How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S5, Ep6 How to Fail: Samin Nosrat

Episode Date: July 31, 2019

Oh, Samin Nosrat! Where do I start? With her ebullient personality and wildly infectious laugh? With her four-part Netflix show, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat where she travels the world eating freshly baked focaccia and Japanese seaweed? Or with the award-winning, bestselling cookbook of the same name, that revolutionised the way we thought about food?I don't know where to start. So let me just tell you that she is one of the bubbliest, most open and generous interviewees I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. She joins me to talks about growing up in San Diego, the child of Iranian parents, who was 'the only brown kid' in her school, and what this sense of outsidership taught her. She talks about overnight fame, and the weirdness that comes with that, as well as failing to write, what happens when your business fails and the one memorable time she burned the sauce for a dinner she was cooking for Hillary Clinton. Oh, and the story of how she got the description of osmosis wrong in the science part of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and was berated by critics. Also the way she talks about cassoulet will probably leave you feeling very hungry.Thank you so much Samin for coming on my podcast!*Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat is published by Canongate and is available to order here*I am thrilled to be taking How To Fail on tour around the UK in October, sharing my failure manifesto with the help of some very special guests. These events are not recorded as podcasts so the only way to be there is to book tickets via www.faneproductions.com/howtofail* The Sunday Times Top 5 bestselling book of the podcast, How To Fail: Everything I've Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong by Elizabeth Day, is out now and is available here.*How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Chris Sharp and Naomi Mantin and sponsored by Teatulia. To contact us, email [e-mail]* Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdaySamin Nosrat @ciaosaminChris Sharp @chrissharpaudioNaomi Mantin @naomimantinTeatulia @TeatuliaUK       Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist

Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. Samin Nosrat is a cook, writer and television presenter. She is also one of nature's enthusiasts. Anyone who has watched her four-part Netflix show, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, or who has read the award-winning book of the same name, will be familiar with Nosrat's ability to sweep you up in her infectious joy of and love for food. From tasting seaweed salt in Japan, to making fresh pesto with an Italian grandmother. Her idea is simple but revolutionary. It comes from Nosrat's belief that you can make any dish a success with just four elements, salt, fat, acid and heat. Nigella Lawson called the book a masterpiece and it was a New York Times bestseller.

Born in California to Iranian parents, Nosrat grew up in San Diego more interested in reading books and riding her bike than in cookery. But as a student at the University of Berkeley, she and her then-boyfriend saved up to eat at the legendary Shih Panis restaurant, where she tasted a chocolate souffle that changed her life. The experience was so transcendental, she decided there and then to pause her studies and begged a job as a waitress, eventually becoming a chef. The rest is history. These days, Nosrat is so beloved that it's difficult for her to walk down the street without being asked for restaurant recommendations by adoring fans.

I mourn the loss of anonymity, she said earlier this year. In every success, there is implicit sacrifice. Samin, welcome to the podcast. And what a beautiful quote, I feel, to lead us into this discussion. What a beautiful introduction. I'm almost in tears. Oh, thank you for saying that. Well, it's all you. That's all your life thus far. And what an incredible and moving journey. And I'm so glad that you're moved because you move me when you talk about your loves. And that Netflix documentary is just, it's unlike anything I've ever watched. And I think that that's because of you and how obvious your enthusiasm and your love is. But is it weird now that something that you probably thought of

as just an integral part of you has become the source of your fame? It's super weird. It's weird for, I mean, it's weird for a lot of reasons. I think mostly because I'm not an actor. I have no idea how to act. So I was just being myself on camera. It's like beamed into, you know, millions of homes around the world. And I'm so grateful that it's touched people and it

moves them and they've watched the show and that it's gotten them to cook. They also very much feel like they know me because they do know a part of me, but I don't know them. I'm still just getting used to what it's like to have the world know something about me. And I'm, I still feel the same. I'm still just the same person doing the same stuff. It just sort of made it onto a screen. I think that's the weird thing is like, when something's on a screen, something somehow shifts in how people think about it, even though I'm still just the same person. And did it feel very quick? Was there a morning that you woke up and suddenly you were recognized? I mean, the day after the show came out, I started getting recognized. Netflix is just,

the power of Netflix is so huge. You know, so almost half a billion people around the world watch it. I mean, it's so huge. And there's no way I could have understood or prepared for that. I mean, I had some small measure of it with the book and other things that I had done locally. And, you know, even coming to England, there were like amazing fans and Instagram and social media. But it's nothing like this. I mean, this is just beyond anything I'd ever imagined. What's interesting is I still am like, oh, well, I'm just still me. It's just one show.

But I have a few friends who are big, big, big time, like movie actors. And so I can't say. Name by name. And what's funny is that they're like, I'm sort of in denial about like being a quote unquote, a celebrity. And they're like, no, you're a celebrity. And I'm like, oh, no, no, no, I couldn't be. And they've actually said something that has're a celebrity. And I'm like, oh, no, no, no, I couldn't be. And they've actually said something that has made me feel a little bit better, which is that, you know, whereas they had sort of a little bit more time to get used to this over the course of, you know,

several movies coming out or whatever, mine really was in a lot of ways very, very sudden because there I was just plodding along being myself and cooking and doing the same stuff as always and then all of a sudden this transition so I'm in a lot of ways emotionally like struggling to catch up and it's going to take a while I think to catch up and to figure out how to be and who to be I mean hopefully I'll just keep being myself because in some ways I have to work to protect myself and protect my energy and just my mental health and my creativity. And also, it means so much to

