Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus.
Today on the show, the wonderful chemistry and science of food.
Yeah, because, you know, even if you've never set foot in a lab...
You are doing a little bit of science every day.
When you add a little salt to your pasta or you cook your vegetables, or even if you make a Betty Crocker cake, you are doing some really cool science.
And one award-winning chef who's thought a lot about all this is Samin Nosrat.
She's the author of the best-selling book, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.
She has a new book out.
It's called Good Things.
And I've wanted to get Samin on the show for ages, because she makes me think about cooking and the food that I shove in my mouth in this completely new and very nerdy way.
And so that's what we're talking about today.
The science of cooking.
Plus, why you should never put meatballs on spaghetti.
My interview with Samin Nosrat is coming up just after the break.
Infinite Monkey Cage returns imminently.
I am Robert Ince and I'm sat next to Brian Cox, who has so much to tell you about what's on the new series.
Primarily eels.
And what else?
It was fascinating, the eels.
But we're not just doing eels, are we?
We're doing a bit.
Brain computer interfaces timekeeping fusion monkey, business cloud.
Science of the North Pole and eels.
Did I mention the eels?
Is this ever since you bought that timeshare underneath the Sargasso Sea?
Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. the show, Samin.
Thank you so much for coming in.
Thanks so much for having me.
Growing up in San Diego.
I've heard you say and you write about it a little bit in the new book that you never really felt like you belonged that much in San Diego.
Can you tell us about it?
Well, I mean, my family's from Iran and my parents came to San Diego sometime in the mid-70s.
In 1979, there was a religious revolution in Iran.
So a lot of people sort of sensed that coming.
And my parents, my father's side of the family was a practice of religion called the Baha'i faith.
And they were persecuted.
So they all fled and were religious asylees.
And my mom, like, came after, followed my dad here.
And so I was born here.
And I was born here to a family who wasn't entirely, like willingly religious, you know, in San Diego.
Like, it was just... Right?
There's the trauma of leaving your homeland behind.
My, You know, we There was In ways I'm sure I can't imagine, and probably many ways I witnessed there was racism and sort of Islamophobia directed at us and to my parents.
And I'm sure that they had a pretty clear sense of like, not feeling very welcome or belonging here.
And...
I also think because they didn't leave – especially my mom did not leave Iran, thinking she'd be gone forever.
My mom would say things like you know, when you go – when you leave this house, like you're stepping into America.
But when you step over the threshold into the house, this is Iran and you're going to like behave like an Iranian child, right?
And I – my mom –
It was so important for her to instill in us a relationship to the place that we were from.
And one of the ways that she did that sort of most powerfully was through food.
And I have always loved to eat.
And the food is good.
And your mom's an amazing chef.
And my mom's a great cook, yeah.
And there were things where I would bring Persian food to school for lunch and people...
You know, it was the classic, like, immigrant kid being like, ew, ew, what's that?
The smell of the whatever in the lunchroom.
And they would have been eating some disgusting peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Totally.
And so or like Americans are going to get mad at me saying that, but it's just Oh, you think it's?
Oh yeah, I actually love PBJ too.
But I know it's a very American thing, though.
Like, other cultures are like, what are you people doing putting that stuff in your mouth?
But then...
And what's funny is now, like 40 years later, Persian food and a lot of Middle Eastern Persian food.
A lot of times it gets appropriated by non-Iranian cooks onto their restaurant menus, where it gets a sort of a glam, like a makeover.
And on the one hand, I'm really happy for more and more people to have exposure to our foods.
And in other ways, it makes me so mad.
Like, it's like you want our food, you know what I mean?
You want to eat the crispy rice.
Or there was a drink I used to have.
It's like a summer drink called secangibin, which is like a it's kind of like maybe an early relative of a shrub.
So it's like a vinegar and sugar syrup that's boiled down with mint.
And you make this like really thick, very fragrant minty syrup.
And it's so tangy and refreshing.
It's kind of like the original Gatorade in a way.
Like, right?
Yeah.
It was just one of my favorite childhood things and I remember having a water bottle of it with a mint leaf in it when I was a kid.
And some people like little kids at school were like ew gross, what's in your water, you gross alien.
And now, of course, every hipster bar has shrubs on their menu.
So there's just this way where it's like an extra level of pain where I'm like, this is yet another way in which our humanity... is not recognized and you just like take from you pick and choose what you want and this is like historically been done against all you know i mean like americans love tacos but hate mexicans so like it's just yeah it's it's not it's not unique to us but it does hurt when when i feel that you talk about in the um in your new book that as a kid cake mixes became like a Betty Crocker cake became kind of my obsession.
Yeah.
Your obsession.
What was it about the Betty Crocker cake or the, you know, those cake mixes?
My mom, my mom was really um, she had, she was very committed to like an organic only uh, like low sugar.
You know like sort of a very hippie, like rules in the household for the children of like the we're only eating fresh fruits and vegetables.
We shopped at the hippie co-op.
