Never Put Meatballs on Spaghetti, with Samin Nosrat

I'm snorting, I'm snorting already. Already, we haven't even started. What's going to happen? D-D-D-U-Science, Jats, with our favourite nerds. Yeah. Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Verses. Today on the show, the wonderful chemistry and science of food. Yeah, because even if you've never set foot in a lab, you are doing a little bit of science every day when you add a little salt to your pasta or you cook your vegetables or even if you make a Betty Crocker cake. You are doing some really cool science. And one award-winning chef who's thought a lot about all this is Simeen Nussrat. She's the author of the best-selling book, Salt Fat Acid Heat. She has a new book out, it's called Good Things. And I wanted to get Simeen on the show for ages because she makes me think about cooking and the food that I shove in my mouth in this completely new and very nerdy way. And so that's what we're talking about today, the science of cooking. Plus, why you should never put meatballs on spaghetti. My interview with Simeen Nussrat is coming up just after the break. At Betweikersino, stake 20 pounds and get 150 free spins for new customers. 18 plus, TizenC's apply, bet the responsible way, gambleaware.org. Emers yourself in herbal essences new Moroccan organ oil elixir, infused with pure organ oil, just one drop. Delivers up to 100 hours of hair nourishment with the indulgence scent of a Moroccan garden. Herbal essences new Moroccan organ oil elixir, spark-quality hair repair without the price tag. Try it now. Herbal essences. Suffers prepared to smoothness nourishment with the regimen use versus non-conditioning shampoo. Welcome to the show, Simeen. Thank you so much for coming in. Thanks so much for having me. Growing up in San Diego, I've heard you say, and you write about it a little bit in the new book, but you never really felt like you belonged that much in San Diego. Can you tell us about it? Well, I mean, my families from Iran and my parents came to San Diego sometime in the mid-70s. In 1979, there was a religious revolution in Iran, so a lot of people sort of sensed that coming. And my parents, my father's side of the family, was a practice religion called the Baha'i Faith, and they were persecuted. So they all fled, and were religious assailees. And my mom, like, came after, followed my dad here. So I was born here, and I was born here to a family who wasn't entirely, like, willingly, you know, in San Diego, it was just, right, there's the trauma of leaving your homeland behind. My, you know, there was, in ways I'm sure I can't imagine, and probably many ways I witnessed, there was racism and sort of Islamophobia directed at us, and to my parents. And I'm sure that they had a pretty clear sense of, like, not feeling very welcome, or belonging here. And I also think because they didn't leave, especially my mom, did not leave Iran thinking she'd be gone forever. My mom would say things like, you know, when you go, when you leave this house, like, you're you're stepping into America, but when you step over the threshold into the house, this is Iran, and you're going to, like, behave like an Iranian child, right? And, um, I, I, my mom, it was so important for her to instill in us a relationship to the place that we were from. Mm-hmm. And one of the ways that she did that sort of most powerfully was through food. And so, and I have always loved to eat. So, like, and the food is good, you know, and your mom's an amazing, and my mom's a great cook. Yeah. Um, and I were, there were things where, like, I would bring Persian food to school for lunch, and people, you know, it was the classic, like immigrant kid being like, you, you, what's that? The smell of the, whatever in the lunch room. And they would have been eating some disgusting peanut butter. They'd say, I mean, don't. And so, or like, Americans are going to get mad at me saying that, but it's just, yeah, you think it's, oh, yeah, I actually love PBJ too, but, um, I know it's a very American thing, though, like other, other cultures, like, what do you people do in putting that stuff up? Um, but then, and what's funny is now, like, you know, 40 years later, um, Persian food, and a lot of Middle Eastern Persian food a lot of times, uh, it gets appropriated by non-Iranian cooks into their, onto their restaurant menus, where it gets a sort of a glam, like a makeover. And, um, and on the one hand, I'm really happy for more and more people to have exposure to our foods. And in other ways, it makes me so mad. Like, it's like, you want our food, you know what I mean? You want to eat the crispy rice. You, or there was a drink I used to have. It's like a summer drink called Sikhan Jabeen, which is like a, it's kind of like, maybe, um, an early relative of a shrub. So it's like a vinegar and sugar syrup that's boiled down with mint. And you make this like, really thick, very fragrant minty syrup. And it's so tangy and refreshing. It's kind of like the original gatorade in a way. Like, right? It was just one of my favorite childhood things. And I remember having like a water bottle of it with the mint leaf in it when I was a kid. And some people, like, little kids, oh, God, school were like, you gross. Like, what's in your water? Are you gross? Like, alien? Yeah. You know, and now, of course, like, every like hipster bar has shrubs on their menu. You know, so there's just this way where, um, I, I, it's like an extra pain, a level of pain where I'm like, this is yet another way in which like our humanity is not recognized. And you just like take from you pick and choose what you want. And this is like, historically, been done against all, you know, I mean, like Americans love tacos, but hate Mexicans. So like, it's just, it's not, it's not unique to us, but it does hurt when, when I feel that. You talk about in the, um, in your new book that as a kid, cake mixes became like a Betty Crocker cake became kind of obsession. Yeah, you're obsession. What was it about the Betty Crocker cake or the, you know, those cake mixes? My mom, my mom was