Never Put Meatballs on Spaghetti, with Samin Nosrat

Speaker 1 I'm snorting. I'm just snorting already.
Already, we haven't even started.

Speaker 1 What's going to happen?

Speaker 1 Science chats

Speaker 1 with our favorite nerds. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus today on the show, the wonderful chemistry and science of food.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And one award-winning chef who's thought a lot about all this is Saveen 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.

Speaker 1 And I've wanted to get Saveen 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.

Speaker 1 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 Saveen Nostrat is coming up just after the break.

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Time to level up your wardrobe at Nordstrom. You'll find the best cold weather must-haves, including thousands of styles under $100.

Speaker 2 Shop head-to-toe cozy from faves like Ugg, All Saints, Nordstrom, Skims, The North Face, and more. Plus, free shipping, free returns, and quick order pickup make it easy.

Speaker 2 In-stores are online, it's time to go shopping at Nordstrom.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the show, Sabine. Thank you so much for coming in.
Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Well, I mean,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And my parents, my father's side of the family,

Speaker 1 was a practiced religion called the Baha'i Faith, and they were persecuted. So they all fled and were religious asyles.
And my mom like came after, followed my dad here. And

Speaker 1 so I was born here. And this, and I was born here to a family who

Speaker 1 wasn't entirely like willingly, you know, in San Diego. Like it was just, right? There's the trauma of leaving your homeland behind.
My,

Speaker 1 you know, we,

Speaker 1 there was,

Speaker 1 in ways I, I, 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.

Speaker 1 And I'm sure that they had a pretty clear sense of like not feeling very welcome or belonging here.

Speaker 1 And I also think because they didn't leave, especially my mom did not leave Iran thinking she'd be gone forever.

Speaker 1 My mom would say things like, you know, when you go, when you leave this house, like you're, 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?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I,

Speaker 1 my mom,

Speaker 1 it was so important for her to instill in us a relationship to the place that we were from.

Speaker 1 And one of the ways that she did that sort of most powerfully was through food. And so, and I have always loved to eat.

Speaker 1 So, like, and the food is good, you know, and your mom's an amazing and my mom's a great cook. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I remember there were things where like 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?

Speaker 1 The smell of the whatever in the lunchroom. And they would have been eating some disgusting peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Totally.

Speaker 1 And so, or like, Americans are going to get mad at me saying that, but it's just, oh, you think it's, oh, I actually love PBJ too. But

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But then, and what's funny is now, like, you know, 40 years later,

Speaker 1 Persian food and a lot of Middle Eastern Persian food, a lot of times

Speaker 1 it gets appropriated by non-Iranian cooks cooks into their onto their restaurant menus where it gets a sort of a glam, like a makeover. And

Speaker 1 on the one hand, I'm really happy for more and more people to have exposure to our foods. And in the other ways, it makes me so mad.
Like it's like, you want our food. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 You want to eat the crispy rice.

Speaker 1 Or there was a drink I used to have. It's like a summer drink called seikanjabin, which is like a, it's kind of like maybe

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's kind of like the original Gatorade in a way. Like, right?

Speaker 1 It was just one of my favorite childhood things. And I remember having like a water bottle of it with the mint leaf in it when I was a kid.
And some people, like little kids

Speaker 1 in school, were like, ew, gross. Like, what's in your water? You gross like alien.
Yeah. You know?

Speaker 1 And now, of course, like every like hipster bar has shrubs on their menu you know so there's just this way where um

Speaker 1 i

Speaker 1 i it's like an extra pain level of pain where i'm like this is yet another way in which like 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

Speaker 1 against all you know what i mean like Americans love tacos, but hate Mexicans. So like, it's just, it's,

Speaker 1 it's not, it's not unique to us, but it does hurt when, when I feel that

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, your obsession. What was it about the Betty Crocker cake or the, you know, those cake mixes?

Speaker 1 My mom, my mom was really, um,

Speaker 1 she had, she was very committed to like an organic only,

Speaker 1 like like low sugar, you know, like sort of a very hippie like rules in the household for the children of like, we're only eating fresh fruits and vegetables.

Speaker 1 We shopped at the vegetable at the like hippie co-op.