And so it's not that we were never allowed dessert, but even when she went to get us the birthday cakes and things for special occasions, they came from the finest European bakeries, right.
And they were covered in chocolate shard and chocolate shavings and they were just this dense chocolate cake.
And I just never wanted to eat that.
I wanted to eat what all the white kids had like at the bake sales.
I wanted to eat the fluffy yellow chocolate, you know, yellow cake with chocolate frosting, like it was soft and i would have never been allowed to have that.
That would have.
Just that was like not okay, we never entered our home yeah, and so this is again going back to the like outsiderness.
I think it became a symbol like the.
The yellow cake in a way became like this symbol of fitting in and so um, And there is something just extraordinary about cake mixes and the very light, incredibly tender texture which almost feels like it's a space astronaut food or something, because it doesn't seem naturally achievable.
And so I sort of became obsessed, as a young cook, with there must be a way to achieve some sort of lightness, Because every cake you make a cake with butter and it's dense and heavy.
You make.
You know you could use the same exact ingredients as what's in the what you think is in the yellow cake cake mix.
You could follow the joy of cooking Martha Stewart.
Anybody's like classic yellow cake recipe and it would still come out quite dense.
And I just wanted this lightness.
Yeah.
How do the cake mixes do it?
What?
So the, well, my, this was a many year journey for me and I didn't know the science of it.
But over time I learned that butter is made of fat primarily, but also milk solids, which are like proteins and water.
It's an emulsion.
And so when you cream butter and you are whipping sugar into it to make this kind of light texture, you're aerating the butter, and that's the main source of lightness in a cake.
Butter is in this kind of emulsified state, like a magical state of emulsion.
That's why it's like it can be on your counter and it's a solid right, yeah.
Yeah, it kind of has this incredible range of temperatures at which it stays in in this solid emulsified state, which is why it's like that amazing thing when you like spread butter, cold butter, on your warm toast and it's like kind of like some of it melts but some of it's just soft still when you bite your bite into the soft butter.
Yeah, and so you have that and and the thing about it is the melting point of butter, like chocolate, is very close to human, our body temperature.
So it's so pleasing the way it melts, it melts on the tongue in this really like amazing way, right?
That's like part thinking we eat a piece of chocolate and like part of the pleasure of it is.
It's just like melting on your tongue.
And so butter is kind of this miracle ingredient, but also, like you have to understand, there's water in there.
And when water and flour combine and start mixing, that's when gluten strands start forming.
And gluten is like a protein that leads to chewiness and toughness.
You want to develop gluten in something like a crusty loaf of bread so that when you cut into it or bite into it, you get that sourdough chew.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But that's not the thing you want in a cake.
In a cake, you want it to crumble and dissolve tenderly.
That's what I want, is tenderness on my tongue.
And so you wanna prevent gluten from forming, which is why they use lower protein, lower gluten flours, things like cake flour and pastry flour to make cake.
And also when you have oil.
So fat inhibits gluten formation.
It kinda coats flour and it makes you can think of it almost like it makes it slippery, so the flour's not gonna combine into long gluten strands because it's kind of like lubricated by this outer layer of fat.
So then, the way cake mix is made industrially like, at some point I kind of went and learned about that.
And it's made in these.
You can think of them like massive food processors, just like huge machines, where they combine all the dry ingredients with shortening, which is a solid fat.
It's a solid oil, right?
And they mix and because it is solid but it's soft at regular room temperature, they can put shortening in there and coat the flour.
You know, mix it without any.
They're pre-oiling the flour in the cake mix so that when you bring it home and you add your oil and your water, your less gluten will form.
And it's done for so long and on such an industrial level and so carefully that you can't see the fat right.
You don't see any of that.
It just looks like flour and cocoa powder when you dump out a chocolate cake mix.
But that's what's happened to it is like the flour has already been pre-coated with fat.
And so I just was like, huh, I'll never be able to do that.
I don't want to make a cake with shortening.
That's not going to taste good.
Like I want it to be with butter, but I don't know how to do this.
And then at some point I stumbled into – which is so funny because maybe if I had been looking – like, if I had been more method.
I'm not I'm not saying I'm like methodical in any of this, I am not a scientist, but this is where are we at, two decades in this journey right now?
Yeah which honestly, maybe if I had been more methodical I could have solved this a lot sooner because literally, there is a book, it is, it is like a.
It is a legendary book called the cake bible.
Like honestly, I could have just looked in the cake bible, but come on, Come on.
You think like in Lord of the Rings, Frodo could have just looked at the map, you know.
Got the journey.
Totally, totally.
So like Rose Levy Berenbaum is kind of this extraordinary, just well, like queen of cakes.
And she wrote this book called The Cake Bible.
So, whereas when a typical yellow cake, a typical sort of homemade cake, starts with room temperature butter that you're whipping through sugar into and that step is called creaming reverse creaming sort of mimics what what's done in the industry, in the cake mix industry right, where you take your flour and your sugar and, if you're using cocoa powder, whatever your dry ingredients are, and then you take very soft, but not too soft, not so soft that it will um separate into water and fat butter.