me that my work touches people and it inspires them and it makes it really has reached so many people so deeply in their hearts. And that's amazing. And it's a privilege to have a platform that works like that. It's going to take me a while to figure out, you know, how to walk that tightrope. I think it's so interesting, because we talk a lot on this podcast about the fear of failure, but I actually think one can be fearful of success. I definitely am. Yeah. And I think that there, you know, what's, it's funny also, I'm, I was just talking to

my best friend a few weeks ago, because in some ways it feels like I'm universally beloved and that my work is universally beloved, which I know it's not true. Of course there are people who do, but very little negative feedback makes its way to me. And I also just know it's inevitable that at some point I will mess up. At some point I'll mess up publicly and I'll say something or do something wrong or that something I put out won't be warmly received. And I try to be really mindful of that because just like everyone in my life, including my therapist, will tell me not to take that personally, I have to work really hard to

not take the positive stuff personally either because neither of them are accurate response to who I am. They're all about some other thing. They're projections about some other thing. all about some other thing. They're projections about some other thing. And so I have to work really hard to not let my own like day-to-day happiness come from the response to my work, you know? I think that's so interesting. And you're so speaking my language here. It's like you're in my head. But I think a lot of that as well of caring what people think comes from a history of people pleasing. And you've spoken in the past so interestingly about this. And I wonder if you can tell me because you spoke in one interview about that being sort of a byproduct of your heritage. Absolutely. So my family's from Iran and also

I'm a woman. So I think those two things have really added up to create me into an incredible people pleaser. In Iranian culture, there's actually a form of etiquette called tarof, which is not really translatable into an English word. And it takes several different forms. One form is saying no when you really want to say yes, or saying yes when you really want to say no. So for example, let's say you're in your pajamas at home, you're already in bed and it was evening time and you're ready to go to bed early and somebody knocks on your door because they just decided to stop by. You would answer the door and they would say, oh, are you in bed? And you'd be like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. I was actually just going to put on

this like evening gown and make a tea. Please come in so I can host you for the next two hours. and make a tea, please come in so I can host you for the next two hours. So it's so much about performing generosity, you know, taking care of other people, making sure that like your family or your family name is never spoken ill of, and never doing anything to bring shame upon yourself or your family. And so those things are very, very deeply instilled in me. And part of what it does is it makes me assume that nobody's being honest with me. So because compliments must be given very freely, even if you don't necessarily mean them, then I just assume that no compliments that are given me are genuine. But I was trained that way and taught those things in a world that didn't function that way and so there was just a sort of fundamental disconnect between me and the environment in Southern

California that surrounded me and that's been really complicated because there was also a disconnect in the school that you went to in that you were visibly not like the majority of the other students and it's funny actually lately I've been like, have I over-narrativized my difference? Because I talk about it so much, about feeling like I don't belong. And then recently, after the show came out, one of my schoolmates put up a picture from our high school cross-country team,

of us all, after a run, we were all sitting in a hot tub. And it was literally 15 blonde, beautiful girls and me you know like and I was like okay no no I definitely looked different you know I definitely was different so I felt different I in some ways probably unintentionally was made to feel different other ways definitely intentionally was made to feel different I mean in second grade a kid called me a terrorist. There were countless ways in which I felt like I didn't fit in. And I think that that feeling of not fitting in combined with the feeling that it's my job to make everyone else feel comfortable and feel welcome and feel pleased and put on a good face and a happy face. I think those things sort of like created a people-pleasing monster out of me. You know, like if only I can sort of fool people into thinking that I belong here, maybe they will allow me to stay. I've got one more question before I actually get onto your

failures, because otherwise I'm just going to be in a, in a heady diversion, because I love chatting to you so much. But did that play itself out in your romantic relationships, the people-pleasing gene? Oh, totally. I mean, and also my general failure as like a person in romantic relationships. I mean, I've had very few. And I think a big part of it is because I worry. I'm like so deeply insecure in my heart. My longest one was the one with Johnny that led me into cooking. And a big part of that was just like me feeling like I was so lucky to be in this relationship.

I couldn't possibly like show any of my true self. so now I'm like so my true self but also actually this speaks really directly to what we're going to talk about which is I have a lot of professional resilience I for whatever reason am willing to try and fail and try again in any capacity professionally I mean part of it comes from just being a cook where you're constantly failing and you still have to get up tomorrow and make more food. But for whatever reason, I have not ever been as discouraged professionally as I am by like the fear of personal failure and the fear of personal vulnerability. So I'm still in intense therapy over that one.

Yeah, I totally get that. But I think it's so interesting that having only just met you, so this is probably quite an overreaching thing for me to say, but it feels as if you being your truest self has actually led you to your greatest success in terms of connection with other people because it feels that the Netflix show is an accurate representation of the lovely woman I'm meeting right now.

