salt - improve food

salt [OPTION]... [DISH]

salt add --to taste DISH

salt add --early PROTEIN

Makes almost everything better. salt makes food taste more like itself: it suppresses bitterness, rounds out sweetness, and turns flat food into food someone meant to make.

Salt early and in stages. A pinch while the onions soften, a measured amount in the pasta water, a correction at the end. Food salted only at the end tastes salty on the outside and bland in the middle.

Professional kitchens measure salt by weight because grain sizes vary so much. A teaspoon of fine table salt weighs about 6 g. A teaspoon of flaky kosher salt can weigh half that. A recipe written for one will over or under season with the other.

--to-taste

The default. Add a little, stir, wait a moment, taste. Repeat. The only option that works in every kitchen.

--early

Dry-brine meat ahead of time: salt chicken or steak at least 40 minutes and up to 2 days before cooking, and leave it uncovered in the fridge. If you cannot wait 40 minutes, salt right before cooking instead. In between, the surface is wet and browns poorly.

--water

Season pasta water so it tastes pleasantly salty, roughly 1 tbsp kosher salt per 4 liters. The advice to make it as salty as the sea is wrong. Seawater is about 3.5 percent salt and would make the pasta inedible.

--finish

Flaky salt scattered on at the end, for crunch and small bright bursts. Cooking with it dissolves the expensive part.

--fine

Table salt. Dense and fast-dissolving. Good for baking and salt shakers. Use about half as much by volume as flaky kosher salt.

KOSHER_SALT

Brands of kosher salt differ in density by nearly a factor of two. When a recipe says kosher salt, start with less, then taste.

acid(1), taste(1), butter(1), maillard(7)

Difficult to undo. salt has no inverse operation.

Adding a raw potato to oversalted soup does not meaningfully remove salt. It adds potato. The working fix is dilution: more unsalted liquid or more of the other ingredients. A little acid or fat can also make it taste less salty.

Two cooks salting the same pot without talking to each other is a race condition.