You take butter that is just at the exact right temperature and you work it into the flour, into the flour in um very slowly in your mixer or your food processor, in such a way that by the time you've worked all the flour in, it actually just looks or, excuse me, by the time you've worked the butter in the flour just looks like a dry ingredient.
It's kind of amazing.
It is this, but it's all about having the butter.
Yeah, I mean, Rose did it.
And it was one of those things where I was like this was here all along and I feel like such an idiot.
And also I felt like a genius because the first time I made it, people came over and i was like i did it you guys i made a i made a homemade betty crocker and people were like i don't and then they started eating it they're like oh my god it really tastes like it so it felt like that was truly a mirror miracle that i thought i would i would i know there were so many bad cakes on the way to that cake in the middle yeah you did it i did it yeah um Okay, so to continue on with your journey, a lot of people, including me, sort of first met you after you wrote the book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which then became this Netflix documentary, which is amazing, the book, the documentary.
For those who haven't come across it, what is the overriding thesis of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat?
Yeah, it's basically that if you can sort of grasp something why salt fat, acid and heat are important elements and understand you know their function in the kitchen on um flavor and on texture and how to balance them and how to use them, that that they they will work as sort of the four points on the compass for you as a cook, no matter what you're cooking, and so whether or not you want to follow a recipe, paying attention to salt fat, acid and heat will um enhance the way that you feel independent um are able to cook instinctively, understand what's going on underneath the maybe steps one through six that are someone else laid lays out for you so that, in case you need to substitute something, you understand why that vinegar was there and why it would work or wouldn't work to replace it with lemon juice.
Yeah so, with salt And fat and acid.
Those are all tangible.
Fats come in many forms.
There's oils and butters, there's animal fats.
And same with acid, comes in many forms.
But heat is kind of this like ineffable, intangible thing.
But as a young cook I kind of realized that was how everyone around me that I was looking up to and learning from really oriented themselves in the kitchen on any given day.
And they were not always consulting cookbooks and recipes.
The things we were always tasting for were salt and fat and acid.
I think about it every time I have avocado on toast because I'm like, Samin would be so proud of me.
I'm toasting my bread.
There's my hate.
I've got my avocado and then my salt.
Yeah, there you go.
You did it all.
But I always think of you.
I mean, I am so glad.
And that's the thing I always say is like, this is actually a lot simpler than you think.
It's just some jargon you have to like wrap your mind around.
But We all naturally do this.
I mean, all of these things are things our palates have evolved to seek and to enjoy, right?
And so if you are a person who has ever been to a taqueria and has garnished your own burrito or taco with sour cream and or cheese and or salsa or guacamole like, and done it again and again until it tastes just right, then you're balancing the salt and the fat and the acid, right?
Like you're doing it already.
And in Salt, Fat Acid Heat.
You talk about this story of working at Chez Panit, which you've mentioned.
It's like this, for those who don't know fancy restaurant in Berkeley California, where you got your start.
And having this moment where you realize that salt is not just the sidekick for pepper but actually can like, completely reshape a meal.
If you try it and you actually wrote...
Sorry if it's awkward that I'm quoting you.
No.
But he wrote, if one lesson from this book stays with you, let it be this.
Salt has a greater impact on flavor than any other ingredient.
It really does, yeah.
Do you know why that is?
It does so many amazing things.
You salt meat in advance, which is to say like a chicken that you're going to roast tomorrow.
I would salt it today to give the salt plenty of time to be absorbed and and be distributed evenly throughout the meat.
That means like tomorrow when I roast it and I take a bite, I won't have salty skin and bland meat.
I'm going to have an evenly perfectly seasoned chicken, right?
The salt has penetrated and gone all the way through.
But also the salt will have worked on some of the proteins and ultimately leading to much more tender meat.
It sort of disables some of the proteins leading to more tender meat.
And that is like a crazy.
Function is like, just by salting your meat in advance, you will have a more tender meat.
Um, salt also on it has a kind of an ability.
If you think about a tomato, like slicing a tomato, and you salt your tomato slices and you wait a few minutes and then you come back and you look and there's like all this water has come out right.
There's like the tomatoes juicier all of a sudden and you take a bite of that tomato and the one that has salt Even if it's just a little bit of salt, so little that you don't actually taste it to be saltier your experience of eating that tomato is going to be totally different, because what the salt has done is by bringing out not only water but aromatic molecules out of the cells that it started to break down.
That means with every bite, your nose is going to breathe in so much more aroma.
But the vast percentage of our experience of eating is smell, not taste, right?
The vast experience.
So the more access we have to aromatic molecules, the more profound our experience of eating is going to be right.
The more like perfumed and profound, right?
So you are always after like, how do I get those aromatic molecules?
It's the same as like why people, you know, tear fresh basil into the thing at the last minute.
It's because you just want that smell, right?
You want that smell. as close to your eating experience as possible, right?