Speaker 1 And so it's not that we were never allowed dessert, but

Speaker 1 even when she went to get us the birthday cakes and things for occasions, special occasions, they came from like the finest European bakeries, right?

Speaker 1 And they were covered in chocolate shards and chocolate shavings and they were just this like dense chocolate cake. And

Speaker 1 I just never wanted to eat that. I wanted to eat what all the white kids had, like at the bake sales.

Speaker 1 I wanted to eat the fluffy yellow chocolate, you know, yellow cake with chocolate frosting like it was sauce. And I would have never been allowed to have that.

Speaker 1 That would have just, that was like not okay. It never entered our home.
Yeah. And so this is again going back to the like outsider-ness.

Speaker 1 I think it became a symbol, like the yellow cake in a way became like this symbol of fitting in.

Speaker 1 and so um

Speaker 1 and there is something just extraordinary about cake mixes and they're the the very light like incredibly tender texture which almost feels like it's like a space like astronaut food or something because it's it's not it's like doesn't seem naturally achievable and so i sort of became obsessed as a young cook and uh with like there must be a way to achieve some sort of like lightness because every cake I, you make a cake with butter and it's dense and heavy.

Speaker 1 You make, you know, you could use the same exact ingredients as what's in the, you think is in the yellow cake cake mix.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, how do the cake mixes do it? What?

Speaker 1 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 like butter is made of,

Speaker 1 you know, it's made of fat primarily, but also milk solids, which are like proteins, and water. It's an emulsion.

Speaker 1 And so when you cream butter and you are like, you know, whipping sugar into it to make this like kind of light texture, that's the, you're aerating the butter and that's the main source of lightness in a cake.

Speaker 1 Butter is in this kind of emulsus. It's like a magical state of emulsion.
That's why it's like, it can be on your counter and it's a solid, solid, right?

Speaker 1 It kind of has this incredible range of temperatures at which it stays 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.

Speaker 1 And so you have that. And the thing about it is the melting point of butter, like chocolate, is very close to human, our

Speaker 1 body temperature. So it's so pleasing the way it melts, it melts on the tongue in this really like amazing way, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's like part, think you eat a piece of chocolate and like part of the pleasure of it is it's just like melting on your tongue.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And gluten is a is a like a protein that is leads to chewiness and toughness it's what you 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 like sourdough chew you know what i mean yeah yeah yeah but that's not the thing you want in a cake in a cake you want it to like crumble and tend dissolve tenderly on or that's what i want is like tenderness on my tongue and so you want to prevent gluten from forming which is why they use lower protein lower gluten flours things like cake flour and pastry flour to make cake

Speaker 1 And also when you have oil,

Speaker 1 if you, and so fat is inhibits gluten formation, it kind of coats flour and it makes like you can think of it almost like it makes it slippery.

Speaker 1 So it's the flour is not going to combine into long gluten strands because it's kind of like lubricated by this outer layer of fat. Right.

Speaker 1 So then the thing that 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,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And they, and they mix, and because it is solid, but it's soft at like these at regular room temperature, they can put shortening in there and coat the flour, you know, mix it without any,

Speaker 1 they're pre-oiling

Speaker 1 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, but it doesn't.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You can't, 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-fat, it pre-coated with fat.

Speaker 1 And so there, 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 which is so funny because maybe if I had been looking,

Speaker 1 well, like if I had been more methodical, I'm not saying I'm like methodical in any of this. I am not a scientist.
But this is, we're, are we at two decades in this journey right now?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, honestly, I could have just looked at the cake Bible.

Speaker 1 Come on. Come on.

Speaker 1 You think, like, in Lord of the Rings, Frodo could have just looked at the map, you know?

Speaker 1 This is kind of Jenny.

Speaker 1 Totally, totally. So, so, like, um, Rose Levy Barrenbaum is kind of this extraordinary, just well, like, like queen of cakes.

Speaker 1 And she wrote this book called The Cake Bible.

Speaker 1 So, whereas when a typical yellow yellow cake, a typical sort of homemade cake starts with room temperature butter that you're whipping sugar into, and that step is called creaming, reverse creaming sort of mimics what's done in the industry, in the cake mix industry, right?

Speaker 1 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 separate into water and fat, butter.

