In 2018, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat aired on Netflix. If you haven’t seen the show yet, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a four-episode documentary miniseries hosted by Samin Nosrat, a chef and writer of a regular food column for The New York Times. The show takes a loving view of the process of making food, broken down into its simplest tenets: salt, fat, acid, and heat.
This is not only the title of the show, but it is also the philosophy, demonstrating how food is made, the people who make it, how the ingredients are sourced. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat shows every aspect of food creation.
In the first episode, themed around fat, Samin visits Italy and delights in showing off the gathering of different foody raw materials: pigs who are fattened to the perfect degree, olives collected in nets (and then pressed into fresh oil), cheese aged to sublime flavours, and the process of making pasta by hand and a fresh pesto sauce from start to finish. What’s interesting about the show is the way it interviews not the star chefs who eventually use those ingredients, but the ordinary people who make, gather, and collect these building blocks of food.
If these descriptions of food are making your mouth water, fair warning, the show will do far worse. If you love cheese, you will love this episode, and frankly, I wanted to drink straight olive oil after watching (a thought I, as you probably can relate, have never ever had before).
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a great show, and it fantastically explores food production and the manufacturing of food. Samin visits countries known for their cuisines like Italy and Japan, but Canada has many age-old culinary traditions as well, and you don’t have to look far to find them.
Food manufacturing in eastern Ontario has characters just as passionate as the Italian olive growers and butchers featured in the first episode of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. And if you like cheese, eastern Ontario is a particularly good place to be.
For example, just a little north of the village of Lancaster, you can find Glengarry Fine Cheese, a cheese shop that specializes in fine artisanal cheeses from both cow and goats milk. The passion and craftsmanship that goes into this eastern Ontario cheese are the exact same qualities that define the Italian cheesemakers in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.
If you’re looking for a career in food manufacturing that is full of passion and contributes to a culture of quality food making, you’ll find plenty of opportunities in eastern Ontario. In fact, the entire eastern Ontario manufacturing industry is full of passion and jobs you can take pride in.
Instead of moving to Europe, Asia, or South America, you can find great cuisine (and therefore a great life) just outside your doorstep.