The fragrance is what makes it sort of alive.
And so salt a lot of times sort of goes into cells, breaks things down.
I was even surprised that salting correctly when cooking beans can make them more vibrantly colored.
Yeah, totally.
How does that happen?
So what's happening when you have a very salty pot of water and a vegetable in it is immediately osmosis is going to start to happen in the pot, but also inside the vegetable, inside the cells of the vegetable.
So it's going to start absorbing in an attempt to reach homeostasis, right?
It's going to start absorbing salt from the pot into itself, and that's what's going to flavor it.
And that means it's like holding on, right?
It's pulling in minerals, right?
It's in a state of pulling in minerals and not letting them out.
Whereas if you cook your vegetables in under-seasoned water then, in an attempt to reach homeostasis, the vegetables are going to leach their minerals into the water.
And with their minerals, also the chlorophyll will get affected.
They will be less vibrant and less green.
Amazing.
It's just a wild, totally, it's a really wild and amazing.
It's so incredible.
Salt is so magical.
So in the Netflix documentary version of Salt Fat, Acid Hate you get to visit, as I guess for those who haven't seen it, I mean visits the world and sees like all these places that kind of represent these elements.
And for salt, you visit the soy sauce factory.
And I have heard you say that, and you could see it, you cry like a baby.
I wouldn't have said cry like a baby, but I thought well, since you, what was so emotional about that place?
Well, for me, so much of it has to do like that soy sauce in particular.
I also got very emotional in the parmesan in the parmesan factory, um but.
And both of those foods are foods that have hundreds or even thousands of years of tradition being made the same way.
There's so much knowledge.
So the story of that soy sauce producer in particular is that it's one of the last remaining traditional soy sauce producers in japan, And what makes it so exquisite is that it's aged for upwards of two years.
Whereas if you think of like kikkoman or other industrially produced soy sauces, they're aged around three months maximum.
So that time is.
You know, and in any food that you're producing, time is often the most expensive ingredient.
In addition to the two years of aging the soy sauce, This soy sauce is aged in these special barrels.
These like huge wooden barrels that only one or two people are left in the world who know how to produce these barrels, because they last close to 100 years.
But as the industry has industrial, like become so much more industrial.
Yeah.
The need for that knowledge and for those barrels has disappeared because Kikkoman, just like an industrially produced soy sauce, is just aged in stainless steel casks, like in the place.
So the wood for the barrels is harder to find.
The knowledge of producing the barrels is harder to find.
And the barrels are part of the taste, right?
There's microbes in that specific type of wood from that place that affect the way that that tastes.
So it's almost like I knew in that moment I was getting to taste an endangered species food right, an endangered species.
And parmesan is not endangered thankfully, but like again they're.
You know, years of aging go into making a wheel of parmesan.
Hundreds of gallons of milk go into one wheel of parmesan.
So it's just, it's like this massive amount of work and and like uh, resources and time for one little bite and that is what is so meaningful to me is like I, I love those things.
I love that in my whole life.
I love things that feel like the magic is sort of hidden a little bit.
How do you make parmesan cheese?
What are you doing with all that milk?
What are they doing?
Well, all cheese, all cheese, uh, this is one of those things that blows my, I love dairy so much.
Like I, what's funny is my girlfriend's lactose intolerant and I'm like, Oh God, I feel so bad.
Like like but um, you know, when I was a young cook actually uh, working at Chez Panisse, at this amazing restaurant one of the things that really sort of blew me away was seeing these people, these incredibly experienced cooks who literally knew how to make anything from scratch.
And that sort of is a little bit of what became my ethic, right?
Like, how can I make this yellow cake from scratch, right?
But one of the things that they didn't make from scratch it already kind of surprised me that they made it at all, but they didn't make it all the way from scratch was mozzarella cheese.
So we would pull fresh mozzarella.
We would get the curd from the local producer and then pull it into fresh balls that then we would slice and turn into like caprese salad or something else.
And it is kind of this magic trick.
It truly is like it turns into this like rubbery texture and like it's very fun to make.
I was like, well, this is amazing, but why aren't we starting with milk?
We should be able to make our own curds.
Get the cow.
I was like, this is the house I've made from scratch.
Let's make this from scratch.
God bless them.
This is one of those things where I'm like, only at Chez Panisse.
I decided to take this on as my project.
I was probably 20 years old.
Maybe they sometimes let me cut an onion.
I had no culinary experience.
I had no business doing this.
This is also very early internet.
This is like 99, 2000.
You have to remember, okay?
So you couldn't.
There was not like a, there was not the internet where you could be like how to make mozzarella curd from scratch.
There was not that.
Yes.
So I had to look it up in books.
I went to the UC Berkeley, like food and cookbook science library, like sort of looked this up in books.
And I found out the basic steps.
I called a few cheesemakers who were friends of the restaurant.
They all were like, do not do that.
They were like, okay.
They were like, and I was like, I don't know what you're talking about.
It's so simple.
It's just milk and rennet and a little acid.