Speaker 1 You take butter that is just at the exact right temperature and you work it into the flat, into the flour in, um, very slowly in your mixer or your food processor in such a way that, like, by the time you've worked all the flour in, it actually just looks, or all, excuse me, by the time you've worked the butter in, yeah, the flour just looks like a dry ingredient.

Speaker 1 It's kind of amazing. It's, it is this, but it's all about having the butter.
Yeah, I mean, Rose did it.

Speaker 1 And so, and it was one of those things where I was like, this was here all along and I feel like such an idiot.

Speaker 1 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 homemade Betty Crocker.
And people were like, I don't know.

Speaker 1 And then they started eating it. They're like, oh my God, it really tastes like it.

Speaker 1 So it felt like that was truly a miracle that I thought I would, I would, I know there were so many bad cakes on the way to that cake.

Speaker 1 In the middle.

Speaker 1 You did it. I did it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 For those who haven't come across it,

Speaker 1 what is the overriding thesis of salt-fat-acid heat? Yeah. It's basically that

Speaker 1 if you can sort of grasp why salt, fat, acid, and heat

Speaker 1 are

Speaker 1 important elements and understand, you know, their function in the kitchen on flavor and on texture and how to balance them and how to use them.

Speaker 1 They will work as sort of the four points on the compass for you as a cook, no matter what you're cooking.

Speaker 1 And so whether or not you want to follow a recipe, paying attention to salt, fat, acid, and heat will enhance the way that you feel independent, are able to cook instinctively, understand what's going on underneath the maybe steps one through six that are someone else

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And same with acid comes in many forms. But heat is kind of this like ineffable, intangible thing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And they were not always consulting cookbooks and recipes. The things we were always tasting for were salt and fat and acid.

Speaker 1 I think about it every time I have avocado on toast because I'm like, Same would be so proud of me. I'm toasting my bread.
There's my hate. I've got my avocado and then my salt and my lemon.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like it's the most

Speaker 1 fashion. But I always think of you.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And so like, if you are a person who goes, has ever been to a taqueria and has garnished your own burrito or taco with sour cream and or cheese and or salsa, you know, 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?

Speaker 1 Like you're doing it already.

Speaker 1 And in salt, fat, acid, heat, you talk about this story of working at Shea Pani, which you've mentioned, it's like this, for those who don't know, a fancy restaurant in Berkeley, California, where you got your start.

Speaker 1 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 strive and you, you actually wrote,

Speaker 1 sorry if it's awkward that I'm quoting you to you.

Speaker 1 You wrote, if one lesson stays with you, 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.

Speaker 1 Would you know why that is? It does so many amazing things.

Speaker 1 You salt meat in advance, you 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 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 um worked on some of the proteins and so and ultimately leading to much more tender meat it sort of disables some of the proteins, leading to more tender meat.

Speaker 1 And that is like a crazy function: is like just by salting your meat in advance, you will have a more tender meat. Um,

Speaker 1 salt also, on it has a kind of an ability.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 There's like the tomatoes juicier all of a sudden.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's because you just want that smell, right? You want that, you want that smell

Speaker 1 as close to your eating experience as possible, right? The fragrance is what makes it sort of alive.

Speaker 1 And so, salt a lot of times sort of goes into cells, breaks things down. I was even surprised

Speaker 1 that salting correctly when cooking beans can make them more vibrantly colored. Yeah, totally.
So, like, how does that happen?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, it's going to start absorbing

Speaker 1 in an attempt to reach homeostasis, right? It's going to start absorbing salt from the pot into itself. So that, and that's what's going to flavor it.

Speaker 1 And that means it's like holding on, right? It's

Speaker 1 pulling in minerals, right? It's in a state of pulling in minerals and not letting them out.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And with their minerals, also the chlorophyll will get affected. They will be less vibrant and

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 the Netflix documentary version of

Speaker 1 fat acid heat, 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.

Speaker 1 And for salt, you visit the soy sauce factory. And

Speaker 1 I have heard you say that, and you could see it, you cry like a baby.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't have said cry like a baby, but I thought since you,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And what makes it so exquisite is that it's aged for upwards of two years. Whereas, if you think of like kikoman or other industrially produced soy sauces, they're aged around three months maximum.

