Samin Nosrat once shunned recipes. Now she's sharing them

Sam Briger

September 23, 2025 / 10:48 am

Samin Nosrat's 2017 cookbook, Salt Fat Acid Heat, was organized around what she considers the four fundamental elements of food — and how to make delicious dishes that didn't require step-by-step instructions. One thing deliberately absent: recipes.

"People can get trapped in a recipe, and feel so bound to the written letter," she says. "They feel really constraining, and that constraint hurts my heart."

Nosrat honed her craft at the famous Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, where she started out as a busser and eventually made it into the kitchen as a cook. Salt Fat Acid Heat felt like the culmination of a lifetime of work, and led to a four-episode Netflix show. But when the pande

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