Thank you. And I think that that's such an important thing to realize, actually being honest about yourself and your own vulnerabilities and your weaknesses, your flaws is the best way. I mean, totally. And one of, I mean, this is the weirdest way to talk about it, but like one of the most healing things in a life that's been built up by a series of me trying to prove myself in one way or another to prove to others that I belong and that I'm good enough. And then trying really hard to unlearn the need to like, if I only show this part of myself, or whatever, one of the most powerful things that's ever happened for me is that this like massive corporation decided that me just as I am, when we were filming the show,

I weighed the most I've ever weighed. I probably had a lot of pimples. And when I met them, I don't really own any fancy clothes. My apartment was really little. There's nothing extraordinarily fancy or shiny about any sort of outward part of me. So when they bought the show, I don't know that I expected there to be any sort of like a any sort of directive that we would change things about me but I definitely had things I was nervous about oh I'm kind of messy in the kitchen oh I'm clumsy I trip on myself a lot and they said no no no we didn't buy this because we want to turn you into something like we bought this because you are exactly who you are and how you are and that you wear overalls, you know, you wear your Birkenstocks,

you're kind of messy or kind of silly. Like that's exactly who we want on camera. And so throughout the making of the show, when any time any of the sort of things that were so fundamentally about me were in danger of being stamped out, Netflix would sort of stand up and say, no, like we're not going to get rid of those things. You know, her curly hair is her. Like her Birkenstocks are her, her overalls are her,

her messiness is her, her crazy life filled with all these friends and whip is her. So that's what we want to convey to the world. And I mean, there were amazing people who stood up time and time again to defend that. But also, they were speaking on behalf of this like huge, huge, huge company, which isn't really a thing that I've ever seen or experienced in my life. And so having that behind me has been really powerful. That's given me a lot of confidence, a lot. So it's amazing. That's so beautiful. Yeah. Your first failure is about a book that you failed to write. So before your global bestseller, Salt for Acid Heat, you failed. Tell us about the book that you failed to write.

Yeah, there were actually two books. All I ever wanted was to write a book. That's all I've ever, I mean, since I was, I don't even know, because I grew up reading books. To me, books are the most important, special thing that I have my whole life. So all I could dream is the biggest dream was to one day write a book. And so when I started cooking, my thought was maybe one day I'll write a book about food. And I went to Italy to work with Benedetta Vitale, the chef. She's actually in the series with me and she was my mentor in Italy. I had applied for a Fulbright

grant, which are these grants that you can get in the US to go study in another country. And I didn't get it. And I was really heartbroken because I wanted to spend more time in Italy researching food making techniques that were in threat of disappearing because of like changing times. And Benedetta said, okay, well, I can't give you that grant, but come stay here. Just come back and work with me and help me write my next book. So I went back. I worked with her, but we were so disorganized. I worked probably for eight months and we outlined a whole thing. And I didn't know, I was 22. I didn't know what I was doing. She was busy running a restaurant. She had kids. And so that one sort of never came to fruition. I ran out of money living there. So I came back. And then a couple years later, there was a whole era in the late

2000s in the States, maybe it reached here too, of kind of like homesteading and pickling and canning and preserving. Yes, having chickens, all of that. And I spent a lot of time doing that kind of work in the restaurant that I worked at just to make use of everything and canning tomatoes and making pickles and all that kind of stuff. And so a friend of mine who I really loved, Michelle First, she's so wonderful, she got an opportunity. An agent came to her and said, I'd like you to write a book about preserving and jamming. Michelle came to me and she said, will you co-write this thing with me because you're the writer? And she knows a ton about preserving. And so we sort of set out about to do that.

And we met with the agent. And to me, like an agent, that's just a thing you hear about in the movies. You know, like an agent was talking to us and she took us out to lunch at an Italian restaurant. And then we talked to the publisher and they told us all the stuff that they wanted. Italian restaurant. And then we talked to the publisher and they told us all the stuff that they wanted. All I remember is that I felt, could I possibly have that much to say about pickles? And also that the agent was not that nice to either one of us or to particularly to me. I don't remember her being very nice. But I was like, oh yeah, I just have to prove myself. Because she made it very clear that we had to prove ourselves to her.

And so I think we worked on it for a while. I mean, there was no money. There wasn't going to be any money until we wrote a proposal and sold the book. So I did it in the meantime of my having a full-time job and doing catering on the weekends. And then eventually, I just remember I gave up. Like, I couldn't do it anymore. And I felt really bad. I told Michelle after a few months that I couldn't do it.

I felt like a failure. I felt like I had sort of wasted. Now it was the second time where I had come sort of even remotely close to having an opportunity to write a book. I had potentially burned this bridge with this agent forever, with this publisher forever. I was never going to write the next great pickling book. forever. I was never going to write the next great pickling book. And so it felt like making a world ending choice to decide to not do that. But in retrospect, you know, there's this great Steve Jobs commencement speech. I don't know if you've heard it. He gave it, I think at Stanford.

And like, he talks about these sort of choices that he made in his life and how looking back, he can connect the dots so clearly to how all of those things built into him making Apple. But at the time, they all just seemed like sort of either heartbreaks or failures or just like difficult decisions that weren't leading particularly anywhere. particularly anywhere. And to me, I, especially now as a person who labored for so long to make the book that I really meant to make, know a lot of things. I know one, making a book sucks. It's like the worst thing in the world. And if you don't deeply care about what you're writing about, there's not going to be any motivation, not for anyone like me, to get so deep in there every day and do this like torturous work. So because, I mean, I cared about pickles, but I didn't care about pickles like to the depths of my soul. So I don't know that I could have put myself through what I put myself through to make my own book. And also just understanding now strategically, like in what it is to be able for someone to look up all of the

things that I've put out in the world I'm really proud that the first thing that I put out was something original that I had to say and not just me doing you know something that some like publisher decided they needed a book on pickles and so and how old were you with this failure that one I was probably 25 yeah that's so interesting because a lot of people come on this podcast and say that they feel that they failed massively in their 20s in some way oh for sure I mean I failed many times massively in my 20s constantly I just remember feeling at the time like it was the heaviest decision that I'd ever made and that I was losing my only chance to do something that I wanted to do more than anything else. And the act of writing, so salt, fat, acid, heat, I read somewhere that you

rewrote four times because it's, as I say, it's a simple idea, but it's a very sophisticated one at the same time to like make it all fit. Must've been an exercise. Yeah. It's a huge puzzle. I mean, putting it, it was a, there were a lot of puzzle pieces. I felt like a beautiful mind a little bit. Like, I mean, I had so many post-it notes on my wall and trying to figure out how things would work and where did something I want to say belong and which chapter and what order it would go in. And then for me, a big part of it was figuring out the structure because obviously I knew there would be four parts, but I didn't know how to say. I kind of had two different things to say about every element. And some of them had to do with more like science. And some of them had to do more with how choices affect flavor and technique and stuff.