Speaker 1 So, that time is, you know, and in any food that you're producing, time is often the most expensive ingredient.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 only one or two people are left in the world who know how to produce these barrels because they last close to 100 years.

Speaker 1 But as the industry has

Speaker 1 industrial, like become so much more industrial,

Speaker 1 the need for that knowledge and for those barrels has disappeared because Kikoman, just like an industrially produced soy sauce, is just aged in stainless steel casks, like in the place.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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 like getting to taste an endangered food, right?

Speaker 1 An endangered species. And Parmesan is not endangered, thankfully.
But like, again, there, you know, years of aging go into making a wheel of parmesan.

Speaker 1 Hundreds of gallons of milk go into one wheel of parmesan. So it's just, it's like this massive amount of work and

Speaker 1 like resources and time for one little bite. And that is what is so meaningful to me is like, I love those things.

Speaker 1 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 pomas and cheese? What are you doing with all that milk?

Speaker 1 What are they doing? Well, all cheese, all cheese.

Speaker 1 This is one of those things that blows me. 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.

Speaker 1 Like, like,

Speaker 1 but,

Speaker 1 you know, when I was a young cook, actually,

Speaker 1 working at Che Panisse at this amazing restaurant, one of the things that really sort of

Speaker 1 took, blew me, blew me away was seeing these people, like these incredibly experienced cooks who literally knew how to make anything from scratch.

Speaker 1 And that sort of is a little bit of like what became my ethic, right? Like, how can I make this yellow cake from scratch, right? And so,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So we would, we would pull fresh mozzarella, we would get the curd from the local producer and then pull it into

Speaker 1 fresh, the like balls that then we would slice and turn into like caprese salad or something else. And it is kind of this magic trick.

Speaker 1 It truly is like, it turns into this like rubbery texture and like it's very fun to make.

Speaker 1 I was like, well, this is amazing, but why aren't we starting with milk? Right. Like we should be able to make, we should be able to make our own curd.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I was like, this is the house of made from scratch.
Let's make this from scratch. Yeah.
So God bless them.

Speaker 1 Like these, like, this is, this is like one of those things where I'm like only at Chapinese. I decided to take this on as my project.
And I was, you know, probably 20 years old. I had no colour.

Speaker 1 I was, I, maybe they sometimes let me cut an onion. Like, I had no culinary experience.

Speaker 1 I had no business doing this. This is also very early internet.
This is like 99, 2000. You have to remember.
Okay.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I went to the UC Berkeley like food and cookbook science Library, like sort of looked this up in books

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So basically, this is all to say I spent like an entire summer wasting like tens of thousands of gallons of cheese of milk

Speaker 1 in an attempt to make mozzarella that like never were also because cheese, you have to have everything super sterile

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 trust a 20-year-old in an

Speaker 1 restaurant kitchen to be making cheese that you want to eat. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But one of the things that I learned was, oh my God, like I would start with a gallon of milk and end up

Speaker 1 with, I don't even know, eight ounces, maybe eight ounces of curd. Wow.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 after the success of salt fat acid hate, I thought you would be living it up, Simane and I. Living your best life.

Speaker 1 But you read in the, in your new book, it wasn't, it wasn't, it hasn't been exactly like that. How have you been? No, I mean, I'm okay.
I'm okay now.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 head down doing my work,

Speaker 1 like sort of dying for acknowledgement for the hard work. And then I went from one extreme of like being very sort of

Speaker 1 underseen to then being like very overseen. Yeah.
It's just that like it

Speaker 1 it kind of knocked me off kilter in a lot of ways. Yeah.
And I had to, yeah, I, I, I like sunk pretty deep in depression.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you, you wrote that like the sense of joy that you'd always found in cooking and eating no longer felt attainable. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It was really, it was a very,

Speaker 1 you know, obviously during this time, it was also, there was COVID. Yeah.
There was like

Speaker 1 George Floyd murder. And, but ultimately, and part of it had to do with my dad dying and like watching my dad.
I'm sorry. A com oh, thank you.
I would just like watching this very complicated

Speaker 1 and kind of horrible person die, a very sad, prolonged,

Speaker 1 complicated death.