Like, of course I can totally do it.
And they're like no literally, because it's so simple.
It's one of the hardest curds, one of the hardest cheeses to make.
Don't do it.
So basically this is all to say.
I spent like an entire summer wasting like tens of thousands of gallons of cheese, of milk, in an attempt to make mozzarella that like never were.
Also because cheese you have to have everything super sterile because it's at it's.
Basically the whole point is like it's at bacteria growing temperatures, so you just have to make sure you're not growing the wrong bacteria right like um and so, and so you can make people really sick.
In cheese making, people can die, so you have to sterilize everything, which is like do not test trust a 20 year old in an restaurant kitchen To be making cheese that you want to eat.
Yeah.
But one of the things that I learned was, oh my God, like I would start with a gallon of milk and end up with, I don't even know, eight ounces, maybe eight ounces of curd.
Wow.
So, after the success of salt fat acid hate, I thought you would be living it up, living your best life um, but in your new book it wasn't.
It wasn't.
It hasn't been exactly like that.
Okay, how have you?
No, i mean, i'm okay, i'm okay now, that's good.
But um yeah, it was.
You know, i was 38 when the book came out and when the and i was 37 when the book came out, 38 when the show came out um, and i'd spent most of my life till then, much of my life till then, being like quite sort of invisible in the world right, like just had down doing my work, like sort of dying for acknowledgement for the hard work.
And then I went from one extreme of like being very sort of under seen to then being like very over seen.
Yeah, it's just that like it.
It kind of knocked me off kilter in a lot of ways yeah, and I had to.
I I, I like sunk pretty deep in depression.
Yeah.
You.
You wrote that, um like the sense of joy that you'd always found in cooking and eating no longer felt attainable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was really I, it was a very um, you know, obviously during this time it was also there was COVID.
Yeah.
There was like, um, like George Floyd murder.
And, Ultimately, and part of it had to do with my dad dying and watching my dad.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Oh, thank you.
I was just watching this very complicated and kind of horrible person die a very sad prolonged, complicated death.
And my dad was such a chaos agent and created so much pain for so many people.
And his last months were really awful for a variety of reasons.
Part of sort of the takeaway was that he was alone.
You know what I mean?
My brother and I were there with him as much as we could be.
And we were just in this sea of chaos that he had created during this time.
It was so horrible and uncomfortable for all of us, including him.
And I was like, this is the worst way I could imagine for somebody to die.
It's just so lonely and sad and pathetic.
And...
I kind of had this moment of being like you know, when I'm on my deathbed I want to look back and know that I made a life that was full of beauty and joy and friendship and connection and deliciousness, and puppy dogs and gardens, and you know art.
And so once he died I kind of was I think this is pretty common but I very much was sort of washed over with a sense of like you only live once.
You know what I mean?
Like the sort of preciousness of time really sort of was like I could see it so clearly in that state of like grief was just like oh, I've spent my whole life trying to be good and to do good and to win the affection of the people around me.
And I've had this sort of voice in the back of my head being like just put your head down, do good, do good, do good.
Like I'm investing in a good bank account so that one day I'll reach some sort of like balance from which I can withdraw and be happy, you know.
And I was like, oh, there's no day, right?
There's no there that you get to.
Like, I have to, why am I making myself so miserable in the meantime?
The meantime is all there is.
And so I think I sort of have just changed as much as a person can change my policy about that of like oh, I have to like, even if I'm on deadline and I feel really bad about being behind, which is all the time like I still have to take a break and go have watermelon in the park with my friends, you know what I mean like I still have to have a little bit of joy every day and I still have in a way that I can do that is this like simple act of cooking, and that if I sort of understand, if I sort of reorient my entire understanding of what's valuable in my, in my life, and that the ultimate, most valuable thing is my time.
Right, the only thing I can't make more of, the only thing I can't yeah, I produce more of, is time.
That's actually the most precious currency I have.
And so my act of spending time for you, or with you, or on you, is the most beautiful gift I can give you, and vice versa.
Right.
You know, it's not like, oh, I'm just trying to make the world's best lasagna.
It's like I'm thinking about the person who asked me to make lasagna for their birthday while I make this.
And I'm like putting all of that energy into, into this thing that takes sometimes two days to make right.
So that when you eat it you feel like I spent two days of my precious time on you and happily right.
In your book, in your new book, In Good Things, it's filled with obviously fabulous recipes and these sort of bigger tips about like, living a happier life I think um but also a bunch of fun facts about fun sciencey facts about oh yeah the excuse that I was like I have to get some meat on the show we better talk about science um uh but so can you tell me one of the um things you mentioned is that you need to bring eggs to room temperature before baking them why is that oh yeah well it's oh that's such a good question I look It's just such a simple question, and it's so good.
Because it is in almost every baking recipe, make sure your eggs are at room temperature.
Right.
And just like I was saying about butter having very specific qualities at different temperatures, eggs do too.
And also, it's not even so much necessarily that an egg at room temperature will whip better than a cold egg, even though it will.
