Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Samin Nosrat
this attribute will be clear.
The Flavours of Fat
Different fats have different flavours. To select the right fat, get to know how each fat tastes, and in which cuisines it’s commonly used.
Olive Oil
Olive oil is a staple in Mediterranean cooking, so make it your default fat when cooking foods inspired by Italian, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, North African, and Middle Eastern cuisines. It shines as a medium for everything from soups and pastas to braises, roasted meats, and vegetables. Use it as a main ingredient in mayonnaise, vinaigrette, and all manner of condiments from Herb Salsa to chilli oil. Drizzle it over beef carpaccio or baked ricotta as a seasoning.
Your food will taste good if you start with a good tasting olive oil, but choosing the right one can be daunting. At my local market alone, there are two dozen brands of extra-virgin olive oil on display. Then there are all the virgin, pure, and flavoured oils. Early in my cooking career, as I approached these aisles, I often found myself overwhelmed by choices: virgin or extra-virgin? Italy or France? Organic or not? Is that olive oil on sale any good? Why is one brand £25 for 750 millilitres while another is £7.50 for a litre?
As with wine, taste, not price, is the best guide to choosing an olive oil. This might require an initial leap of faith, but the only way to learn the vocabulary of olive oil is to taste, and pay attention. Descriptors like fruity, pungent, spicy, and bright might seem confusing at first, but a good olive oil, like a good wine, is multidimensional. If you taste something expensive but don’t like it, then it’s not for you. If you find a ten-dollar bottle that’s delicious, then you’ve scored!
While it’s a challenge to explain what good olive oil tastes like, it’s fairly simple to describe a bad one—bitter, overwhelmingly spicy, dirty, rancid—all deal-breakers.
Colour has little to do with the quality of olive oil, and it offers no clues to whether an olive oil is rancid. Instead, use your nose and palate: does the olive oil smell like a box of crayons, candle wax, or the oil floating on top of an old jar of peanut butter? If so, it’s rancid. The sad truth is that most Americans, accustomed to the taste of rancid olive oil, actually prefer it. And so, most of the huge olive oil producers are happy to sell to us what more discerning buyers would reject.
Olive oil is produced seasonally. Look for a production date, typically in November, on the label when you purchase a bottle to ensure you are buying a current pressing. It will go rancid about twelve to fourteen months after it’s been pressed, so don’t save it for a special occasion, thinking it will improve over time like a fine wine! (In this way, olive oil is nothing like wine.)
As with salt, there are various categories of olive oils—everyday oils, finishing oils, and flavoured oils. Use everyday olive oils for general cookery and finishing olive oils for applications where you really want to let the flavour of the olive oil stand out: in salad dressings, spooned over fish tartare, in herb salsas, or in olive oil cakes. Purchase and use flavoured olive oils with caution. Flavourings are often added to mask the taste of low-quality olive oils, so I generally recommend staying away from them. But there is an exception: olive oils marked agrumato are made using a traditional technique of milling whole citrus fruit with the olives at the time of the first press. At Bi-Rite Creamery in San Francisco, one of the most popular sundaes features bergamot agrumato drizzled over chocolate ice cream. And it is delicious!
It can be difficult to find a good, affordable everyday olive oil. My standbys include the extra-virgin oils from Seka Hills, Katz, and California Olive Ranch. Another good everyday oil is the Kirkland Signature Organic Extra Virgin Oil from Costco, which regularly scores well on independently administered quality analyses. In their absence, look for oils that are produced from 100 percent Californian or Italian olives (as opposed to those with labels that simply read “Made in Italy,” “Packed in Italy,” or “Bottled in Italy,” which imply that the oil is pressed in Italy from olives whose provenance cannot be traced or guaranteed). The production date should always be clearly marked on the label.
If you can’t track down a good, affordable everyday olive oil, instead of using a lower-quality one, make your own blend of good olive oil and a neutral-tasting cold-pressed grapeseed or canola oil. Save the pure stuff and use it as a finishing olive oil for salads and condiments.
Once you find an olive oil you love, take good care of it. Constant temperature fluctuations from a nearby stove or daily brushes with the sun’s rays will encourage olive oil to go rancid, so store it somewhere reliably cool and dark. If you can’t keep it in a dark place, store olive oil in a dark glass bottle or metal can to keep light out.
Butter
Butter is a common cooking fat in regions with climates that support pasture for grazing cows throughout the US and Canada, the UK and Ireland, Scandinavia, Western Europe including northern Italy, and Russia, Morocco, and India.
One of the most versatile fats, butter can be manipulated into several forms and used as either a cooking medium, main ingredient, or seasoning. In its natural state, butter is available salted and unsalted, and cultured. Salted and tangy cultured butters are best as is, spread on warm toast, or served with radishes and sea salt as an hors d’oeuvre. There is no way to know exactly how much salt is in any one particular brand of salted butter, so use unsalted butter when cooking and baking, and add your own salt to taste.
Chilled or at room temperature, unsalted butter can be worked into doughs and batters as a main ingredient to lend its rich dairy flavour to baked goods and produce a variety of luxurious textures, from flaky to tender to light. Unlike oil, butter is not pure fat—it also contains water, milk protein, and whey solids, which provide much of its flavour. Gently heat unsalted butter until those solids brown and you get brown butter, which is nutty and sweet. Brown butter is a classic flavour in French and northern Italian cooking—particularly apt for pairing with hazelnuts, winter squash and sage, as I like to do in Autumn Panzanella, which is dressed with a Brown Butter Vinaigrette.
Melt unsalted butter gently over sustained low heat to clarify it. The whey proteins will rise to the top of the clear, yellow fat, and other milk proteins will fall to the bottom. The water will evaporate, leaving behind 100 percent fat. Skim the whey solids and save them to toss with fettuccine—the buttery flavour is an ideal complement to the eggy noodles, especially if you top the dish with grated Parmesan and freshly ground black pepper. Since the proteins can sneak through even the finest cheesecloth, take care to leave them undisturbed at the bottom of the pot. Carefully strain the rest of the butter through cheesecloth to yield clarified butter, which is an excellent medium for high-heat cooking. I love using clarified butter for frying potato cakes—with the solids removed, the butter doesn’t burn, and the potatoes take on all of that buttery goodness. Indian ghee is simply clarified butter that’s been cooked at a higher temperature, allowing the milk solids to brown and lend the finished fat a sweeter flavour. Smen, used to fluff Moroccan couscous, is clarified butter that has been buried underground for up to seven years to develop a cheesy taste.
Seed and Nut Oils
Almost every culture relies on a neutral-tasting seed or nut oil, because cooks don’t always want fat to flavour a dish. Peanut oil, expeller-pressed canola oil, and grapeseed oil are all good choices as cooking fats precisely because they don’t taste like anything. Since they have high smoke points, these oils can also withstand the high temperatures required to crisp and brown foods.
Spreading a rumour of tropical flavour to any dish where it’s used, coconut oil tastes particularly good in granola, or as the cooking fat for roasted root vegetables. Coconut oil is also the rare vegetable oil that’s solid at room temperature. Read on to learn how solid fat is a boon for making flaky pastries, and use coconut oil to make a pie crust the next time your lactose-intolerant friend comes over for dinner. (Cook’s tip: Both