Speaker 1 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.
But

Speaker 1 part of sort of the like takeaway was that, like, he was alone. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Like, my brother and I were there with him as much as we could be, but like, there was, and we were just in this sea of chaos that he had created during this time.

Speaker 1 It was so horrible and uncomfortable for all of us, including him.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Like the sort of preciousness of time really sort of

Speaker 1 was

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 There's no, 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.
Yeah. Like, yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, um, and so I, I, I think I sort of have just changed in 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.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? Like, I still have to have a little bit of joy every day. And I still have, and a way that I can do that is this like simple act of cooking.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 The only thing I can't make more of, the only thing I can't, yeah, produce more of is time. That's actually the most precious currency I have.
And so.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 this thing that takes sometimes two days to make, right?

Speaker 1 So that when you eat it, you feel like I spent two days of my precious time on you and happily, right?

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Speaker 1 In your book, in your new book, In Good Things,

Speaker 1 it's filled with obviously fabulous recipes and these sort of bigger tips about like

Speaker 1 just living a happier life, I think.

Speaker 1 But also a bunch of fun facts about fun science-y facts about food. You know, the excuse that I was like, I have to get some meat on the show.
We better talk about science.

Speaker 1 But so, can you tell me one of the things you mentioned is that you need to bring eggs to room temperature before baking them. Why is that? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, it's, oh, that's such a good question. I love, it's just such a simple question.
It's so good because it is in almost every baking recipe. Make sure your eggs are at room temperature.
Right.

Speaker 1 And just like I was saying about butter having like very specific qualities at different temperatures, eggs do too. And also, it's not that.

Speaker 1 It's not even so much necessarily that an egg at room temperature will whip better than a cold egg, even though it will. Like a room temperature egg white will hold air more readily than a cold one.

Speaker 1 Okay. But often in baking, what you're doing is you're combining different ingredients.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then you're going to add eggs into that.

Speaker 1 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 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 When I was a baby cook, somebody told me they, I feel like they had a fridge magnet that said, like,

Speaker 1 I think it said that, like, refrigeration destroy. I think it, I think I was quoting the fridge magnet, but uh,

Speaker 1 but um, it's part basically tomatoes are very delicate. And this goes back to those aromatic molecules.

Speaker 1 And also a tomato, like many other things, is sensitive to temperature. What a fridge does to vegetables is it slows down the decay, essentially, right?

Speaker 1 Like a vegetable from the moment it's picked is dying, right?

Speaker 1 And so, and so, and also a lot of things are happening chemically inside those vegetables.

Speaker 1 Like, for example, A thing many of us have heard is with corn, sweet corn, for example, like it's the freshest the moment it's picked, or it's the sweetest the moment it's picked.

Speaker 1 And that's totally true.

Speaker 1 Like I, I, people I know who grew up in the Midwest where they grow a lot of corn, you know, the grandma would put on the pot of water to bring it to a boil before sending the kids out.

Speaker 1 into the yard to pick the corn. Cause she's like, it has to go straight from the picking into the pot.

Speaker 1 And grandma was right because what you're doing when you pick a vegetable is like the minute you pick it, its innate sugars start transforming into starches.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Tomatoes ripen slightly differently, but still you want to pick them at the peak of their sugars. And

Speaker 1 putting them in the fridge, what it's going to do to a tomato's texture is it's going to start degrading degrading the cells and the cells will

Speaker 1 become mealy, like the texture of the tomato will start to become mealy. Oh, I can just see your face.
You're so disgusted. Yeah, what's that? It's so gross.

Speaker 1 What's

Speaker 1 that? 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.

Speaker 1 So, I really don't put tomatoes in the fridge. I always leave them out at room temperature.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So like on your plate, you can see sort of the effects of socio-political conflict, of um

Speaker 1 like economic sanctions of and you can taste the changes that happen with these. So for example, um cinnamon is, I think, a really great example.
So,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 sweet. Like when you taste a piece of cinnamon bark, it tastes sweet on your tongue.
It also is very high in the like

Speaker 1 the oils, like the cinnamon oils that are kind of make it taste spicy.

Speaker 1 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 red, like that, that is what I'm talking about, right?

Speaker 1 But if I, 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.

