat, sausage will be dry and tasteless.

It's easy to discount water's importance in the kitchen. After all, it has no flavor, and more often than not, it's left off ingredient lists, making it seem like an afterthought. Yet water is an essential element of almost everything we cook and eat, and it affects the flavor and texture of all our food.

We all have incredible relationships to what we eat, to what we don't eat, to what we've eaten since childhood and what we were fed, to what food means to us. And so I find it a really powerful tool in storytelling and in opening people's hearts and their minds.

Like all Iranian kids, I grew up feeling strongly that the best part of dinner was tahdig, the crisp, golden crust that forms at the bottom of every pot of Persian rice - and sometimes other dishes, too.

I always turn to Wendell Berry for inspiration on food, community, agriculture, and, well, just being a human.

Steaming offers no opportunity for either seasoning or developing the brown, crisp textures that sauteing and roasting afford.

While other stone fruits grow tender on the surface as they ripen, apricots take an alternate path to maturity, softening from the inside out.

Browning butter affects more than just the color and the flavor of its milk solids; the water that butter contains also simmers away.

I take, like, 9,000 supplements every morning. I don't know if it's completely placebo or not, but I'm super committed to these supplements: like, I can't face the day without them.

Most canele recipes begin with an instruction to brush $30 copper molds with melted beeswax. Unsurprisingly, I've never made it past the Internet search for 'used canele molds' before giving up.

When I was young, one Sunday every month or so, my mom would load my brothers and me into our station wagon and drive 80 miles north to Orange County, where we'd meet our extended family at a Persian restaurant for lunch.

Long-stemmed broccoli should be tossed with olive oil and flaky salt and roasted in a hot oven until the florets turn the color of hazelnut shells and shatter on the tongue.

As a student of Alice Waters, the patron saint of salad, I'm no stranger to the art of lettuce washing.

I've always believed that pastry chefs are born, not made. They're patient, methodical, tidy, and organized. It's why I stick to the savory side of the kitchen - I'm far too messy and impulsive to do all the measuring, timing, and rule-following that pastry demands.

I just drink regular drip coffee, but I'm kind of a coffee baby.

At some point during every cooking class I teach, I do my signature move: dramatically add handful upon handful of salt to a large pot of boiling water, then taste it and add even more.

I know pastry chefs who are overwhelmed by the idea of tasting, rather than measuring, their way to a balanced vinaigrette.

Salt's relationship to flavor is multidimensional: It has its own particular taste, and it both balances and enhances the flavor of other ingredients.

One pillar of my cooking is that salad dressing is sacred and that you always make it with the most delicious oil you can find. Usually, that means extra-virgin olive oil.