No Recipe, No Problem: Improvising In The Kitchen

Life Kit

NPR

Education, Business, Self-improvement, Kids & Family, Health & Fitness

4.5 • 4.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2021

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Following a recipe is easy, but improvising in the kitchen takes confidence — and a well-stocked pantry. Samin Nosrat and Hrishi Hirway of the podcast Home Cooking give their advice for whipping up great meals without a recipe.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Samine, Rishi. Hello. Hello. Hello. Welcome to Life Kit.
0:06.6	Hey everybody, Shireen, Madi Soul Maraji here, and my guests on this episode of NPR's Life Kit
0:12.7	are Samine Nasrat and Rishi Heerwe. They co-host the hit podcast series Home Cooking,
0:20.0	and we're going to talk about cooking without a recipe. Yeah, I kind of fundamentally hate recipes,
0:26.8	and I'm not a very good follower of rules. This is also why we get along because I'm the same way.
0:31.3	Samine, we know you, you've cooked professionally. You've got this best-selling cookbook,
0:36.6	soft-fat acid heat. Rishi. Who the heck are you? Yeah, who are you as a cook?
0:42.6	The fact is I have no qualifications to be on this show except for the fact that it was my idea,
0:47.1	and I talked Samine into it. Rishi is a musician and creator of the podcast and Netflix show
0:53.9	song-exploiter, so he's a big deal too, just not in the culinary sense. On their pod,
0:59.2	the two friends talked through listeners cooking questions, and the idea came to Rishi
1:04.0	after he messed up his mom's famous mango pie. It wasn't smooth and creamy like it was supposed to be.
1:10.4	It just wasn't right there with these little white flecks in the texture. So we called up Samine.
1:15.2	She's like, did you bring your ingredients to room temperature before you did this? Is that important?
1:20.1	Are you sure that could be it? And she was like, I'm 99% sure that's the reason why.
1:26.5	She was right, and I said Samine, this is a podcast. Samine Nasrat, Chef Detective.
1:33.1	A year and a half after Rishi made that initial pitch, we all found ourselves at home cooking a lot more
1:40.0	because you know, the global pandemic, and we needed help. And Samine Nasrat, Chef Detective,
1:46.9	became home cooking. The mango pie ended up becoming a column. One of my most popular columns ever.
1:52.8	Even though Samine never actually had my version of the mango pie, she had to go fancy it up for
1:58.5	the New York Times. Did you try her recipe? No, because I know what it's supposed to really be.
2:07.1	Good thing we're not talking about recipes. After the breaks, Samine and Rishi discussed tips for
	...

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