Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by Samin Nosrat
a conceptual book about cooking
I appreciated this book -- the introduction is lovely:
I mentioned the theory to one of the chefs, and he smiled as if to say "duh, everyone knows that", but I didn't know that!, and certainly no one had explicitly related it to me.
More concept books in the world please!
That said, it got a bit long for me, and a lot of it washed over me. The main things I will take away from it are:
1) use more salt on almost-all your home cooking -- this alone is worth the price of admission.
1b) cooking water for pasta should be as salty as the sea -- a GREAT mnemonic (though as she says, it's only as salty as you remember the sea, which is way less salty than the sea actually is).1c) watermelon with feta tastes so good on the beach BECAUSE your hands are still covered in salt! Amazing, great memories.
2) just.... structuredly experiment with your cooking. Taste along the way. Take a spoonful of whatever you're cooking, add more salt or oil or chili or whatever, see what that does. This is... so obviously a good idea, and I never used to do it?
(I started a googledoc after reading this book to jot down notes about each thing I cook, what worked, any ideas for next time.... I really hope I'll actually manage to keep that going, though I fear I won't).
I will cook so many meals in my life, and currently they're usually 6-or-7 out of 10, and they could so easily be 8-or-9 out of 10, if I actually tried to get better instead of just sitting at my plateau? This feels like an important lesson for all of life, I just hope I can hold on to it.