really, um, she, she was very committed to like an organic only, uh, like low sugar, you know, like sort of a very hippie, like rules in the household for the children of like the, we're only eating fresh fruits and vegetables. We shopped at the vegetable at the like hippie co-op. Um, and so it's not that we were never allowed dessert, but, but even when she went to get us the birthday cakes and things for occasions, special occasions, they came from like the finest European bakeries, right? And they were covered in chocolate shard and chocolate shavings and they were just this like dense chocolate cake. And they're, I just never wanted to eat that. I wanted to eat what all the white kids had, like at the bake sales, I wanted to eat the fluffy yellow, you know, yellow cake with chocolate frosting, like it was saw, and I would have never been allowed to have that. That would have just, that was like not okay. We never entered our home. Yeah. And so this is again going back to the, like outsideerness. I think it became a symbol like the yellow cake in a way became like this symbol of fitting in. And so, um, and there is something just extraordinary about cake mixes and they're, the, the very light, like incredibly tender texture, which almost feels like it's like a space, like astronaut food or something because it's, it's not, it's like doesn't seem naturally achievable. And so I sort of became obsessed as a young cook and a with like, there must be a way to achieve some sort of like lightness because every cake I, you make a cake with butter and it's dense and heavy. You make, you know, you could use the same exact ingredients as what's in the, we think is in the yellow cake cake mix. You could follow the joy of cooking, Martha Stewart, anybody is like classic yellow cake recipe and it would still come out quite dense. And I just wanted this lightness. Yeah. How do the cake mixes do it? What? So the, well, my, this was a many year journey for me and I didn't know the science of it. But over time I learned that like butter is made of, um, you know, it's made of fat primarily, but also milk solids, which are like proteins and water. It's an emulsion. And so when you cream butter and you are like, you know, whipping sugar into it to make this like kind of light texture, that's that you're aerating the butter and that's the main source of lightness in a cake. Butters in this kind of emulsist, it's like a magical state of emulsion. That's why it's like, you can be on your counter and it's a solid, right? Yeah. It kind of has this incredible range of temperatures at which it stays in in this solid emulsified state, which is why it's like that amazing thing when you like spread butter, cold butter on your warm toast. And it's like kind of like some of it melts, but some of it's just soft still when you bite bite into the soft butter. Yeah. And so you have that and the thing about it is the melting point of butter like chocolate is very close to human are, are, um, body temperatures. So it's so pleasing the way it melts, it melts on the tongue in this really like amazing way, right? Yeah. That's like part thing to me, you need a piece of chocolate and like part of the pleasure of it is it's just like melting on your tongue. And so, um, so butter is kind of this miracle ingredient, but also like you have to understand there's water in there. And when water and flour combine and start mixing, that's when gluten strands start forming. And gluten is a, is a like a protein that is leads to chewiness and toughness. It's what you, you want to develop gluten in something like a crusty loaf of bread so that when you cut into it or bite into it, you get that like sourdough chew, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's not the thing you want in a cake. And a cake you want it to like crumble and tend to dissolve tenderly on or that's what I want is like tenderness on my tongue. And so, you want to prevent gluten from forming, which is why they use lower protein, lower gluten flowers, things like cake flour and pastry flour to make cake. And also when you have oil, if you, and so fat is inhibits gluten formation, it kind of coats flour. And it makes, like you can think of it almost like it makes it slippery. So it's the, the flour is not going to combine into long gluten strands because it's kind of like a lubricated by this outer layer of fat. Right. So then the thing that the way cake mix is made in dust really, like at some point I've kind of went and learned about that. And it's made in these, you can think of them like massive food processors, just like huge machines where they combine all the dry ingredients with shortening, which is a solid fat. It's a solid oil, right? And they, and they mix and because it is solid, but it's soft at like these at regular room temperature, they can put shortening in there and coat the flour, you know, mix it without any, they're, they're pre, they're pre-looiling your, your, the flour in the cake mix so that when you bring it home and you add your oil and your water, yeah, your less gluten will form, but it doesn't. And it's done for so long and on such an industrial level. And so carefully that it, you can't see the fat, right? You don't see any of that. You can't, it just looks like flour and cocoa powder, you don't have to chocolate cake mix. But that's what's happened to it is like the flour has all been pre-coated with fat. And so there, I just was like, huh, I'll never be able to do that. I don't want to make a cake with shortening. That's not going to taste good. Like I want it to be with butter, but I don't know how to do this. And then at some point I stumbled into, which is so funny, because maybe I, if I had been looking, well, like if I had been more methought, I'm not saying I'm like methodical in any of this. I am not a scientist. But this is where are we at two decades in this journey right now? Yeah, which honestly, maybe if I had been more methodical, I could have solved this a lot sooner. Because literally there is a book, it is, it is like a, it is a legendary book called The Cake Bible. Like