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This week, in part two of my conversation with chef and food writer Nik Sharma, we dug into the science-based approach to cooking that informs his terrific new cookbook, Seasons: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food.\xa0

Given Nik\u2019s background in medical research, it made sense to learn that he thinks of his kitchen as just another lab. All of us, he pointed out, experiment in one way or another in the kitchen, even if we\u2019re just tweaking a family recipe. In his case, though, Nik explains that he \u201chad that training to do that\u2026one of the things I really like about recipes, [is that] the way they're written is exactly the way I would prepare my buffers in biochemistry or in genetics\u2026 We call them recipes, we pretty much use the terminology, everything is arranged by volume or when it has to go in.\u201d He even admits to using lab notebooks when he\u2019s developing a recipe. It\u2019s that analytical approach that he says allows him to make each iteration of a recipe better.

That said, Nik shied away from making Seasons read overly scientific. Instead, \u201cI kind of wanted to introduce myself to people,\u201d he said. \u201cAt the same time, I wanted to be really approachable, so someone who is intimated by being too science-y kind of understands that the simplest things that they're doing in the kitchen actually have a scientific basis to them.\u201d He talked about something as simple as bruising an herb like mint to extract essential oils and introduce them to a cocktail. \u201cYou know, you're breaking those cells to release those essential oils so then they get solubilized in whatever solvent they're in, so like water.\u201d

The moral of Nik\u2019s story? Even if science intimidates you, \u201cwhat you're doing in the kitchen is a form of science,\u201d and even when it goes awry, learning from your mistakes is half the fun. Nik believes, like Bob Dylan once sang, "There's no success like failure and failure's no success at all.\u201d When it comes to cooking, he told me "I want people to understand that when you walk in to the kitchen, you don't have to be compelled to succeed the first time, I think that's something very cultural where there is this impetus to push people for success, but I think we forget sometimes that it's okay to fail because it's your failures that you remember, you'll never remember what you succeeded at or why, but it's when you fail you start to remember what was wrong, how can you fix it, and it makes you much wiser."

I loved hearing what everyone's eating on Nik Sharma Day, but if I told you what it is, you might not listen to the whole episode. And that, serious eaters, would be a big mistake.

The full transcript for this episode can be found over here at Serious Eats:\xa0https://www.seriouseats.com/preview?record=445672