A room temperature egg white will hold air more readily than a cold one.
Okay.
Often in baking, what you're doing is you're combining different ingredients.
Like with an egg into a cake batter, say what you're doing is you have your soft butter that maybe you've creamed with your sugar or whatever.
Or reverse creamed or whatever.
And then you're going to add eggs into that.
And often you do one egg at a time, let it mix in, add the next egg.
Or even sometimes more like.
You even do it more gradually, where you're just adding, you're dribbling the egg in.
And that's because you are trying to keep an emulsion.
You know you're trying to have this um cake batter or mixture or cookie dough or whatever come together into a unified texture and a unified mixture.
And if things are vastly different temperatures, they're gonna, they're not gonna come together as readily like, right.
And if the if, if you're adding a cold thing into a warm thing, they're kind of going to reject each other a little bit.
Right, you want everything to be similar temperature, uh-huh.
On a sort of different note, but fridge related um, You write that refrigeration destroys a tomato's delicate flavor.
Yes, it is true.
It does destroy the delicate tomato flavor.
When I was a baby cook, somebody told me they I feel like they had a fridge magnet that said like I think it said that like refrigeration.
I think I was quoting the fridge magnet.
But it's basically tomatoes are very delicate.
And this goes back to those aromatic molecules.
Mm-hmm.
And also a tomato, like many other things, is sensitive to temperature.
What a frigid does to vegetables is it slows down the decay, essentially, right?
Like a vegetable from the moment it's picked is dying, right?
And also a lot of things are happening chemically inside those vegetables.
Like, for example, a thing many of us have heard is with sweet corn, for example, it's the freshest the moment it's picked, or it's the sweetest the moment it's picked.
And that's totally true.
People I know who grew up in the Midwest, where they grow a lot of corn.
The grandma would put on the pot of water to bring it to a boil before sending the kids out into the yard to pick the corn.
Because she's like, it has to go straight from the picking into the pot.
And grandma was right, because what you're doing when you pick a vegetable is, the minute you pick it, its innate sugars start transforming into starches.
So like if you've had starchy corn, you know, that's like kind of like dry and starchy.
That's probably because it's old or it could be the variety.
But if it's supposed to be like corn on the cob, it's the sweetest the moment it's picked.
That's why you want to eat the corn like the day you bring it home from the farmer's market, if you can.
And so the same is true for a tomato.
Tomatoes ripen slightly differently, but still you want to pick them at the peak of their sugars.
And putting them in the fridge.
What it's going to do to a tomato's texture is it's going to start degrading the cells.
And the cells will become like the texture of the tomato will start to become mealy.
I can just see your face.
You're so disgusted.
Yeah, it's so gross.
And you'll lose a lot of those.
And you'll lose a lot of those like aromatic molecules, which are what makes a tomato have such sort of vibrant, fresh flavor.
So I really I don't put tomatoes in the fridge.
I always leave them out at room temperature.
Yeah.
You have spent a lot of time thinking about food systems and how we get food to How all that food ends up in our supermarket.
It's so interesting sometimes.
You find out the craziest things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, like on your plate, you can see sort of the effects of sociopolitical conflict, of like economic sanctions, and you can taste the changes that happen with these.
So, for example, cinnamon is, i think, a really great example.
So until about, i would say, the mid 1900s in this country in the us, our predominant source or our main source of cinnamon was vietnam and the cinnamon grown in vietnam is is sweet, like when you taste a piece of cinnamon bark.
It tastes sweet on your tongue.
It also is very high in the like um the oils, like the cinnamon oils that are kind of make it taste spicy.
So if you've ever had like red hot gum or red hot candies or big red gum, like that taste of that very spicy sort of cinnamon, that is what I'm talking about, right.
But if I told you to picture cinnamon, you wouldn't think of red hot gum.
You would think of apple pie or cinnamon, apple cider donuts or something which is a totally different kind of cinnamon.
And that cinnamon comes historically from Mexico or India.
And it has just a completely different sort of like molecular makeup and a different spice profile.
It's much less spicy and more sort of soft, softly flavored.
That's if you want to picture the difference between, like I said, apple pie and big red gum, right?
Yeah.
Those things are both cinnamon, but totally different kinds of cinnamon.
And so until like mid-1900s.
Basically everyone here like our experience of cinnamon was this Vietnamese very sweet, very spicy cinnamon.
And then when the Vietnam War happened and there were sanctions economic sanctions posed on all goods coming here from Vietnam from, like this, I think, late 60s until the late 90s, when Bill Clinton was president there were sanctions nothing from Vietnam could enter this country.
So an entire generation and a half of people.
Their experience of cinnamon shifted into Indian Mexican, Chinese cinnamon.
And so that taste of that big red whatever felt, and I fall into that group, right?
I was born in 79.
And then one day I can't remember when it was probably 2002, 2003 someone gave me a piece of Vietnamese cinnamon bark.
I'd never had it before.
And it's so good that I now only use Vietnamese cinnamon in my cooking.