honestly, I could have just looked at the cake by the fat. Come on. Come on. We think like in a lot of the rings, Friday, I could have just looked at the map. You know, you got the journey. Don't really tell it. So, so like Rose Levy Baronbaum is kind of this extraordinary, just well, like, like queen of cakes. And she wrote this book called The Cake Bible. So whereas when a typical yellow cake, a typical sort of homemade cake starts with room temperature butter that you're whipping sugar into and that step is called creaming reverse creaming sort of mimics what's done in the in the cake mix industry, right? Where you take your flour and your sugar and if you're using cocoa powder, whatever your dry ingredients are. And then you take very soft, but not too soft, not so soft that it will separate into water and fat butter. You take butter that is just at the exact right temperature and you work it into the flour into the flour in very slowly in your mixer or your food processor in such a way that like by the time you've worked all the flour in, it actually just looks or all it, excuse me, by the time you've worked the butter in, yeah, the flour just looks like a dry ingredient. It's kind of amazing. It's it is this, but it's all about having the butter. Yeah, I mean Rose did it. And so and it was one of those things where I was like this was here all along and I feel like it's such an idiot. And also I felt like a genius because the first time I made it, people came over and I was like I did it you guys I made a I made a homemade Betty Crocker. And people are like I don't and then they started eating it. They're like oh my god, it really tastes like it. So it felt like that was truly a mirror miracle. I thought I would I would I know there were so many bad cakes on the way to that cake. In the middle. Yeah, you did it. I did it. Yeah. Okay, so to continue on with your journey, a lot of people including me sort of first met you after you wrote the book, Salt Fantasy Heats, which then became this Netflix documentary, which is amazing, the book, documentary. For those who haven't come across it, what is the overriding thesis of Salt Fantasy? Yeah, it's basically that if you can sort of grasp why salt fat acid and heat are important elements and understand, you know, their function in the kitchen on flavor and on texture and how to balance them and how to use them that that they they will work as sort of the four points on the compass for you as a cook no matter what you're cooking. And so whether or not you want to follow a recipe, paying attention to salt fat acid and heat will enhance the way that you feel independent are able to cook instinctively understand what's going on underneath the so it maybe steps one through six that are at someone else slide lays out for you so that in case you need to substitute something, you understand why that vinegar was there and why it would work or wouldn't work to replace it with lemon juice. Yeah, so with salt and fat and acid, those are all tangible fats come in many forms. There's oils and butters, there's animal fats and same with acid comes in many forms, but heat is kind of this like ineffable, intangible thing, but as a young cook I kind of realized that was how everyone around me that I was looking up to and learning from really oriented themselves in the kitchen on any given day. And they were not always consulting cookbooks and recipes. The things we were always tasting for were salt and fat and acid. I think about it every time I have avocado on toast because I'm like, it's mean would be so proud of me. I'm toasting my bread. There's my hate. I've got my avocado and then my salt and flat. Yeah, I get so much. Yeah, no, you didn't imagine, but I always think of you. I mean, I am so glad and that's the thing I always say is like this is actually a lot simpler than you think it's some it's just some jargon you have to like wrap your mind around, but we all naturally do this. I mean all of these things are things our our palettes have evolved to seek and to enjoy, right? And so like if you are a person who goes has ever been to a takeria and has garnished your own burrito or taco with sour cream and or cheese and or salsa, you know, or guacamole like and and and done it again and again until it tastes just right, then you're balancing the salt and the fat and the acid, right? Like you're doing it already. And in salt fat acid hate, you talk about this story of working at Shai Pani, which you've mentioned. It's like this. So I don't know if fancy restaurant in Berkeley, California where you got your start and having this moment where you realize that salt is not just the sidekick for pepper, but actually can like completely reshape a meal. If you stride and you you actually wrote, um, sorry if it's awkward that I'm quoting you. No. No. But if one lesson stays with you, if one lesson from this book stays with you, let it be this salt has a greater impact on flavor than any other ingredient. It really does. Yeah. Would you know why that is? It does so many amazing things. You salt meat in advance, you, which is to say like a chicken that you're going to roast tomorrow, I would salt it today to give the salt plenty of time to be absorbed and be distributed evenly throughout the meat. That means like tomorrow when I roast it and I take a bite, I won't have salty skin and bland meat. I'm going to have an evenly perfectly seasoned chicken, right? The salt has penetrated and gone all the way through. But also the salt will have worked on some of the proteins and so, and ultimately leading to much more tender meat. It sort of disables some of the proteins, leading to more tender meat. And that is like a crazy function is like just by salting your meat in advance, you will have a more tender meat. Salt also on, it has a kind of an ability. If you think about a tomato, like slicing a tomato and you salt your tomato slices and you wait a few minutes and then you come back and you look and there's like all this water has come to route, right? There's like the tomato's juicier all of a sudden. And you take