And it took me a really long time to figure out that I could just divide it into science and flavor. Because salt and fat and acid are tangible elements that you can buy at the store and you use to cook into your, you know, you add them physically into your food. Whereas heat is this invisible thing. So every time I'd figure something out for the first three, it never worked for the fourth one. And so it just took a really long time. It was like cracking a code. And I remember the first code I cracked was figuring out how to organize the textures of fat into five textures when I realized like everything I could think of that you use fat way anywhere else. And it was exactly what I needed to be able to convey this information because I wrote them in order and salt just in general is usually used in one form, which is salt crystals,

whereas fat comes in all these different forms. There's butters and oils and animal fats and mayonnaise and all these different things. And it took a lot of thinking to figure that one out. So I'm glad I did it and I'll never do it again. I'm so glad you did it because also I'm a salt fanatic. I add so much salt to my food. I mean, you were speaking to The Converted, that episode and that section of your book. But even as a salt fanatic, I had never taken the time to understand the different varieties and it was fascinating to me that some come from like mountains so it sounds so obvious

but some some of it comes from seaweed and there are different ways of actually processing it and that idea of going and tasting a different quality of salt was fascinating to me yeah thank you for that hard slog. Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? This is a time of great foreboding. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago set in motion a chain of gruesome events and sparked cult-like devotion across the world. I'm Matt Lewis. Join us as we unwrap the enigma and get to the heart of what really happened to Thomas Beckett by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit.

Peyton, it's happening. We're finally being recognized for being very online. It's about damn time. I mean, it's hard work being this opinionated. And correct. You're such a Leo's about damn time. I mean, it's hard work being this opinionated. And correct. You're such a Leo. All the time. So if you're looking for a home for your worst opinions,

if you're a hater first and a lover of pop culture second, then join me, Hunter Harris, and me, Peyton Dix, the host of Wondery's newest podcast, Let Me Say This. As beacons of truth and connoisseurs of mess, we are scouring the depths of the internet so you don't have to.

We're obviously talking about the biggest gossip and celebrity news. Like it's not a question of if Drake got his body done but when. You are so messy for that but we will be giving you the B-sides. Don't you worry. The deep cuts, the niche, the obscure. Like that one photo of Nicole Kidman after she finalized her divorce

from Tom Cruise. Mother. A mother to many. Follow Let Me Say This on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new episodes on to many. Follow Let Me Say This on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new episodes on YouTube or listen to Let Me Say This ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Talking of failures in your 20s, I'm assuming that your second failure happened in your 20s as well, which was when you were at Chopin East and you were cooking for none other than Hillary Clinton. Please tell us what happened. Well, I was too junior of a cook to even be put in the remote presence of Hillary Clinton.

But this is actually when she was still the first lady and we were going to host. And by we, I mean the restaurant, not me. I was not invited. There was going to be a dinner or a lunch. It was a luncheon for her in Golden Gate Park, which is the big park in the middle of San Francisco. And the theme was like barbecue style, sort of Southern food. And so that week was a very busy week at the restaurant. There was a lot going on. Then on top of everything else, there was this party that we were planning for, which was not small, if I remember correctly. For whatever dish that I was preparing that day, the day before the lunch for Mrs. Clinton, I was making pork sauce for my dish. And they said,

oh, well, we'll need more of that for this party tomorrow. So why don't you just make twice as much? So what's called pork sauce at Chez Panisse and other places is often called demi-glace or like a double stock. So you roast meat bones, very dark, and you like cook down, you know, some onions and garlic and celery until they're really caramelly. And you put everything in a huge stock pot and then you pour stock that's already been made over it and then that simmers all day long and becomes a double stock because now it's a stock that has twice as much bones twice as much flavor and stock's not inexpensive especially when it's homemade and it's and i'm talking like 10 gallons right like 40 liters of

stock and so that's quite a price yes a huge pot right so and then you strain that after six or seven hours and then you reduce it to the texture of like this sort of it becomes a silky sauce so they said well since you're making some and it since it takes so much space on the stove and in the ovens just make twice as much and that way we'll have what we need for tomorrow too and I said how do I do they said, oh, you just use twice the bones in twice as big of a pot and you just cook it the same amount of time. So I roasted the bones. I put everything in the pot to paint the picture here. Like this kitchen is beautiful. It's pristine. There's like copper sort of paneling on the walls. It's so beautiful. All the cooks are the most professional. This was the early 2000s. And

at the time the restaurant was winning every year. Best restaurant in America. These were some of the most skilled cooks in the world that I was working next to. And I was basically an unpaid apprentice. You know, I may have been paid at this point. I can't remember. But like, I was very, very, very, very low on the skill ladder. I'm just like taking my sauce making so seriously.