Like I always look for it.
And at this point, you can find it like I got.
You can get it at Costco.
You can get it at Whole Foods.
You just look for it's called Vietnamese or Saigon cinnamon.
But it is this way where, you know, it tells the story, right?
This like taste and this simple ingredient tells this crazy like global story.
And then why are vanilla beans so expensive?
Oh, my God.
Vanilla beans are so crazy.
I at one point I was staying in the like near the Palm Desert and I somehow somebody was like you got to go visit this orchid greenhouse.
They're so amazing.
There wasn't a lot for me to do in Palm Desert.
So I was like, I'll go visit the orchid greenhouse.
So I went to the orchid greenhouse and I saw the different types of orchids.
I'm not like a major orchid nerd, but it was still pretty cool.
Yeah, they're very sexy.
I feel like I'm looking at porn, you know.
Totally.
It's amazing.
And at the very end of the tour, they were like, I was like, oh, what's that thing?
And there was this one sort of plant that was like this crazy vining trailing plant.
And they're like, oh, that's vanilla.
And I was like, what?
And they're like vanilla bean.
I was like, vanilla is an orchid.
And they're like, yes.
And so vanilla is an orchid plant or vanilla is the seed pod from an orchid plant.
And it takes almost a year for a vanilla bean to mature on the plant.
And in that year when, When the plant flowers, it's so finicky that on a vanilla farm a human has to go and hand pollinate each flower to ensure that enough vanilla will be produced.
Because there's, I think, something like a three-day window for that flower to be pollinated.
So if they were left to the bees and nature, you know, probably you would get a much smaller yield of vanilla.
So for one thing, like that step already is so sort of... Whoa, you've got humans literally.
You've got humans hand pollinating, but also in this very small time window, right?
So you have to get that right.
And then you have to wait however many months.
I think it's upward of eight months for the seed pod to ripen.
And then they're picked, and then there's a multi-step, basically, fermentation process.
Because when they're picked, it's not the pod, it's not the vanilla bean that we know.
It's still not usable.
So it has to go through a multi-step sort of drying and fermentation process to become the fragrant pod that we know.
So when you understand that and then layer onto that a whole other understanding that these places where vanilla is endemic are among the most vulnerable to climate disaster, Like you start to learn.
Oh right, like wow, this is an incredible treasure for humankind that actually is on the verge of extinction.
And, you know, it can only grow in this very limited climate.
And if we do not protect those climates, those people who live there, the plants, then we will lose this.
And we will likely lose vanilla, probably not in my lifetime, but probably forever in the next generation's lifetime.
Like, it will probably not.
Vanilla, chocolate, coffee, like, bananas.
There are a lot of foods that we sort of don't think about that are not long for this world.
When you look at the food trends out there, you know whether it's Soylent or robots serving as food.
Oh, my God.
Various diets, ketogenic carnivore.
Yeah uh oh, my god what what, what terrifies you the most?
Oh, my god, what terrifies you.
I'm like anxious.
All the things you just listed make me so anxious.
Oh god, i mean, i think what really?
This isn't really a trend, but i think what i'm going to turn the sorry, i'm not going to answer your question, i'm going to turn it inside out.
Great uh, um.
I feel so protective of the people who grow, produce and make our food that we get to eat the they're.
They're such unglamorous, it's such unglamorous work.
It's such low-paying work in general, across cultures, across countries, across populations.
Um, and also it's this right like food is this thing that gets valorized in tv shows like the bear and top chef and whatever.
But there, in this country in particular, there is such um, a flawed um, for food production that serves really just a few large interests at the cost of the environment, at the cost of the people who produce the food.
And so there is just this kind of way where we, as a population, have been trained to expect our food to be very cheap.
And I see that understanding where, like on the brink of a recession and a lot of people face economic precarity in their lives.
So I'm not necessarily out here saying everything should be more expensive, but I am saying it's kind of just built in that we expect that we should be able to go get a taco for this much, a burger for this much, and it should be cheap.
But when you take a step back and think about it, you're like how are the people, the many people who worked on producing this thing to get it to us, making a living and, you know, paying for their basic needs?
And I worked in kind of the fanciest restaurants, restaurant in America for a while.
And, like you know, I did not achieve financial stability in my own life until I had like a miracle situation and sold a book and at a Netflix show right.
Like I was existed in economic precarity as well.
Totally.
But like in this moment that we live in and in this, like late capitalism, like everything at the touch of a button available to us.
Everything's so digitized and separate and we're so removed from the process of making and like having anything made for us.
I really believe like food and restaurants are kind of one of the last vestiges in our daily lives of having an experience of something be handmade for you.
And having this human to human, like somebody, I made this for you.
That doesn't happen anymore with so many of the goods in our life.
You don't meet the person who made your shoes or your clothes or your headphones, but you are a room apart from the person who made you this plate of food.
Sometimes they're handing it to you.
And so it is kind of this like incredibly valuable and beautiful thing that we still have like a little bit of access to in our lives.
