chorizo salami on board, hepatitis E linked to pork

It is so rare to hear fat talked about with any kind of affection. We strip it out of butter, cream and cheese or spritz it sparingly into saucepans from cans that look like air freshener. Anything to reduce fat, avoid fat or do away with it altogether. We do it so unthinkingly in modern cooking that we forget fat is, actually, delicious. That, as chef and food writer Samin Nosrat says in Salt Fat Acid Heat (Netflix UK, available now), it makes up one of the four core elements that make or break a dish. It can conjure up creamy textures or light flavours and say as much about our cultural identity as a national dish. The lard lovingly sloshed on, well, everything in the southern states of the US, the bubbling butter beloved by French cooks or, of course, the olive oil so synonymous with Italy.

That’s where the wonderfully enthusiastic Nosrat, who closes her eyes and sighs every time she eats and giggles infectiously with the locals in their native tongue, bases herself for this 45-minute ode to fat. She helps harvest Taggisaca olives - the “champagne of olive oils” - sipping on the final product from wine glasses. She joins Lorenzo the butcher and his fatty pigs, where Lorenzo swears that sommeliers gather to detect egg yolk, chocolate and walnuts in the air, before sampling thin layers of the milky fat raw. And at a visit to a parmigiano producer she helps craft ‘newborn’ wheels of cheese, which is then aged until crystals of calcium form.

Beautifully shot and passionately told, this is the story of fat told by a true foodie. And one that made the low-fat option look way less appealing.