The mandoline is your secret weapon (but with great power comes great responsibility)

While your Spiralizer may be languishing in a drawer and that avocado masher which seemed like such a great idea at the time was inevitably usurped by a fork, the mandoline is one tool worth investing in. It can shave fennel, julienne carrots and prep your veg in double quick time, but it can also slice your finger open if you’re not careful. “The Japanese mandoline is a really wonderful, inexpensive tool for shaving things,” says Samin. The key is to create a flat edge to work with, which often means cutting your vegetable in half. “I didn’t do that with a butternut squash once and had to go the emergency room and get 26 stitches.” Consider us warned. Use the finger guard and take it slowly if you’d rather be eating potato dauphinoise than spending the evening in A&E.

Not all salts are created equal

Salt is salt, right? So when a recipe insists on flaky sea salt but all we have to hand is Saxa, we can just substitute one for the other, can’t we? Wrong. Regular table salt can taste two to three times as salty as the flaked variety, so when a recipe asks for 1 teaspoon of salt, “it’s meaningless,” says Samin. Taste your salts and get to know how salty they are and adjust while you cook to achieve the perfect level of saltiness. “Apart from the crazy handful of salt I put in pasta water, my advice is not to use more salt, it’s to use salt better and to know when you’re adding it and in what form.” Salt your food nice and early and you’ll end up adding less at the table.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: what I learned at a cooking class with Samin Nosrat