We all have incredible relationships to what we eat, to what we don't eat, to what we've eaten since childhood and what we were fed, to what food means to us. And so I find it a really powerful tool in storytelling and in opening people's hearts and their minds.
— Samin Nosrat
I went straight from college into restaurants, so, from the beginning, my idea of what a kitchen should be was the highfalutin' restaurant type - and what I had at home never measured up to that.
Chez Panisse is a sensory temple - you might have to be made of stone not to fall for it.
I would say, probably 7 or 8 years into my cooking career, it stopped being about just food for me. Food's really fun, but I've always been about people, and I realized that food is just a really convenient tool for me to connect people and bring them together.
I can only be me!
There are so many food shows, really beautiful ones, that exist to elevate professional cooking and professional chefs. But there aren't that many that really celebrate home cooking or are for home cooks especially.
I love a Yorkshire pudding. It's basically pancake batter that's fried in beef fat and puffs up; it's like you can't go wrong.
No one's born a good cook. You have to learn and practice.
Things taste less salty when they're cool.
I take, like, 9,000 supplements every morning. I don't know if it's completely placebo or not, but I'm super committed to these supplements: like, I can't face the day without them.
There's never been anyone like Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, and there never will be. She is such an important source of inspiration for me, reluctant recipe writer and follower that I am.
I grew up in San Diego with immigrant parents, before the food blogs, before this kind of celebrity chef culture we know now.
I hate recipes.
The delicate sweetness of just-picked vegetables is always worth savoring.
There are two proper ways to use garlic: pounding and blooming. Neither involves a press, which is little more than a torture device for a beloved ingredient, smushing it up into watery squiggles of inconsistent size that will never cook evenly or vanish into a vinaigrette. If you have one, throw it away!
Friends have warned me that I can be a bully in the kitchen. With every fledgling relationship, I'm anxiously aware that the simple act of cooking alongside my new paramour can unleash havoc.
Ours was a pork-free household. The rules were arbitrary but strict: No pork in the house, ever. Except for the occasional pepperoni pizza. Or maybe Hawaiian.
I have a lot of plants - my living room is like a jungle. I like the idea of bringing the outside in.
People love giving cooks spoons, I've noticed. Or, at least, they love giving them to me.
What any immigrant is after is a taste of home.
I'm the child of immigrants, and there was always a garage filled with food, just in case, and you kept money under the mattress. You were always prepared, because you couldn't trust that you were being taken care of. So that translated into my life into a lot of opportunity hoarding.
There's nothing historically in my life very flashy. I'm not exceptionally beautiful. I'm not exceptionally wealthy.
For me, I am very much a champion of home cooking and home cooks.
I'm not the number-one fan of the heavy holiday meal. And also, I didn't grow up eating them, the traditional Western holiday meals, so it's just not something I have a nostalgic relationship to.
People never used to look at me twice. That was my superpower: When I met someone, I could decide whether to care about them based on whether they cared about me.
I've had an untraditional trajectory with food: I was in my mom's home, then I was a college kid making mac and cheese and quesadillas, and then I was a professional cook. I never had that time where you figure out how to cook for yourself at home.
I wake up naturally and begrudgingly around 6:10 A.M. That's wired in so deeply that I wake up at that time no matter where I am, in any time zone. I wish I could sleep later.
The beach has always been a constant in my life.
I could probably go on for a long time about the differences between Northern California and Southern California Mexican food.
For the timid or uninitiated, leaf-wrapped foods offer an ideal and gentle introduction to fire cooking. Liberated from the need to worry about whether the fish is sticking to the grill or burning, pay attention instead to the rate of browning on the surface of the leaf, which you'll get to discard whether it chars or remains pale.
The classic French blanch-and-cool technique I learned at Chez Panisse yields the kind of brilliant, picturesque vegetables we all want to see on restaurant plates. Long-cooked foods, on the other hand, fall firmly into the 'ugly but good' camp of the Tuscan cucina povera, where flavor far outshines looks.
Very early in my culinary career, while helping another cook prepare the staff meal, I stirred some chopped raw garlic and herbs into a bowl of leftover lentils. The atonement for this sin was so extreme that I've never repeated it: After being chastised, I spent the next 20 minutes fishing out the minuscule pieces of garlic.
I'd never been religious, but I'd always obeyed my elders. My decision to become an omnivore was fraught, not because it was a religious transgression but because it was my first act of self-assertion as a young adult.
In sausage, fat is a source of both delightfully porky flavor and a springy texture. Without enough fat, sausage will be dry and tasteless.
When I left restaurants, I had to learn to be a home cook.
The people-pleasing and performing is 100% ingrained in me, partly because I was a little brown girl growing up in a very white, homogeneous community in San Diego - where, in second grade, I was called a terrorist.
I think the goal of 'Chef's Table' is that you are so moved by the story that you want to go and eat that person's food at their restaurant. But I wanted the takeaway from my show to be that you go and cook the thing.
I just drink regular drip coffee, but I'm kind of a coffee baby.
Does anybody like being recognized? I understand that it's my job. I'm grateful about people who are moved enough by the work to want to say something. But I mourn the loss of anonymity.
I'm surprisingly squeamish.
Chex mix is this wonderful crunch that you just can't get enough of.
I grew up eating and loving Persian food, going to school, and everyone making fun of me.
I live by myself, so I derive a lot of joy from being with my friends and their families.
I always turn to Wendell Berry for inspiration on food, community, agriculture, and, well, just being a human.
I really love the beach.
My students regularly spend 20 hours or more in the kitchen with me. I try to teach them that even the most well-written recipe for, say, gazpacho can never take into account the ways in which a tomato that's lapped each morning and evening by coastal fog will taste completely different from one grown in a hot, inland valley.
Grilling used to make me nervous, but then I learned to view the fire as just another source of heat, no different from a stove or an oven.
Growing up, I was aware of the kids-don't-like-vegetables trope, but it didn't make much sense to me. I never had any choice; all the traditional Iranian dishes my mom cooked teemed with herbs and vegetables.
In the wake of a failed relationship, I'm often flooded with if-onlys.
At home, Mom served us turkey breakfast links that she got at the health-food store. But whenever we went out for breakfast, she let my brothers and me order pork sausages (though, inexplicably, not bacon).
