Samin Nosrat

In 2000, as a sophomore in college, Nosrat ate dinner at Chez Panisse and immediately applied to work there as a busser.[9] She eventually worked her way up to the restaurant kitchen, becoming a cook and working with Alice Waters, who described her as "America's next great cooking teacher."[2][7][10]

After leaving Chez Panisse, Nosrat worked in Italy and then other Berkeley-area restaurants.[15] She worked as a sous-chef and took catering jobs before starting to teach private cooking classes in 2007.[16] She has said that she soon felt that a television show would be a more efficient way of teaching; however, it would be years before that would happen.[17]

She later worked with Michael Pollan, and was included in his book and the 2016 Netflix documentary television series Cooked as "the chef who taught Michael Pollan how to cook".[18]

Nosrat's 2017 cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat, illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton and including a foreword by Michael Pollan, explains the fundamental principles of good cooking which she defines by the four pillars named in the title. Instead of focusing on recipes alone, each pillar has its own chapter where Nosrat teaches readers through stories and wisdom gained from her years as a professional chef and cooking teacher. Rare for a cookbook, it teaches readers "from the ground up, how to be a good cook,"[19] functioning more as a textbook than a recipe collection.[16] The intention is that readers can improve their every day cooking with a fundamental understanding of food, improvising instead of needing to follow recipes.[19] Even though it was published in 2017, it has remained on best-selling lists for over three years.[12]

The book was named "Food Book of the Year" by The Times of London[20] and was a New York Times best seller.[21] The cookbook also won the 2018 James Beard Award for Best General Cookbook,[22] was named Cookbook of the Year by the International Association of Culinary Professionals, and won the 2018 IACP Julia Child First Book Award.[23] In 2019, it was named one of the ten "Best Cookbooks of the Century So Far" by Helen Rosner in The New Yorker.[19]

A Netflix docu-series and travelogue based on the cookbook, also called Salt Fat Acid Heat, was released on October 11, 2018, with each of the four episodes based on one of the four elements of cooking set out in the title.[24] In episode 1, Nosrat goes to Italy to talk about the use of fat in cooking; in episode 2, Japan for salt; in episode 3, Mexico for acid; and in episode 4, returns to the United States, cooking at Chez Panisse as well as with her own mother, to discuss heat.[25] The show was described by The Washington Post as "unlike any other food show on TV"[26] and helped launch Nosrat to "household-name status."[19]

In March 2020, Nosrat and friend Hrishikesh Hirway, who created the popular podcast Song Exploder, started the podcast Home Cooking, which set out to help people cook for themselves in the midst of the COVID-19 global health crisis.[27] Originally planned as a four-part mini-series, the podcast continued to publish sporadic episodes over the course of the pandemic. It currently does not have a public plan to either continue or end, though the most recent episode is from November 2022.[28]

The show is structured as a cooking advice show where Nosrat answers listener questions about cooking. It initially started as a way of answering the question, "How do I use the things I have in my pantry?" during a time when people were over-buying particular ingredients out of fear early in the pandemic and didn't have access to many other things. It later grew beyond this type of troubleshooting.[29][30]

The show won the 2021 iHeartRadio award for Best Food Show, and was named one of the best podcasts of 2020 by Time,[31] Rolling Stone,[32] Vulture,[33] The Economist,[34] and The Atlantic.[35]

From 2017 to 2021, Nosrat was a regular "Eat" columnist for The New York Times Magazine.[7][8]

In March 2019, Nosrat announced a second cookbook, again in collaboration with MacNaughton, titled What to Cook.[23] Ten Speed Press will publish the collection of 120 recipes.[23] Similar to her first book, Nosrat's second cookbook is about helping home cooks navigate the kitchen more similarly to professional cooks. What to Cook will also cover four elements, the ones used for decision making: time, ingredients, resources, and preferences. Nosrat called them the "invisible set of constraints you face every time you set out to cook".[14]

Also in 2019, she was included on Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world.[36]

In 2021, Nosrat made a guest appearance on Michelle Obama's children's cooking show called Waffles + Mochi on Netflix.[14]