But a typical cook, like the sauce is sort of, they get that on the stove and then they go do 50,000 other things. So for me, this was a huge assignment and for everyone else, it would have just been like sort of the side job. So I get the thing on the stove and just like any stock, you have to bring it to a boil and then you reduce it to a simmer and it simmers all day. So I put like all of these bones, probably, you know, 40 pounds of bones in the pot, all of the stock, everything. And I crank it up and I'm like, okay, in my mind, I set sort of a mental timer. Like this is going to take a while for everything to come back to a boil.

So then I left the room to go do whatever else. I was probably butchering chickens or something downstairs in the butcher room. And after a while, like everyone sort of is like, something's burning, something's burning. And I'm like, oh yeah, I could smell it too. I was like, something's burning. Like, who's burning something? You know, and I was probably being very judgmental about somebody burning something because every time I went to go look at my pot, it still wasn't boiling. Like, how could a pot of liquid possibly burn in my mind and so it wasn't until probably 20 minutes later when like the whole kitchen had filled with like noxious burnt bone fumes that it even occurred to me that like I don't even think that I figured it out I think

one of the chefs figured out that my pot was burning and he came and got me and he's like your pot's burning your bones are burning and it still didn't make sense to me that something in a pot of liquid could burn you know i just was like what are you talking about and he was like you put too many bones in the pot because that's hot and they had all pushed down the weight of the bones and pushed them so far down and they were basically compressed against the bottom of the pot which was next to this very high flame. It was like burning and it smelled so bad. On the one hand, if I were going to waste like a whole pot of something, wasting bones that we have just like endless more bones is not the worst thing. I mean, the stock was not cheap, but I think it was also just knowing that I had like ruined this

opportunity to make this like special thing for this dinner the next day and that I had ruined Mrs. Clinton's pork sauce. But also the public nature of it. Yeah. It was the other chef you had to say. And also something like that, that everyone can smell and it fills the whole restaurant. Like it's so, so, so embarrassing. And that was a week, I remember that was a, like there was a one, one or two week span. And I think that was the third thing that I had ruined really, really, really obviously. And this is me trying to prove myself as a cook, you know? And so to me, like all of those failures in that kitchen and especially that span of sort of like, I can't remember what the other one was, but there was just this

time when I felt so bad. Like I went to work and I just kept ruining stuff and wasting time and money. And I remember feeling like, hey, why are they not firing me? You know, I mean, I knew that a lot of people there were not stoked to have me around and like any kind of waste is not a good thing in a restaurant. But also I think it speaks to the remarkable nature of that place and that kitchen, which is so committed to teaching and so committed to teaching that it will take mistakes, take broken stuff, take overly salted, under salted, burnt stuff, and always kind of try to find a way to fix it and turn it into something that we can serve.

And that doesn't always work. We had to throw my sauce away. We had to throw all of my failed rice away. But it's a great way. And that like, now that I'm a person who's run other kitchens and understood all of that stuff, I feel like it's all the more impressive to me because it is such an incredible commitment to the art of cooking way more than, oh, here's our bottom line. You know, this is what we have to get done today. Well, failure is in we have to get done today. Well, failure is in so many respects, data acquisition is a process of learning and you learn if you choose to learn from your failures, you learn that the next time you do the stock,

you don't put as many bones in and you can sort of apply that to life, I guess. But have you ever met Hillary Clinton since? No, no. If you met her, would you tell her? Definitely. And when you made it again, was it, did it go okay? Oh, I've never burned it since. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned at the very beginning about, this was your way of saying it, your failure to have romantic relationships. Is part of that because the amount of devotion required in a kitchen is so high in terms of hours? I wouldn't, I mean, I would have said that maybe 10 years ago, I would have been like, oh, it was because of work, but everybody else who I worked alongside managed to have a romantic life. So I don't think it has to do with other, I don't think that's the reason why. I think

I sort of turned my heart closed and poured myself into work I used it as an excuse but I don't think that's really why I think I just was afraid and I am still afraid yeah yeah what'm really afraid of rejection. Like, I really am afraid of, like, rejection on the most intimate level of, like, me as who I am, you know, with all of my problems, which are many. Yeah, that I'm not pretty enough or that I'm not anything enough, that I'm not, yeah. And also I have this whole other level

of like because I've had a lot of time to intellectualize this I think a big part of it is like I've been on my own and I'm so independent and I really love and treasure my independence that I'm now at this point I'm like would I even could I even possibly like share my life to that extent with somebody? How could I give up so much of this independence and decision-making power and all that kind of stuff? I mean, I have to believe that I would be able to. Or maybe in the right relationship you won't have to. Maybe there's a way not to.

Maybe there's a different way. I don't know. I also just haven't had a lot of great models in my life of healthy relationships. I mean, I have a lot of friends with healthy relationships and that's, that's a way, but, um, I have not like in my life had so many sort of men who have treated me really well. So I think part of it is I'm just gun shy. Yeah. Yeah. I want to date you and I'm straight. I mean, I want to date you and I'm straight. Oh, thank you. I think you're amazing. I wanted to ask you something.

And if it is too fast. Oh, I also thought of another failure. If you want a fourth one. Yes, please. But that one chronologically comes last. Okay, fine. So I'm about to ask you something that's deeply personal and might be extremely hurtful. In which case, don't answer it. It's all good.