Speaker 1 And that cinnamon comes historically from Mexico or India, but

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's if you want to picture the difference between, like I said, apple pie and big red gum, right? Those things are both cinnamon, but totally different kinds of cinnamon.

Speaker 1 And so until like mid-1900s, basically, everyone here, like our experience of cinnamon was this Vietnamese very sweet, very spicy cinnamon.

Speaker 1 And then when the Vietnam 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 nothing from Vietnam could enter this country.

Speaker 1 So, so the an entire, you know, generation and a half of people, their experience of cinnamon shifted into like Indian, Mexican, Chinese cinnamon.

Speaker 1 And so like that, that taste of that big red whatever felt and that, and I fall into that group, right? I was born in 79. Yes.

Speaker 1 And then one day, like in, I can't remember when it was, probably 2002, 2003, someone gave me a piece of Vietnamese cinnamon bark. Like I'd never had it before.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 this story, right?

Speaker 1 This like taste and this simple ingredient tells this crazy like global story.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 why are vanilla beans so expensive? Oh my God. Vanilla beans are so crazy.
So

Speaker 1 I, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I'm not like a major orchid nerd, but it was still pretty cool. Yeah.
They're very sexy. They're very, I feel like I'm

Speaker 1 a little, 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 it takes almost a year for a vanilla bean to mature on the plant. And in that year,

Speaker 1 when the plant flowers,

Speaker 1 it's so finicky

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 on a vanilla farm, a human has to go and hand pollinate each flower to ensure that like enough vanilla will be produced because there's, I think, something like a three-day window for that flower to be pollinated.

Speaker 1 So, if it were left to the bees and nature, you know, probably you would get much, a much smaller yield of vanilla. So, for one thing, like that step already is so strong.

Speaker 1 You've got humans, literally. You 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.

Speaker 1 I think very, I think it's upward of eight months for the seed pod to ripen.

Speaker 1 And then they're picked. And then there's a multi-step for basically process fermentation process.
Cause when they're picked, it's not the pod, it's not the vanilla bean that we know.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, wow, this is

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And if we do not protect those climates, those people who live there, the plants, then we will lose this.

Speaker 1 And we will likely lose vanilla, probably not in my lifetime, but probably in the next generation's lifetime. Like there, there will, it will, it, it will probably not.

Speaker 1 Vanilla, chocolate, coffee, like bananas. there are a lot of foods that we sort of don't think about that are

Speaker 1 are um not long for this world when you um and when you look at the food trends out there um you know whether it's soy lent or robots oh god serving us food oh my god various diets ketogenic carnivore um yeah uh oh my god what what what terrifies you the most

Speaker 1 oh my god what terrifies you i'm like anxious all the things you just listed make me so anxious. Oh God.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 feel so protective of the people who grow, produce, and make our food that we get to eat.

Speaker 1 It's such unglamorous work. It's such low-paying work in general across cultures, across countries, across populations.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 a flawed

Speaker 1 system

Speaker 1 for

Speaker 1 food production

Speaker 1 that serves really just a few large interests at the cost of the environment, at the cost of the people who

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I say that understanding we're like on the brink of a recession and a lot of people face like sort of economic precarity in their lives.

Speaker 1 So, I'm not necessarily out here saying everything should be more expensive, but I am saying like, I, I,

Speaker 1 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, you know, and it should be cheap.

Speaker 1 But when you sort of 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?

Speaker 1 And I worked in kind of the fanciest restaurants, restaurant in America for a while. And like,

Speaker 1 you know, I did not achieve financial stability in my own life until I had like a miracle situation and sold a book and had a Netflix show, right? Like I was existed in economic precarity as well.

Speaker 1 Totally. But like, in this moment that we live in, in this like late capitalism, like everything at the touch of a button available to us, everything's so digitized and separate.

Speaker 1 And we're so removed from the process of making and like having anything made for us.

Speaker 1 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, right?

Speaker 1 Like, and having this like human to human, like somebody, I made this for you. That doesn't happen anymore, like with so many of the goods in our life, right? Like we're so

Speaker 1 you don't meet the person who made your shoes or your clothes or your headphones, right? But you are a room apart from the person who made you this plate of food. Sometimes they're handing it to you.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a real depressing note.