a bite of that tomato and the one that has salt, even if it's just a little bit of salt, so little that you don't actually taste it to be saltier, your experience of eating that tomato is going to be totally different because what the salt has done is by bringing out not only water but aromatic molecules out of the cells that it started to break down. That means with every bite your nose is going to breathe in so much more aroma. But the vast percentage of our experience of eating is smell, not taste, right? The vast experience so the more access we have to aromatic molecules, the more profound our experience of eating is going to be, right? The more like perfume, damn profound, right? So you are always after like how do I get those aromatic molecules? It's the same as like why people, you know, tear fresh basil into the thing at the last minute is because you just want that smell, right? You want that you want that smell as close to your eating experience as possible, right? The fragrance is what makes it sort of alive. And so salt a lot of times sort of goes into cells, breaks things down. I was even super you that salty incorrectly when cooking beans can make them more vibrantly colored. Yeah, totally so like. How does that happen? So what's happening when you have a very salty pot of water and a vegetable in it is immediately osmosis is going to start to happen in the pot but also inside the vegetable inside the cells of the vegetable. So it's going to start absorbing in an attempt to reach homeostasis, right? It's going to start absorbing salt from the pot into itself. So that and that's what's going to flavor it. And that means it's like holding on, right? It's pulling in minerals, right? It's a state of pulling in minerals and not letting them out. Whereas if you cook your vegetables in under seasoned water, then in an attempt to reach homeostasis, the vegetables are going to leech their minerals into the water and with their minerals, also the chlorophyll will get affected. They will be less vibrant and less green. So it's just a wild totally. It's a really wild and amazing. It's so incredible. Salt is so magical. So in Netflix documentary version of So fat assed hate, you get to visit as I guess for those who haven't seen it, I mean, visits the world and these like all these places that kind of represent these elements. And for salt, you visit the soy sauce factory. And I have heard you say that and you could see it, you cry like a baby. I wouldn't have said cry like a baby, but I thought, what was so emotional about that place? Well, for me, so much of it has to do like that soy sauce in particular. I also got very emotional in the Parmesan in the Parmesan factory. But and both of those foods are foods that have hundreds or even thousands of years of tradition being made the same way. There's so much knowledge. So the story of that soy sauce producer in particular is that it's one of the last remaining traditional soy sauce producers in Japan. And what makes it so exquisite is that it's aged for upwards of two years. Whereas if you think of like Kiko Man or other industrially produced soy sauces, they're aged around three months maximum. So that time is, you know, and in any food that you're producing, time is often the most expensive ingredient. In addition to the two years of aging the soy sauce, this soy sauce is aged in these special barrels. These like huge wooden barrels that only one or two people are left in the world who know how to produce these barrels because they last close to 100 years. But as the industry has industrial, like become so much more industrial, the need for that knowledge and for those barrels has disappeared because Kiko Man just like an industrially produced soy sauce is just aged in stainless steel cask like in in the place. Yeah. So the wood for the barrels is harder to find. The knowledge of producing the barrels is harder to find. And the barrels are part of the taste, right? There's microbes in that specific type of wood from that place that affect the way that that tastes. So it's almost like I knew in that moment I was like getting to taste an endangered food, right? An endangered species. And Parmesan is not endangered thankfully. But like again, there, you know, years of aging go into making a wheel of Parmesan. Hundreds of gallons of milk go into one wheel of Parmesan. So it's just it's like this massive amount of work and and like resources and time for one little bite. And that is what is so meaningful to me is like I love those things. I love that in my whole life, I love things that feel like the magic is sort of hidden a little bit. How do you make Parmesan cheese? What are you doing with all that milk? What are you doing? Well, all cheese, all cheese. This is one of those things that blows me. I love dairy so much. Like I, what's funny is my girlfriend's lactose intolerant. I'm like, oh god, I feel so bad. But you know, when I was a young cook actually working at shape and yeast at this amazing restaurant, one of the things that really sort of took blew me away was seeing these people like these incredibly experienced cooks who literally knew how to make anything from scratch. And that sort of is a little bit of like what became my ethic, right? Like how can I make this yellow cake from scratch, right? And so, but one of the things that they didn't make from scratch, it already kind of surprised me that they made it at all, but they didn't make it all away from scratch was mozzarella so we would we would pull fresh mozzarella, we would get the curd from the local producer and then pull it into moths into fresh like balls that then we would slice and turn into like a braise salad or something else. And it is kind of this magic trick. It truly is like it turns into this like rubbery texture and like it's very fun to make. I was like, well, this is amazing, but why aren't we starting with milk? Right? Like we should be able to make we should be able to make our own get the cow. Yeah, it's like this is the house of made from scratch. Let's make this from scratch. Yeah. So God bless them. Like