Okay. But I read somewhere that you had an older sister who died when you were one. And I wondered, although obviously you were too young to remember it, but I wondered if that had had a deeper knock-on effect with your family life. I mean, it's definitely affected my entire family life in so many ways that I have had to sort of piece together backwards. So I don't remember her or remember the loss in and of itself. But I think it was sort of twofold in the way that it's affected me. what it did to my mom's emotional state, especially for her to lose one baby when she had another, like even more helpless one. And so I think probably subconsciously what happened to me was that I received the messages

that I sort of needed to be two kids worth of good or two kids worth of happy or two kids worth of like making my parents happy. And so that's in a lot of ways, like the burden that I've carried my whole life. And then I also think because in our family and because our culture is so much about appearances and stuff that we didn't really ever grieve it. And we certainly didn't grieve it in any sort of open way. And so we never talked about her. We never talked about that. And to the point where like i have two younger

brothers and i don't think they really even i mean they never even think about her or the effect that i mean they never knew her so they don't need to like think about her every day but the shadow of her loss absolutely sort of like colored our family life and i think in ways that i'm still trying to unravel in therapy and figure out so I don't know maybe my mom will hear this podcast probably not but but I don't I think even if I brought it up with her like she we would find a way to not talk about it no wonder you struggle with feeling enough yeah yeah I think that was a big sort of light bulb moment for me in therapy recently like and just in the last few years that I figured that part out of that like how could I possibly ever be enough and to be clear like my parents were mourning they were new immigrants

in a country that like did not want them and had just lost a child like they've gone through a lot my mom went through so much and it's not that I like blame anybody for putting that stuff on me that's just how the system worked right and that's just sort of like how the cards fell and what I took away from that experience. And that's what I sort of have carried with me. And also being the oldest child and being a girl in a family of boys and in a culture that definitely treats girls and boys differently, that has its own burdens. So yeah. What's your family make of your success yeah I mean my brothers who are younger than me they understand for sure like what it means and what Netflix means and having a show and being on TV and stuff my mom my mom

my mom gets sort of gets it I think you. You know, until very recently, until the last few years, like still every time I'd see my family, my aunts and uncles would be like, okay, but when are you going to go to graduate school and get a real job? Like, you know, I don't think there's, in immigrant families, like especially from Iran, like there's, you can be an engineer, a doctor, or a lawyer. Like there's, that's basically the three sort of things that allow a parent to be proud of their child. And I'm not any of those. And so

it was really sort of a confusing, I think it was just confusing for all of us. And to be fair, I don't think a lot of my American friends, parents really understand what I do or understood until recently. Because what I do is weird. Like most of my friends don't even understand like the business of being me. I'm still wrapping my mind around it. But definitely as recently as just like a couple years ago, I think I already had the deal to make my show. My uncle was trying to be helpful. And he was like, oh, I met this woman in San Diego.

She's Iranian. She's a blogger and has like a YouTube channel you should talk to her she wants to help you and I was like that's cool but like I have like an international book deal and a Netflix show like you know I mean it was just there was no way to translate what I was doing until they see it you know now they sort of see it I think and some of them get it a little more than others but I have had a long time ago I had to stop sort of seeking whatever it was that I wanted from them because I knew I wouldn't ever get in that wouldn't be the thing to satisfy me so oh yeah so many people live their lives seeking a parent's approval and that you're so right that you can't get your own validation from that but

talking about the business of being you your third failure is about an actual business and I love that you've chosen this because I think it's so important for people to understand that failure is part of running your own business and so it's about the pop-up general store tell us about that so the pop-up General Store came on the heels of, I had helped run a restaurant called Ecolo for five years. And it was my mentor's restaurant. And it was an Italian restaurant in Berkeley. And after a lot of years of financial struggle

and sort of a final death blow from the 2008 financial crash, the restaurant closed in 2009. So it wasn't ever my business, but I felt like it was. And I made a lot of pasta there. Like I was sort of known for my pasta and Chris, the chef and owner of the restaurant, his passion is making cured meats and sausages. So when Acollo closed, you know, we had a moderate following in the Bay area and I don't know, Chris and I would sort of hang out, we'd get coffee or whatever. And people would recognize us and come up to us and say,

oh, we just miss the food so much. We miss the pasta, we miss the sausages. And eventually I started wondering like, well, I guess we could just make the food and sell it directly to people. We don't need a restaurant to do that. In fact, we could cut out all of the parts that are complicated and expensive and just make the food.

So we started borrowing a friend's commercial kitchen. And this was 2009. It was winter of 2009. And the first thing we made was cassoulet. And it was Christmas time. And so we had people, I bought a whole bunch of ceramics, or the option was you could bring your own ceramic dish and we would fill it and then you would take it home. And we were kind of belabored over charging enough money you know to make any money so i don't think we made any money but we like made the duck confit from scratch and we made the pork belly and cooked the beans and made the sausages and assembled the whole thing and it takes three days to make a cassoulet so we made it took us three days and we did all this stuff i think i just posted on facebook and people like

maybe 25 people bought them which is a lot of cassoulet for two people to make and so we made them and as people do you know they posted their Christmas Eve dinner or their Christmas dinner of this cassoulet so all of a sudden like everyone in our community was posting cassoulet so then everybody else was like where'd you get that so then people wanted more and so a couple weeks later we did it again and more and more people wanted them so we turned it into a business, we did it again. And more and more people wanted them. So we turned it into a business. And we called it Pop-Up General Store. And I said, oh, we can make other stuff.

