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the first course to folding perfect little ravioli for the second to butchering beef for the third. These thrills sustained me as I made innumerable mistakes—some small, such as being sent to retrieve coriander and returning with parsley because I couldn’t tell the difference, and some large, like the time I burned the rich beef sauce for a dinner we hosted for the First Lady.

      As I improved, I began to detect the nuances that distinguish good food from great. I started to discern individual components in a dish, understanding when the pasta water and not the sauce needed more salt, or when an herb salsa needed more vinegar to balance a rich, sweet lamb stew. I started to see some basic patterns in the seemingly impenetrable maze of daily-changing, seasonal menus. Tough cuts of meat were salted the night before, while delicate fish fillets were seasoned at the time of cooking. Oil for frying had to be hot—otherwise the food would end up soggy—while butter for tart dough had to remain cold, so that the crust would crisp up and become flaky. A squeeze of lemon or splash of vinegar could improve almost every salad, soup, and braise. Certain cuts of meat were always grilled, while others were always braised.

      Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat were the four elements that guided basic decision making in every single dish, no matter what. The rest was just a combination of cultural, seasonal, or technical details, for which we could consult cookbooks and experts, histories, and maps. It was a revelation.

      The idea of making consistently great food had seemed like some inscrutable mystery, but now I had a little mental checklist to think about every time I set foot in a kitchen: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. I mentioned the theory to one of the chefs. He smiled at me, as if to say, “Duh. Everyone knows that.”

      But everyone didn’t know that. I’d never heard or read it anywhere, and certainly no one had ever explicitly related the idea to me. Once I understood it, and once it had been confirmed by a professional chef, it seemed inconceivable that no one had ever framed things in this way for people interested in learning how to cook. I decided then I’d write a book elucidating the revelation for other amateur cooks.

      I picked up a legal pad and started writing. That was seventeen years ago. At twenty years old, I’d been cooking for only a year. I quickly realised I still had a lot to learn about both food and writing before I could begin to instruct anyone else. I set the book aside. As I kept reading, writing, and cooking, I filtered everything I learned through my newfound understanding of Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat into a tidy system of culinary thinking.

      Like a scholar in search of primary sources, a desire to experience authentic versions of the dishes I loved so much at Chez Panisse took me to Italy. In Florence, I apprenticed myself to the groundbreaking Tuscan chef Benedetta Vitali at her restaurant, Zibibbo. At first it was a constant challenge to work in an unfamiliar kitchen where I barely spoke the language, where temperatures were measured in Celsius, and where measurements were metric. But my understanding of Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat quickly gave me my bearings. I might not have known all of the specifics, but the way Benedetta taught me to brown meat for ragù, heat olive oil for sautéing, season the pasta water, and use lemon juice as a foil for rich flavours echoed what I had learned back in California.

      I spent my days off in the hills of Chianti with Dario Cecchini, an eighth-generation butcher with a huge personality and an even bigger heart. Dario took me under his wing, teaching me about whole-animal butchery and Tuscan food heritage with equal vigour. He took me all over the region to meet farmers, vintners, bakers, and cheese makers. From them, I learned how geography, the seasons, and history have shaped Tuscan cooking philosophy over the course of centuries: fresh, if modest, ingredients, when treated with care, can deliver the deepest flavours.

      My pursuit of flavour has continued to lead me around the world. Fuelled by curiosity, I’ve sampled my way through the oldest pickle shop in China, observed the nuanced regional differences of lentil dishes in Pakistan, experienced the way a complicated political history has diluted flavours in Cuban kitchens by restricting access to ingredients, and compared varieties of heirloom corn in Mexican tortillas. When unable to travel, I have read extensively, interviewed immigrant grandmothers, and tasted their traditional cooking. No matter my circumstances or whereabouts, as reliably as the points on a compass, Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat have set me on the path to good food every time I cook.

      I returned to Berkeley and went to work for Christopher Lee, my mentor at Chez Panisse, who’d recently opened his own Italian restaurant, Eccolo. I quickly took the role of chef de cuisine. I made it my job to develop exquisite familiarity with the way an ingredient or a food behaved and then follow the crumb trail of kitchen science to understand why. Instead of simply telling the cooks under my watch to “taste everything,” I could really teach them how to make better decisions. A decade after I first discovered my theory of Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat, I’d gathered enough information to begin teaching the system to my own young cooks.

      Seeing how useful the lessons of Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat had been for professional cooks, I used them as a rubric when my journalism teacher, Michael Pollan, hired me to teach him how to cook while writing Cooked, his book about the natural history of cooking. Michael quickly noticed my obsession with the four elements of good cooking and encouraged me to formalise the curriculum and begin teaching it to others. So I did. I’ve taught the system in cooking schools, senior centres, middle schools, and community centres. Whether the foods we cooked together were inspired by Mexican, Italian, French, Persian, Indian, or Japanese traditions, without exception, I’ve seen my students gain confidence, prioritise flavour, and learn to make better decisions in the kitchen, improving the quality of everything they cook.

      Fifteen years after arriving at the idea for this book, I began to write in earnest. After first immersing myself in the lessons of Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat, and then spending years teaching them to others, I’ve distilled the elements of good cooking into its essence. Learn to navigate Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat, and you can make anything taste good. Keep reading, and I’ll teach you how.

       HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

      As you can probably tell, this isn’t your typical cookbook.

      I recommend that you start by reading it through from beginning to end. Pay attention to the techniques, the science, and stories, but don’t worry too much about committing it all to memory. Come back again later to revisit the concepts that are relevant to you. Readers who are new to the kitchen will quickly catch on to the basics—each element is organised by its flavour and its science, guiding you through both the whys and the hows of good cooking. More experienced cooks will find aha! gems buried throughout and even see cooking tricks you already know with fresh eyes.

      Throughout each chapter, I’ve suggested a handful of kitchen experiments—essentially, recipes that will illustrate some of the major concepts and give you a chance to put theory into practice.

      And at the back of the book, I’ve compiled a canon of recipes to illustrate just how far a grasp of Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat will take you. Over time, you’ll grow comfortable enough to cook without recipes on a daily basis. But when learning to cook intuitively, recipes can be necessary and comforting, like training wheels.

      To underscore the patterns that guide all good cooking, I’ve organised the recipe section by type of dish, rather than by the particular course in the meal. With the help of the brilliant and hilarious illustrator, Wendy MacNaughton, I’ve created a variety of visual guides to help convey concepts where words aren’t enough. The choice to embellish this book with illustrations rather than photographs was deliberate. Let it liberate you from feeling that there’s only one perfect version of every dish. Let it encourage you to improvise, and judge what good food looks like on your own terms.

      If jumping straight into the recipes after reading through the book seems overwhelming, take a look at the Cooking Lessons, which will steer you to recipes that will help you hone particular skills and master specific techniques. If you feel unsure of how to put together dishes to create a menu, use the list of Suggested Menus as a guide.

      Finally,

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