these like this is this is like one of those things where I'm like only at shape and use. I decided to take this on as my project. And I was you know, probably 20 years old. I had no colon, I was maybe they sometimes let me cut an onion. Like I had no culinary experience. I had no business doing this. This is also very early internet. This is like 99, 2000, you have to remember. Okay. So you couldn't there was not like a there was not the internet where you could be like how to make mozzarella curd from scratch. There was not that. Yes. So I had to look it up in books. I went to the UC Berkeley like food and cookbook science library like sort of look this up in books. And I found out the basic steps. I called a few cheese makers who are friends of the restaurant. They all were like do not do that. They were like. They were like, I don't know what you're talking about. It's so simple. It's just milk and rennet and a little acid. Like of course, I can totally do it. They're like no literally because it's so simple. It's one of the hardest curds. I want to artist Jesus to make. Don't do it. So basically this is all to say I spent like an entire summer wasting like tens of thousands of gallons of cheese of milk. And in attempt to make mozzarella that like never were also because cheese you have to have everything super sterile because it's it's basically the whole point is like it's at bacteria growing temperatures. So you just have to make sure you're not growing the wrong bacteria. Right? Like and so and so you can make people really sick in cheese making. People can die. So you have to sterilize everything which is like do not test trust a 20 year old in an in-restaurant kitchen to be making cheese that you want to eat. Yeah. But one of the things that I learned was oh my god. Like I would start with a gallon of milk and end up with I don't even know eight ounces, maybe eight ounces of curd. Wow. So after the success of salt fat acid hate, I thought you would be living it up. Sumein is living your best life. But I spent the right in the in your new book. It wasn't it wasn't it hasn't been exactly like that. How have you been? No. I mean I'm okay. I'm okay now. That's good. But yeah it was you know I was 38 when the book came out and when the and I was 37 when the book came out 38 when the show came out. And I'd spent most of my life till then much of my life till then being like quite sort of invisible in the world right like just had down doing my work like sort of dying for acknowledgement for the hard work. And then I went from one extreme of like being very sort of under scene to then being like very over seen. Yeah. It's just that like it it kind of knocked me off kilter in a lot of ways. Yeah. And I had to yeah I like sunk pretty deep into depression. Yeah. You wrote that I'm like the sense of joy that you'd always found in cooking and eating no longer felt attainable. Yeah. Yeah. It was really I it was a very you know obviously during this time it was also there was COVID. Yeah. There was like like George Floyd murder and but ultimately and and part of it had to do with my dad dying and like watching my dad. I'm sorry. I come. Oh thank you. I would just like watching this very complicated and kind of horrible person die a very sad prolonged complicated death. And my dad was such a chaos agent and created so much pain for so many people and his last months were really awful for a variety of reasons. But part of sort of the like takeaway was that like he was alone. You know what I mean? Like my brother and I were there with him as much as we could be but like there was and we were just in the sea of chaos that he had created during this time it was so horrible and uncomfortable for all of us including him. And I was like this is the worst way I could imagine for somebody to die. It's just so lonely and sad and pathetic and I kind of had this moment of being like you know when I'm on my deathbed I want to look back and know that I made a life that was full of beauty and joy and friendship and connection and deliciousness and puppy dogs and gardens and you know art. And so once he died I kind of was I think this is pretty common but I very much was sort of washed over with a sense of like you only live once. You know what I mean? Like the sort of preciousness of time really sort of was like I could see it so clearly in that state of like grief was just like oh I've spent my whole life trying to be good and to do good and to win the affection of the people around me and I've had this sort of voice in the back of my head being like just put your head down do good do good do good like I'm investing in a good bank account so that one day I'll reach some sort of like balance from which I can withdraw and be happy you know and I was like oh there's no day right there's no there that you get to like I have to why am I making myself so miserable in the meantime the meantime is all there is yeah yeah like um and so I I think I sort of have just changed you know as much as a person can change my policy about that of like oh I have to like even if I'm on deadline and I feel really bad about being behind which is all the time like I still have to stick a break and go have watermelon in the park with my friends you know what I mean like I still have to have a little bit of joy every day and I still have an a way that I can do that is this like simple act of cooking and that if I sort of understand if I sort of reorient my entire understanding of what's valuable in my in my life and that the ultimate most valuable thing is my time right the only thing I can't make more of the only thing I can't yeah produce more of is time that's actually the most precious currency I have and so my act of spending time for you or with you or on you is the most beautiful gift I can give you and vice versa right you know it's not like oh I'm just trying to make the world the best lasagna it's like I'm thinking about the person who asked me to make lasagna for their birthday while I make this and I'm like putting all of that energy into this thing that takes sometimes