Like I can make my pasta. And Chris can make his sausages. So we used the mailing list from the restaurant that I think had like 1,200 names on it or something and started sending out emails. And people would sign up on a Google form, then pay for their thing, and then come pick it up. And it got really popular really, really quickly. And then Chris had to go. He actually had to come to England. He had a job, like a consulting job that he had scheduled. So I just kept running

the business. I got all of our other friends who had specialties. Like we had one friend who made the most beautiful English muffins. So she would come make English muffins and another person would make granola and another person made chocolates and candies and, you know, cookies and all different things. And at the time, I mean, it doesn't seem like that revolutionary of an idea. And I mean, it wasn't that revolutionary, but it was the kind of the first of its kind where we were, it was an artisan foods market that was sort of digital. So people went nuts for it. And it got so much press. And Chris was still in England. I mean, in the first six

months, it got so much press. I mean, we had international press, we had NPR there. We had a mailing list, you know, jumped from that original 1200 to like over 20,000 people. But we were just like six ladies and a dude making some English muffins and some pasta. Like there was no infrastructure for a business. There was no business plan. This was just something we had done because we missed cooking for people. And also for me because now I had been an employee in the food world for a long time, and it's really hard to make a living as an employee in the food world,

especially in the Bay Area, which is just a really expensive place to live. And so I was trying to support these like baby entrepreneurs. So it was really important for me to not take too much commission from anyone. And yet all of a sudden I had all these fees and had to pay the legal licenses and the insurance and all this stuff. And so in the end, I never made like any money from it, even though it was this massively successful thing. And then all of these sort of internet types and VCs were getting in touch because they wanted to buy the business and build it out and do this. And at the same time, like I would go to yoga class and sit there and I would just be like so miserable because I didn't care that much about this thing I just wanted to be a writer I had left restaurants because I wanted to write and figure out how to make a living as a writer and I was writing these blog posts for like yogajournal.com for $25 each and and from the outside it looked like the most

popular thing and people would read about it in the press and come from so far. Like I remember the day NPR came and they were doing a business story about it. And it was this day where because of some other press, over a thousand people had showed up, but we were just literally eight tables of people. We didn't have enough food for that many people. We didn't have the infrastructure for that. So I was in the corner crying when NPR was there, like with the girl with the microphone in my face. And it was just so much, it was too, too much. And yet there was pressure for me to grow because all of the vendors wanted it. And I was getting all of this positive sort of feedback after just having left a restaurant that had failed. And so that was really sort of enticing and attractive and felt really

good. But ultimately, I realized I didn't want to do this. I wanted to write a book, even if that was going to be really hard. I didn't want to do this. So I decided to end it at the two year point. I told everybody we were going to end it. I gave everyone two months notice. I said, these are going to be our last markets. Please come support the vendors. You know, and a lot of people were upset, but I felt really proud that I could sort of control the narrative of the thing. Because the other thing that I think people forget is that everything has an end, right? Like everything ends. And so you can either have the end that you want, you know, at the time that feels right and sort of go out high or a thing can like fizzle to a slow painful death and I'd just been at a restaurant that had fizzled to a slow painful death and I

didn't want to do that anymore I didn't want to do that again and so I was really happy to leave and it sounds to me both in that instance and the book deal for pickles that you were following instinct like you try you would try your hardest to make something work and then ultimately your instinct tells you where to go yes and for me a big part of this is like a big part of everything that i learned in therapy and everything is that i almost always have the answer inside i just spend a lot of time avoiding avoiding it or like trying to cover it up i just need to get better at list like my whole job as a human is to hone sort of my ability to listen to myself if i could figure that out man things

would be a lot better yeah wouldn't it and when you figure it out tell me how yeah i've got like one more question but i want you to tell me what the fourth failure oh yeah well this one's a true failure i feel like the other ones are like constructed story. This was like an actual thing that a huge mistake that I made. And I think the lesson from it is how I dealt with it afterward, which was, so in writing my book, there's a lot of science in it. And I was really nervous about that, because I'm not a scientist. And I had done my best to sort of translate the science for people who are going to read it at home to make it make sense in the context of cooking. And so I had used a lot of metaphors and sort of stories and language. And I hired a fact checker to check the science. And she checked a bunch of it and corrected a bunch of it. And then I sent the book out to a bunch of people who I hoped would write blurbs or support the book in other ways. And one of the people is like incredibly influential and most amazing person, Harold McGee, who wrote, he wrote literally the book on kitchen science. It's called On Food and Cooking. He's like my idol of kitchen science.

And I had hoped that he would write a blurb. So I sent him the book and months later or a while later, he wrote back and said, wow, what a nice book that you've written. And he had helped me periodically through the making of it. He knew I was doing it. He said, what a nice book that you've written, but under no circumstances would I ever put my name on this. There are so many science mistakes. And here's a partial list. And he sent all of these sort of examples. And he said, this is flat out wrong. This, like your wording is wrong. This is this. And the book was past the point where naturally I would be able to make these changes. And he was like, no one will take it seriously with these mistakes.

And I can see you've worked really hard. If I were you, I'd get someone to fix this right now. So first, I was like, incredibly embarrassed, like so embarrassed. And secondly, I was like, what am I going to do? I only have like, you know, I had a very short amount of time in which to sort of turn that around. So he suggested a couple people people in the end. And it was really hard for me to find somebody to help do that work. I did find an incredible woman who helped and she did a lot of it. And she told me basically, and he said the same thing. He's like, you've put so much pressure on yourself to write in the science-y voice, but you're not a scientist. And like, you can't take science and apply a creative license to it

because then it's not science anymore so a lot of this stuff you can just say what you think and not quote it as science so I was like okay and other stuff you just have to have fact-checked so I did and we had everything checked so by the end it ended up that three different people helped fact-check it you know I thought we caught everything and I felt a lot better but I was still by now very gun-shy and I knew I was like, something's going to go wrong. So the book comes out and on the very first day, this is making me feel so sick. On the very first day, I generally don't read reviews. I don't read like comments. It's just, I had to learn not to do that for my own mental health. An excerpt ran in the New York Times. And if you ever want somebody to send you some letters