And I'm just so sad that every force in our lives and in the world is sort of hell bent on eradicating even that from us and letting us appreciate it.
And I don't know, there's no solution that I know.
You know, I don't know that there's an answer.
I'm not criticizing anyone for buying or eating any food.
I just, it kind of breaks my heart.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a real depressing note.
Sorry.
Well, we can't end there.
We can't end there.
How about we end here?
Why is spaghetti the very last place a meatball belongs?
Direct quote.
It's so funny.
It really is.
My editor was like we.
I had this in my question and she was like you asked that question, Wendy.
It's very important.
Well, and I say that quoting the song on top of spaghetti all covered with cheese, right?
Like, I'm just like, no, no.
Have you ever had a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs?
Have you ever had one?
At our house, we actually do it with macaroni.
It's macaroni and meatballs.
Okay, well, there we go because...
So already you're making a better choice.
My mom will be very happy.
It's a grandma's recipe.
Okay.
Spaghetti is an insane choice of shape to eat with a meatball.
For one thing, a meatball is like this huge thing.
You have to sort of break it down.
Spaghetti is this long, whatever.
You're never going to get the right amount of meatball on the fork with the right amount of spaghetti.
It's like, it's bad.
So either, like I'm like, if you're going to do pasta, choose a different shape that's like more amenable.
Where, like, the stabbing works for, you know what I mean?
You're absolutely right.
And, or, like, eat it on a bowl of polenta.
Eat it with some grilled bread.
Do something else with your time.
Like, eat a meatball sandwich.
But not on a spaghetti, please, for the life of me.
Because also like you're, like you have a whole bowl of spaghetti and then what you have, three meatballs.
It just looks wrong.
You're like, I don't know.
All right.
Lightning round.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Hit me.
Lightning round of oddball questions.
What is the most dangerous thing you've done for a book?
I don't know.
Oh, my God.
I feel the pressure of the lightning and I don't have an answer for you right now.
I mean, I do all sorts of dangerous things that I would never recommend.
And I mean, I've probably eaten.
You know what I've probably done that's the most dangerous?
Eating the cheese that you tried to cook.
So I've definitely had stuff where I'm like is this salad dressing still good three and a half months later?
I'll try it.
Why not?
Like I think I've definitely taken my life into my own hands, eating like potentially rotten food, but also, I'm still here.
So it's fine.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
All right.
Finish this sentence.
Now that I know blank, I'll never look at my blank the same way again.
Oh, uh.
I mean, I think, now that I know how long it takes to make a vanilla bean, I'll never look at a vanilla bean the same way again.
Funnest object sitting in your house?
Oh, oh, oh, oh.
My friend gave me... My friend gave me the coolest thing.
It's a set of, like, Russian-style dolls.
But instead of being Russian, like, dolls, they're vegetables.
So, like, it's, like, a broccoli and then a bok choy.
And then, like I can't remember what the Oh, an artichoke, and then a cucumber, and then a pea pod, and then the peas.
Oh, that's so cute.
It's so cool.
It's like hand-painted wood.
It's so beautiful, yeah.
Oh, what a joy.
Biggest mistake you've made while cooking?
Oh, I mean, there are a million to choose from.
But, I mean, there was one time I... I don't know, is this kind of a mistake?
Well, yeah, it is a mistake.
I was in a rush and I chose to.
I like, very consciously chose to use not the safest knife for um, cutting into a butternut squash, because the knife what we?
I in the restaurant where i worked, i always had a two-handled knife, which is the knife you use when you cut into a wheel of parmesan or anything sort of unwieldy, because that way you're seesawing your way into it instead of jamming a knife in that could slip out, oh yeah, and injure you.
So our, for some reason, our large two-handled knife had gone missing for a few days, which is a very weird.
And so I was too, and I had even made a mental note like get a new one of those before someone hurts themselves.
But then I was in a rush and I just, instead of choosing the next safest knife which would have been a very big one I just grabbed the closest one, which was little, and I went into my butternut squash and I stabbed myself in the hand and I had to have surgery.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah oh, my god no, but uh yeah, it was very intense.
I truly yeah, it was very intense.
Wow, that was a big mistake.
That was a mistake, is it true?
Because i did it.
Um, i had to go to emergency for trying to cut a bagel with.
Oh yeah, and i've heard the bagel and the avocado were two of the most.
Um, i knew a hand surgeon and he said bagels and avocados were like the two of the most sort of common injuries.
Yes, that brought people to hand surgery.
Thank you so much.
Oh, thank you, you're so great, Thank you.
I really appreciate your time and your work and your new book.
And it's really fabulous.
Oh, thank you.
I definitely was like, am I the science or am I the versus?
Because I'm not a scientist.
Yeah, thank you so much.
Thank you.
Nice talking to you, Wendy.
Lovely to talk to you.
That was the award-winning cook, Samin Nosrat.
Her new book is called Good Things.
I'm Wendy Zuckerman.
Back to you next time.