two days to make right so that when you eat it you feel like I spent two days of my precious time on you and happily right in your book in your new book in good things um it's filled with obviously fabulous recipes and these sort of bigger tips about like just living a happier life I think um but also a bunch of fun facts about fun science facts about oh yeah excuse that I like I have to get to be able to show we better talk about science um uh but so can you tell me one of the things you mentioned is that you need to bring eggs to room temperature before baking them why is that oh yeah well it's all oh that's such a good question I look it's just such a simple question it's so good because it isn't almost every baking recipe make sure your eggs are at room temperature right and just like I was saying about butter having like very specific qualities at different temperatures eggs do too and also it's it's not that it's not even so much necessarily that an egg at room temperature will whip better than a cold egg even though it will like a room temperature egg white will hold air more readily than a cold one okay but often in baking what you're doing is you're combining different ingredients like with an egg into a cake batter say what you're doing is you have your soft butter that maybe you've creamed with your sugar or whatever or reverse creamed or whatever and then you're gonna add eggs into that and often you do one egg at a time let it mix in at the next egg or even sometimes more like you even do it more gradually where you're just adding you're dribbling the egg in and that's because you are trying to keep an emulsion for you know you're trying to have this cake batter or mixture cookie dough or whatever come together into a unified texture and a unified mixture and if things are vastly different temperatures they're gonna they're not gonna come together as readily like right and if that if if you're adding a cold thing into a warm thing they're kind of gonna reject each other a little bit right you want everything to be similar temperature uh-huh on a sort of different note but fridge-related um you right the refrigeration destroys a tomato's delicate flavor yes it is true it does destroy the delicate tomato flavor when I was a baby cook somebody told me they I feel like they had a fringe magnet that said like I think it said that like refrigeration destroy I think it I think I was quoting the fridge magnet but um but it's part basically tomatoes are very delicate and this goes back to those aromatic molecules and um the and also a tomato like many other things is some sensitive to temperature what a fridge it does to vegetables is it slows down the decay essentially right like a vegetable from the moment it's picked is dying right so and so uh and also a lot of things are happening chemically inside those vegetables like for example I think many of us have heard is um with corn sweet corn for example like it's the freshest the moment it's pick it's the sweetest the moment it's picked and that's totally true like I I people I know who grew up in the Midwest where they grow a lot of corn you know the grandma would put on the pot of water to bring it to a boil before sending the kids out into the yard to pick the corn because she's like it has to go straight from the picking into the pot and grandma was right because what you're doing when you pick a vegetable is like the minute you pick it it's innate sugars start transforming into starches so like if you've had starchy corn you know that's like kind of like dry and starchy that's probably because it's old or it could be the variety but if it's supposed to be like corn on the cob it's the sweetest the moments pick that's why you want to eat the corn like the day you bring it home from the farmers if you can and so the same is true for a tomato tomatoes ripen slightly differently but still you want to pick them at the peak of their sugars and putting them in the fridge what it's going to do to a tomato's texture is it's going to start degrading the cells and the cells will become like the texture of the tomato will start to become mealy like you see your face you're so disgusted yeah it's so gross and you'll lose a lot of those and you'll lose a lot of those like aromatic molecules which are what makes a tomato have such sort of vibrant fresh flavor so I really I don't put tomatoes in the fridge I always leave them out a room temperature yeah you you have spent a lot of time thinking about food systems and how we get food to how all that food ends up in our supermarket it's so interesting sometimes you find out the craziest things yeah yeah so it's like on on your plate you can see sort of the effects of sociopolitical conflict of like economic sanctions of and you can taste the changes that happen with these so for example cinnamon is I think a really great example so until about I would say the mid 1900s in this country in the US our predominant source or our main source of cinnamon was Vietnam and the cinnamon grown in Vietnam is is sweet like when you taste a piece of cinnamon bark it tastes sweet on your tongue it also is very high in the like the oils like the cinnamon oils that are kind of make it taste spicy so if you've ever had like red hot gum or a red hot candies or big red gum yes like that taste of that very spicy sort of cinnamon that red like that that is what I'm talking about right but if I if I told you to picture cinnamon you wouldn't think of red hot gum you would think of apple pie or cinnamon apple cider donuts or something yes which is a totally different kind of cinnamon and that cinnamon comes um historically from Mexico or India but and and it has just a completely different sort of like molecular makeup and a different spice profile it's much less spicy and more sort of soft softly flavored that's if you want to picture the difference between like I said apple pie and big red gum yeah right those things are both cinnamon but totally different kinds of cinnamon and so until like mid 1900s basically everyone here like our experience of cinnamon was this