pointing out your mistakes, just write something in the New York Times. And so an excerpt ran in the New York Times and then reviews started popping up on Amazon.com. So the excerpt in the Times said, I had written about maldon salt, actually, the British maldon salt and how it's sun-dried. And they were like, no, no, no, no, no, the British maldon salt and how it's sun dried. And they were like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You know, some competitor wrote and said, it's not solar, which is true. Factually, I made a mistake. And so here I was like trying to frantically call maldon and get a fact change for my book. And then on like the sixth Amazon review was like, it was actually a positive review. It said, oh yeah, a really nice book, but it got the definition of osmosis wrong,

which is actually a science thing that I do know. And it was on the very first page of science in the book, like page 29. And it's a huge mistake to get wrong. I had, in the sort of like whole mess of changing, doing everything, I had flipped. I had written the backwards of the definition of osmosis. The illustration also was a little bit incorrect because of me, because I had given Wendy the wrong thing to draw.

And so I think also because both Wendy and I didn't really understand that you can't take creative license. So she was like drawing what she thought osmosis looked like, whereas, you know, there had to be specific numbers of salt cells on either side of the wall. And also because osmosis is now colloquial as well so people say oh i got this knowledge by osmosis so there's like totally so it was just a you know it was a big thing to get wrong i got it wrong on the very first page of science and there it was like in the first 50 000 copies and so i was mortified and i knew i had to go to therapy and just be like I don't know what

else to do I can't beat myself up I did everything within my power I had three fact checkers like this mistake got through and we'll fix it in the next printing and in the end like for various stupid reasons it didn't get fixed for a couple other printings so I think there were like over 70,000 copies with the mistake in there and And I just remember feeling at first this responsibility, like I was going to teach people the wrong science. And I was like, you know what? If they're learning all their science in my book, like something's wrong, they need to go look it up.

And also I'm just a human. And I really knew that I had sort of processed it and come out on the other side. When a while later, by that time, we were deep into like several printings later, many months later, I got this email. And it was like on university letterhead from some like chemistry professor at some place. I don't remember where. And he was livid.

And he was like, I can't believe that this got through publication. Like what a scam. Like you're a sham artist. Like how could I possibly trust anything you've said if you can't get osmosis right? Which was my deepest fear, right? Like, how can anyone feel trust me if I get something wrong on the first page of science, right? But it was so extreme.

His letter was so extreme. And it was judging, you know, the process of publication and this, that, and the other. And so, you know, I wanted to write this really defensive email and be like, listen, like, I made a mistake. I had four fact checkers. Like, da, da, da, da, this this, that, and the other, like it's fixed in all the future printings. And I sort of thought about it for a day. And I thought about like, A, what kind of person takes the time to like find my email address, write a letter on this letterhead, be so mean about it, all this stuff. And I was like, how will I respond to this? And then finally I wrote him

back and I said listen thank you for your email I know I made a mistake and that's what it was it was a mistake I have done my best to rectify it and I seriously hope that the next time you make a mistake people are nicer to you and more compassionate to you than you've been to me about this. And then he actually wrote back and he was super contrite. But I just was like, I was like, come on, dude. It's a mistake. It's so important to show that you're human in the email response and be like, actually, you've written this to an individual.

I made a mistake. I've claimed it. I'm owning up to it. But the best thing is just not to feed into your default defensiveness, I think think when something yeah totally I mean and it's like I'm not some deeply evolved person like I have all of the dirt like horrible sort of jealous instincts or like really you know defensive instincts I have all of those those are always my first reaction to anything I think the work of therapy and the work

that I do is like how to like not act on those instincts. And of course I have those feelings. Of course I'm like deeply upset, hurt, jealous, mad, angry, whatever. But is that where I'm going to respond from? Or will I let that pass through me and then move to the next thing? Brilliant. My final question is a very, very, very important one. Which is, I'm sure you get asked all the time about your favorite dishes.

But I want to know what dish you samin would be if you were reincarnated as a plate of food oh that's a really good one um okay there's this salad that i love making that's so weird and wonderful and i can't remember why i started making it. I make it in the summertime and it has grilled corn and these peppers called Jimmy Nardello peppers, which are sometimes called like similar to like Italian frying peppers. They're long and sweet and sort of curvy. So you grill peppers, you grill corn. If you have scallions or onions, you can grill those too. And then it has all of the good juicy things of summertime, like cucumbers and too and then it has all of the good juicy things of summertime like cucumbers and avocado and like million different kinds of tomatoes all cut up and salted and super

juicy and then I really like coriander but you could also use basil or you could use both just tear a whole bunch of herbs in there I mix it up in a big bowl with my hands and you eat it with grilled bread or on top of steak or chicken and it's just like spicy and juicy and salty and like oily and tangy and creamy and has the grilled yumminess of the corn. And it's so good. And you are all of those things. Spicy, juicy, creamy, colorful. Oh, Samin Nosrat, I could talk to you and listen to your laugh forever and a day

i'm so glad you never wrote that book on pickling me too i'm so glad that you came on my podcast thank you so much for being the wonderful wonderful person you are oh you're awesome thank you if you enjoyed this episode of how to fail with elizabeth day i would so appreciate it if you could rate review and subscribe apparently it helps other people know that we exist