Simon & Schuster Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking

The book is well written and have a lot of great tips along the way. I haven't tried any of the recipes yet, bought this primarily for the basic understanding of how dishes are affected by the titled elements.Delivery: 1* as it was packaged in a simple Amazon plastic bag for delivery. Hardcover book was scuffed up and looked used (it wasn't).

I bought this as a gift for my sister. I flipped through it extensively when it came in. I love it so much I am going to buy 2 more - one for a friend and one for me! I am a very visual person and the pictures in here are awesome. I love that they aren't photos, but rather hand-drawn-looking pics done in a watercolor way. I love the recipes that are full page visuals. There is lots of humor throughout. Make no mistake though, this is a cooking book, NOT a cookbook. It is teaching methods and how-to techniques. Yes, there is a section in the back third of the book with recipes to apply all you have learned. I love everything about this book. Can't wait to really dive into my copy. I highly recommend it.Note: Like many people, I rely heavily on Amazon reviews before purchasing anything, online or brick-and-mortar. Because of this, I am very honest when reviewing products. If I love something, you'll be the first to know. And if I hate it, I'll tell you that too. I try to be thorough to help people make informed decisions before buying new products. If you've found my review helpful, please click Helpful below. Thanks! :-)

I had great hopes for this book and generally love cooking and recipe books but this one leaves me cold.It does go into a lot of fairly tedious and obvious detail about the basics of using salt and which fats to use and which flavourings etc - all info that would be obvious from general knowledge or from just reading the recipe. Some recipes look interesting though and I will try them . It feels very geared to the US market too .not for me.

Inspiring and charming, really make you appreciate the beauty of food and cooking. Being from Italy and a very conservative cook, I disagree with some of the recipes (for example I NEVER mix onion and garlic in a tomato sauce) - for me the best tip in the book was adding salt at the soffritto level if making a sauce or a soup as it really makes a difference. There is no time quoted and the recipes have too many steps for me.

Disclaimer: I have not read the entire book yet, updates to follow ASAP.This is an amazing concept for a "cookbook", and I absolutely love the setup and flow of the text. It keeps me engaged by presenting information concisely, but manages not to be dry or overwhelming.I was so sad to find a pretty glaring scientific error at the very beginning of the book in the section entitled How Salt Works (subsection Cooking Foods in Salted Water, pg 35-37). I have a lot of sympathy for typos and grammatical errors as they don't typically effect my comprehension of the subject matter, but this was a more serious problem with the science being presented. Specifically, Ms. Nosrat has conflated salt (NaCl) with all minerals, and presents the idea that salting cooking water enough will prevent osmosis of nutrients and minerals from inside whatever is being cooked into the water. Le Chatelier's principle dictates that osmosis over a permeable barrier (like the skin/flesh of a green bean) occurs when there is an imbalance of a particular mineral or compound, ergo, the only thing adding NaCl potentially prevents is leeching NaCl, Na, and Cl. Other minerals and nutrients will freely pass out of your food and into the water as easily as they do in unsalted cooking water. Steaming and other cooking methods might mitigate this issue as exposure to water is limited, however, I expect these processes might yield similar results if food is cooked to the same extent. The way we account for this nutrient loss, in reality, is by eating more of a given cooked food than we would its raw counterpart, which is what cooking allows us to do by physically breaking foods down!I hope this is the only error of it's kind because it is quite confusing and misleading, but I'm not at all confident that I could discern a similar future error. I gave the book 3 stars simply because of my skepticism of the underlying science and the authors understanding. I guess we just have to take it with a grain of salt. ;)

A must have book for a serious cook. It covers topics that no other book I have come across covers. I just have over 200 cookbooks and I value the information in this one the most