Vietnamese very sweet very spicy cinnamon and then when the Vietnam war happened and there were sanctions the economic sanctions um posed on all goods coming here from Vietnam from like this I think late 60s until the late 90s when Bill Clinton was president there were nothing from Vietnam could enter this country so so the an entire you know generation and a half of people their experience of cinnamon shifted into like Indian Mexican Chinese cinnamon and so like that in that that taste of that big red whatever felt and that and I fall into that group right I was born 79 yes and then one day like and I can't remember when it was probably 2002 2003 someone gave me a piece of Vietnamese cinnamon bark like I'd never had it before and it's so good that I now only use Vietnamese cinnamon like I always look for it and at this point you can find it like I got you can get it at Costco you can get it at Whole Foods you just look for it's called Vietnamese or Saigon cinnamon but it is this way where you know it tells this story right this like taste and this simple ingredient tells this crazy like global story and then um why have vanilla beans so expensive oh my god vanilla beans are so crazy so um I I at one point I was staying in the like near the Palm Desert and I somehow somebody was like you got to go visit this orchid greenhouse they're so amazing there wasn't a lot for me to do in Palm Desert so I was like I'll go visit the orchid greenhouse so I went to the orchid greenhouse and I saw the different types of orchids I'm not like a major orchid nerd but it was still pretty cool yeah they're very sexy they're very I feel like yeah totally you know totally it's amazing and at the very end of the tour they were like I was like oh what's that thing and there was this one sort of plant that was like this crazy vining trailing plant and they're like oh that's vanilla but I was like what and they're like vanilla beans I was like vanilla's an orchid and they're like yes and so vanilla is an orchid plant or vanilla is the seed pod from an orchid plant and it takes almost a year for a vanilla bean to mature on the plant and in that year when the when the plant flowers it's so finicky that um on a vanilla farm a human has to go and hand pollinate each flower to ensure but but like enough vanilla will be produced because there's I think something like a three-day window for that flower to be pollinated so if they were left to the bees and nature yeah you know probably you would get much a much smaller yield of vanilla so for one thing like that step already is so sort of well you got humans literally you got humans hand pollinating but also in this very small time window right so you have to get that right and then you have to wait however many months I think I think it's upward of eight months for the seed pod to ripen um and then they're picked and then there's a multi-step for basically process fermentation process because when they're picked it's not the pod it's not the vanilla bean that we know it's still not usable so it has to go through a multi-step sort of drying and fermentation process to become the fragrant pod that we know so when you understand that and then layer onto that a whole other understanding that these places where vanilla is endemic are among the most vulnerable to climate disaster like you start to learn oh right like wow this is a an incredible treasure for humankind that actually is on the verge of extinction and you know it can only grow in this very limited climate and if we do not protect those climates those people who live there the plants then we will lose this and we will likely lose vanilla probably not in my lifetime but probably in in the next generations lifetime like they're there there will it will it will probably not vanilla chocolate coffee like bananas there are a lot of foods that we sort of don't think about that are are um not long for this world when you when you look at the food trends out there um you know whether it's soy lent or robots or God's serving as food oh my god the various diets energetic caravans oh yeah oh my god what what what terrifies you the most oh my god what terrifies me that I'm like anxious all the things you just listed make me so anxious oh god I mean I think what really this isn't really a trend but I think what I'm gonna turn the sorry I'm not gonna answer your question I'm gonna turn it inside out late uh um I feel so protective of the people who grow produce and make our food that we get to eat the if they're they're such unglamorous it's such unglamorous work it's such low-paying work in general across culture is across country is across populations um and also it's this right like food is this thing that gets valorized in tv shows like the bear and top chef and whatever but they're in this country in particular there is such um a flawed system for for food production um that serves really just a few large interests at the cost of the environment at the cost of the people who um produce the food and so there is just this kind of way where we as a population have been trained to expect our food to be very cheap um and I say that understanding we're like on the brink of a recession and a lot of people face like sort of economic precarity in their lives so I'm not necessarily out here saying everything should be more expensive but I am saying like uh I I there it's kind of just built in that we expect that we should be able to go get a taco for this much a burger for this much you know and it should be cheap but when you sort of take a step back and think about it you're like how are the people the many people who worked on producing this thing to get it to us making a living and you know paying for their basic needs and I worked in kind of the fanciest restaurants restaurant in America for a while and like you know I did not achieve financial stability in my own life until I had like a miracle situation and sold a book and out a Netflix show right like I was existed in that kind of precarity as well yeah totally but like um in this moment that we live in in this like late capitalism