Okay, but hear her out: December was rough. She did a ten-day press tour that took everything out of her; then the holidays hit. Physically, psychically, and digestively, Nosrat was wrecked. She decided that while she cleansed her mind in the desert she would cleanse her body too. She’s been on the diet for two weeks by the time I arrive, and she feels incredible. “I don’t even think about my digestion,” she says, awestruck.
So instead of cooking, Nosrat and I drive to a date farm that she’s known about since she was 19 and working at Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’ iconic Berkeley restaurant, where these particular dates are still on the menu. From her Subaru Impreza, Nosrat tells Siri to text her literary agent, Kari Stuart: “Are we millionaires yet?” Then she laughs as only Nosrat does, like a fire hydrant bursting at full blast.
Nosrat is not a millionaire yet, but she’ll get a lot closer in March, when she’ll sell her second cookbook, What to Cook, to Ten Speed Press for an undisclosed amount, but more than her first book. (Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat sold to Simon & Schuster in 2013 after a bidding war among virtually every major publisher. Nosrat says, “It was the biggest deal for a first-time cookbook author I’d ever heard of.” As of February the book has sold 330,000 copies, which, for what it’s worth, is more than three times what Gwyneth Paltrow’s 2016 cookbook sold.)
How Nosrat roasts beets: In a cast-iron skillet with a little water and covered in foil so they steam while they cook.
Photo by Alex Lau
On the way to the farm, we stop at a vegan café for a cleanse-approved lunch—a salad with black beans called Coachella Forever—before arriving at a driveway with a small wooden sign reading “Flying Disc Ranch.” A woman in an L.A. Angels cap comes out to introduce herself as Christina Kelso, the farm’s second-in-command.
“You’re on that show, right?” she says to Nosrat, smiling shyly.
We walk the grassy paths that run between rows of gnarled date palms as the late-day sun filters in, and I feel like I’m on Nosrat’s show. As she does with the Italian olive producers in the “Fat” episode and at the Japanese salt factory in “Salt,” Nosrat peppers Kelso with questions: How do you harvest? When do you drive to market? How does pollination work?
We go into a packing room where hundreds of dates sit in cardboard boxes: fat, squishy Medjools; skinny, honey-colored Deglet Noors; yellow-ish Zahidis. Nosrat moans as she bites into a round, thin-skinned date, so I follow her lead. The flesh dissolves in my mouth like a caramel cloud. “It’s called a Barhi,” Nosrat tells me. Kelso glows. Nosrat buys an obscene amount of dates, Kelso undercharges, Nosrat overpays, there are hugs all around, and scene.
By this point I’ve nailed down one obvious reason why you and I and my mom and your dentist all love Samin Nosrat: She really wants you to love her, and she has an uncanny, non- smarmy ability to get you to do just that. “Luckily, as a brown woman, I’ve had a lifetime of training making other people feel comfortable,” she says. For a long time Nosrat hated that she was such a people pleaser, but now she sees it as her greatest strength.
It got her through high school in the richest, whitest part of San Diego as the daughter of middle-class Iranian immigrants. It got her a job that involved vacuuming the floors at Chez Panisse when she was a student at UC Berkeley. It helped her at Eccolo, the seasonal Italian Berkeley restaurant where she was first a line cook and then a sous-chef, and at catering gigs for celebrities and moneyed Bay Area families she’d met through Chez Panisse. It’s why Michael Pollan let her audit his wait-listed writing class in 2007 and then hired her to be his cooking teacher when he was writing his book Cooked in 2013. It’s why the editor who would go on to acquire Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat in 2013 wrote her a letter begging to let him publish the book after meeting her once. It’s how she managed to write about protein strands and coagulation in a way that made hundreds of thousands of people want to roast a chicken. It’s why everyone she meets on her Netflix show—even the most skeptical honey producers in the Yucatán—can’t help but smile when she’s around.