Home Cooking · Samin Nosrat & Hrishikesh Hirway

White Fra-chili-ty (with Sam Sanders)

July 8, 2020·1 hr 7 min·5 clips

Samin reveals how to make salty beet soda with just beets, water, and salt—and why mold isn't a deal-breaker.

1. Home Cooking episode five features Samin Nosrat and Rishi Dhingra in a later-in-pandemic installment, joined by Sam Sanders of NPR's It's Been a Minute podcast. 2. Samin Nosrat is the author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat; Rishi Dhingra created Song Exploder; Sam Sanders hosts It's Been a Minute on NPR. 3. The episode's framing question is how to cook delicious food during a hot summer without turning on the oven or overheating the kitchen. 4. Samin opens with her pandemic cooking evolution toward fermentation: curtido (El Salvadoran pickled cabbage with carrots, jalapeño, and oregano) and beet kvass (Eastern European fermented beet soda made from sliced beets, water, and salt with optional ginger and lemon zest). 5. She explains the practical challenge of keeping cabbage submerged under brine—solved by laying plastic wrap on top and weighing it with a Ziploc bag filled with water. 6. Her weekly fridge-clearing frittata uses slow-caramelized greens processed in a food processor for 45 minutes, producing a jammy texture she says 'is completely different than what anybody associates with a greens frittata.' 7. Rishi describes making pasta weekly from Few For All, an LA organization of recently unemployed restaurant workers who sell homemade pasta and donate a pound to the LA Food Bank for every pound sold. 8. Samin's lemon tree, named Dame Maggie Smith, is so prolific she can hear lemons dropping at night, driving her lemon-garlic tuna pasta recipe and Melissa Clark's lemon coconut snacking cake. 9. The 'it's too hot to cook' theme prompts Samin to recommend cold soba noodles with a Diana Kennedy–inspired Mexican flavor combination she used to make at Chez Panisse: corn, zucchini, basil, serrano peppers, with the soba noodles as a starch surprise underneath. 10. Samin covers three gazpacho variants: traditional tomato gazpacho with cherry tomatoes and optional jalapeño; white gazpacho from blanched almonds, bread, water, olive oil, garlic, and cucumber topped with green grapes; and granita (frozen fruit purée scraped with a fork every few hours), which she notes is traditionally eaten in Sicily as summer breakfast on brioche with whipped cream. 11. A tangent through Iranian doogh (fizzy salted yogurt drink) and mastokhiar (cucumber yogurt) includes Rishi's fake trivia that Neil Patrick Harris had a show called 'Doogh Hazel,' which Samin believes entirely before catching herself. 12. Listener Mike from Charleston asks for cold, simple, non-red-meat foods for his pregnant wife's nausea, and Samin recommends Parsi deviled eggs from Niloufer Ichaporia King's cookbook My Bombay Kitchen—egg yolks mashed with honey, lime, cilantro, serrano, and mayonnaise—and Japanese somen noodles in thin dipping sauce, which she describes as one of the most memorable cold meals of her life. 13. Samin recommends hand-rolled sushi rice in nori sheets as a flavor-mild, cold delivery system for grilled chicken or roast vegetables. 14. Listener Cody's anti-tomato girlfriend prompts Samin to argue philosophically that what makes chili a chili is the chili spices—not beans (chili con carne has none), not tomatoes (white chili has none), and not meat (vegetarian chili has none)—and to recommend white chili with cannellini beans. 15. Both hosts agree the most exciting part of chili is the toppings—avocado, cheese, hot sauce, cilantro, onions—eaten with cornbread or tortilla chips. 16. The Sporkful host Dan Pashman asks whether olive pits actually improve flavor or whether this is unfounded culinary snobbery; Samin explains that pitting exposes flesh to oxidation, requiring more brine additives, making unpitted olives genuinely less processed—while also confessing she eats entire cans of pitted black olives for dinner. 17. Rishi Googles the question mid-show, finds immediate confirmation that pits preserve flavor, and delivers the punchline: 'didn't that James Beard Award teach you how to use Google?' 18. The episode's pasta segment covers hand-rolling pasta without a machine: one cup flour, one egg, one yolk, rested 30 minutes, rolled with a wine bottle in a pinch, and Samin's advice to err on the side of a wetter dough for hand-rolling. 19. Fans of practical summer cooking, no-heat recipes, fermentation basics, and conversational food philosophy will find this episode immediately useful. 20. Listeners looking for structure, single-topic depth, or formal recipe instruction rather than wide-ranging Q&A will find the episode's format loose.

As heard by us

Warm, flexible cooking talk for making something decent from what is already in the kitchen.

Home Cooking comes back with the comfort of a friend calling from the next room, half laughing, half admitting that time has gone strange. Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway start from that missing feeling of having something to look forward to, then settle into the show's easy…

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When you want friendly company while figuring out what to cook with what you've got at home.

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