like everything at the touch of a button available to us everything so digitized and separate and we're so removed from the process of making and like having anything made for us I really believe like food and restaurants are kind of one of the last vestiges in our daily lives of having an experience of something be handmade for you right like and having this like human to human like somebody I made this for you that doesn't happen anymore like with so many of the goods in our life right like we're so for room you don't you don't meet the person who made your shoes or your clothes or your headphones right but you are a room apart from the person who made you this plate of food sometimes they're the handing it to you and so it is kind of this like incredibly valuable and beautiful thing that we still have like a little bit of access to in our lives and I'm just so sad that every force in our lives and in the world is sort of hellbent on eradicating even that from from us and and letting us appreciate it and I don't know there's no solution that I know you know I don't know that there's an answer I'm not criticizing anyone for buying or eating any food I just it kind of breaks my heart yeah yeah it's real depressing no well we kind of there we kind of there how that we end we end to yeah um why is spaghetti the very last place a meatball belongs uh direct quiet it's so funny it really is my editor was like we had this in my question she was like you asked that question Wendy it's very important well and I say that quoting the song on top of spaghetti I'll cover with the cheese right like like I'm just like no no have you ever had a bowl of spaghetti meatballs have you ever had we at our house we actually do it with macaroni it's macaroni well there we go because so already you're making a better choice my mom will be very happy it's a grandma's recipe okay spaghetti is an insane choice of shape to eat with a meatball for one thing a meatball is like this huge thing you have to sort of break it down spaghetti is this long whatever you're never gonna get the right amount of meatball on the fork with the right amount of spaghetti it's it's it's like it's bad so either like I'm like if you're gonna do pasta choose a different shape that's like more amenable where like the the stabbing works for but you know what I mean like absolutely right and or or like eat it on a bowl of polenta eat it with some grilled bread do something else with your time like I'm eating meatball sandwich but not on this spaghetti please for the life of me because also like you're like you have a whole bowl of spaghetti and then what you have three meatballs on it just looks wrong you're like I don't know all right lightning round thank you thank you very much um all right hit me lightning round of of oddball questions what is the most dangerous thing you've done for a book oh I don't know oh my god I haven't filled the pressure of the lightning and I don't have an answer for you right now I mean I do all sorts of dangerous things that I would never recommend and and I mean I've probably eaten you know what I've probably done that's the most what eaten the cheese that you tried to cook so I've definitely had stuff where I'm like is this salad dressing still a good three and a half months later try it why not like I think I've definitely taken my life into my own hands eating like potentially rotten food but also I'm still here so it's fine exactly exactly yeah yeah all right finish this sentence now that I know blank I'll never look at my blank the same way again oh uh I mean I think now that I know how long it takes to make a vanilla bean I'll never look at a vanilla bean the same way again yeah funnest object sitting in your house oh oh oh my friend gave me my friend gave me the coolest thing it's a set of like Russian style dolls but instead of being Russian like dolls they're vegetables so like it's like a broccoli and I'm and then a buck toy and then like I can't remember with them oh an artichoke and then a cucumber and then a pea pod and then the peas oh that's so cute it's so cool it's like hand painted wood it's so beautiful yeah what a joy um biggest mistake you've made while cooking oh I mean the million to choose from but I mean there was one time I don't know this kind of a mistake well yeah it is a mistake I was in a rush and I chose to I like very consciously chose to use not the safest knife for um cutting into a butternut squash because the knife what we I in the restaurant where I worked I always had a two handled knife which is what the knife you use when you cut into a wheel of Parmesan or anything sort of unwieldy because that way you're seasawing your way into it instead of jamming a knife in that could slip out oh yeah and and injure you so our for some reason our large two handled knife had gone missing for a few days which is a very weird and so I was too and I had even made a mental note like get a new one of those before someone hurt some cells but then I was in a rush and I just instead of choosing the next safest knife which would have been a very big one I just grabbed the closest one which was little and I went into my butternut squash and I stabbed myself in the hand and I had no surgery oh my god oh my god no but uh yeah it was very intense I truly yeah I was very intense wow that was a big mistake it was a mistake is it true because I did it um I had to go to emergency for trying to cut a bagel with oh yeah and I've heard the bagel in the avocado or two of the most um I knew a hand surgeon and he said bagels and avocados were like the two of the most sort of common injuries yes that brought people to hand surgery thank you so much oh thank you you're so great yeah thank you it's um yeah I really appreciate your time and your work and your new book and it's really thank you I definitely was like am I the science or am I the versus because I'm not a scientist yeah thank you so right thank you nice talking to you that was the award-winning cook to me Nosrat her new book is called Good Things I'm Wendy Zuckerman back to you next time you