Speaker 1 Well, we can't end there. We can't end there.

Speaker 1 How about we end we end here?

Speaker 1 Why is spaghetti the very last place a meatball belongs?

Speaker 1 Direct question.

Speaker 1 So funny.

Speaker 1 It really is.

Speaker 1 My editor editor was like, we, I had this in my question. And she was like, you asked that question, Wendy.

Speaker 1 It's very important. Well, and I say that quoting the song on top of spaghetti all covered with cheats, right?

Speaker 1 Like, I'm just like, no, no. Have you ever had a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs? Have you ever had one?

Speaker 1 We, at our house, we actually do it with macaroni. It's macaroni.
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

Speaker 1 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 gonna get the right amount of meatball on the fork with the right amount of spaghetti it's it's it's like it's bad so either like i'm like if you're gonna do pasta choose a different shape that's like more amenable

Speaker 1 where like the the stabbing works for you know what i mean like

Speaker 1 and or or like eat it on a bowl of polenta. Eat it with some grilled bread.
Do something else with your time. Like,

Speaker 1 eat a meatball sandwich,

Speaker 1 but not on a spaghetti, please, for the life of me.

Speaker 1 Because also, like, you're like, you have a whole bowl of spaghetti, and then what, you have three meatballs on it. It just looks wrong.
You're like, I don't know. All right.
Lightning round.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 All right. Hit me.
Lightning round of oddball questions.

Speaker 1 What is the most dangerous thing you've done for a book?

Speaker 1 Ooh, 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, I do all sorts of dangerous things that I would never recommend.

Speaker 1 I mean, I've probably eaten, you know what I've probably done that's the most dangerous thing? What?

Speaker 1 Eaten 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Right. Finish this sentence.
Now that I know blank, I'll never look at my blank the same way again.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 uh,

Speaker 1 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. Yeah.
Funnest object sitting in your house.

Speaker 1 Oh, oh, oh, oh. My friend gave me,

Speaker 1 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 a, it's like a broccoli and

Speaker 1 then a bok toy and then like, I can't remember what the, oh, an artichoke, and then a cucumber, and then

Speaker 1 a pea pod, and then the peas. Oh,

Speaker 1 that's so cute. It's so cool.
It's like hand-painted wood. It's so beautiful.
Yeah. Oh, what a joy.

Speaker 1 Biggest mistake you've made while cooking? Oh, I mean,

Speaker 1 there are a million to choose from. But I mean, there was one time I, I don't know, is this kind of as a mistake? Well, yeah, it is a mistake.

Speaker 1 I was in a rush and I chose to, I like very consciously chose to use not the safest knife.

Speaker 1 for 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

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so I was too, and I had even made a mental note, like get a new one of those before someone hurts themselves.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 Oh my God. I'm sorry now.
But 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? Cause I did it.

Speaker 1 I had to go to emergency for trying to cut a bagel with.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. And I've heard the bagel and the avocado are two of the most.

Speaker 1 I knew a hand surgeon, and he said bagels and avocados were like the two of the most sort of common injuries that brought people to hand surgery. Thank you so much, Sabinas.
Oh, thank you. So lovely.

Speaker 1 You're so great. Yep, yeah.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 It's, yeah,

Speaker 1 I really appreciate your time and your work and your new book. And it's really oh, thank you.
I definitely was like, am I the science or am I the versus? Because I'm not a scientist.

Speaker 1 Yeah, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Nice talking to you, Wendy.
Lovely to talk to you. That was the award-winning cook, Same Nosrat.
Her new book is called Good Things. I'm Wendy Zuckerman.
Back to you next time.

Speaker 3 The Infinite Monkey Cage returns imminently. I am Robert Ince, and I've sat next to Brian Cox, who has so much to tell you about what's on the new series.

Speaker 4 Primarily eels.

Speaker 3 And what else?

Speaker 4 It was fascinating, though.

Speaker 3 the eels. But we're not just doing eels, are we? We're doing a bit.

Speaker 4 Brain-computer interfaces, timekeeping, fusion, monkey business, cloud, signs of the North Pole, and eels. Did I mention the eels?

Speaker 3 Is this ever since you bought that timeshare underneath the Sagasso C?

Speaker 4 Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.