Samin Nosrat: Do Dinner Parties Have Healing Powers?
The Sam Sanders Show
KCRW & Sam Sanders
4.9 • 709 Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
Samin Nosrat found a love for cooking through working in acclaimed restaurants and visiting kitchens around the world. She became a star after releasing her hit cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat – which also became a Netflix series. But to her surprise, all that success left her feeling empty.
Sam chatted with Samin in her ‘secret garden,’ surrounded by kumquats, limes and passion fruit. She broke down how hard it was to recover in the spotlight, and how she learned to embrace life’s pleasures. Plus, she dishes on the healing powers of dinner parties and gives advice for pulling them off yourself.
Samin Nosrat’s new book is called Good Things.
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The Sam Sanders Show is a production of KCRW and Sam Sanders Productions.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey listeners, it is the season of giving. |
| 0:03.0 | Get that warm, fuzzy feeling. |
| 0:05.1 | Make a donation, pick out some cozy KCRW merch, or send meals to local food banks. |
| 0:11.1 | Donate now at kCRW.com slash give. |
| 0:28.6 | Hey, y'all, it's the Sam Sanders show from KCRW here with big questions and hot takes on the pop culture we love. |
| 0:33.9 | Thank you so much for listening. |
| 0:36.3 | This week, food. |
| 0:39.7 | I am so, so honored to share a chat I had recently with my favorite celebrity chef, Samin Nasrat. She's out with a new cookbook called Good Things. |
| 0:47.0 | But you may know Samin from her earlier cookbook. Flashback with me for a second to 2018. |
| 0:53.5 | I consider this the golden age of Netflix, |
| 0:56.6 | and perhaps the most beautiful show from that era on Netflix, |
| 1:00.1 | was the series based all on Samin's cookbook. |
| 1:03.5 | The book and the show are called Salt, Fat, Acid Heat. |
| 1:07.6 | In this series, Samin took viewers all over the world |
| 1:10.5 | to learn the basics of good cooking. |
| 1:12.6 | Fat adds its own unique flavor to a dish, and it can amplify the other flavors in a recipe. |
| 1:20.6 | Simply put, fat makes food delicious. |
| 1:25.6 | And one of the most important things any cook can learn is how to harness its magic. |
| 1:32.6 | This show was wildly popular. In the cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid Heat, it sold more than a million copies. |
| 1:40.6 | You would think that everything after that would be smooth sailing for Samin, but not actually. |
| 1:46.0 | After that crazy success, Samin had years of writers' block, and she struggled with clinical depression. |
| 1:52.1 | She even stopped cooking for a while. |
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