Tie Up Your Aprons: It's Time for Kitchen Confidence Camp!

If you haven’t heard the name Samin Nosrat yet, you’re about to start hearing a lot of it: Samin Nosrat, who talked her way into a job at Chez Panisse with no previous kitchen experience. Samin Nosrat, Michael Pollan’s cooking teacher (and former journalism student). Samin Nosrat, author of the forthcoming Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, her first cookbook, which is nearly 500 pages, readable as a novel, bursting at the seams with curiosity and verve, and almost as thorough an education as culinary school.

Yes, the book itself is an education—but, we thought, why not bring it to life? Why not mint a cooking school that would introduce some of Samin’s best tips and strategies and her mindset, which is zingy and refreshing as lemonade? Reader, it’s here at Food52 every weekend for the rest of April: Kitchen Confidence Camp.

Every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday this April, we’ll talk through the four elements of cooking as Samin breaks it down—salt, fat, acid, heat—and explore the lessons they teach us as she does in her book. We’ll learn to juggle them in everything we cook, from flaky-as-heck biscuits and superlatively tender cakes to creamy, aggressive dressings and slow-roasted fish. And we’ll have Samin to guide us, in her snappy, friendly writing (I misread her recipe for “Sprinkling Crumbs” as “Sparkling Crumbs” the first time I encountered it and thought nothing of it) and in a series of videos with her real, true, live-from-New-York self. Her lessons (adding a few drops of lemon juice to beaten eggs for a more tender scramble, for example) have something for old hands and new cooks alike.

As you can tell, we’re really excited about the book—not only because it’s full of game-changing, I can’t believe I never thought of that tips; not only because it is so thorough you wonder how she possibly put all of it together, let alone holds it in her brain; not only because it is thoughtful and wide-reaching and inclusive; but also because it prioritizes a love of learning as much as a love of cooking. As Samin herself writes, “Perhaps no ingredient is as important as curiosity.”

Tie on your aprons, gang, and see you at camp. (And bookmark the Kitchen Confidence Camp landing page so you won’t miss a lesson!)

P.S. Be sure to check out the book, available for pre-sale right here in the Food52 Shop and everywhere books are sold on April 25.

All April, Kitchen Confidence Camp takes us through the four essential elements of cooking, inspired by chef and author Samin Nosrat's cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Follow along here.