My mother and I haven’t had a real argument since the day I pierced my nose. But salt is a brand new battleground.
As a nurse practitioner committed to keeping her family healthy, my mother is very careful about how much salt she cooks with.
“This salt contains one-third less sodium,” she told me recently, when I was cooking at her house.
How is that even a THING?
I’m not here to pick a fight with the entire nation of health professionals. If your doctor has said you should watch your sodium intake, pump the breaks on the salt. But there are a lot of people out there who habitually underseason their food. Maybe they don’t know how or are afraid of oversalting. Maybe they believe that properly seasoning their food will give them high blood pressure.
Let’s get one thing straight: consuming lots processed foods laden with preservatives will give you high blood pressure. But if you’re cooking with fresh, whole ingredients, you can absolutely season without fear. And once you understand how salt functions and how you can use it for maximum effect, it will revolutionize your cooking.
Why Does Salt Matter?
Salt enhances our ability to taste.
This is an actual chemical fact: sodium chloride actually heightens our taste receptors so that we can experience other tastes better. This is why a little salt sprinkled on strawberries actually makes them taste sweeter. If you don’t salt your food adequately, it will taste flat, not because it’s not salty enough, but because the absence of salt prevents the other flavors from popping as much as they could.
Salt elevates our cooking.
Salt helps us cook better. Applying salt to cooking vegetables draws out the moisture from them, allowing their flavors to concentrate and become more pronounced during the cooking process. This is why you should always salt vegetables and aromatics (such as onions) when you begin sautéing them.
Salt can also help tenderize meat, when it is used as part of a brine or a dry rub, as it begins to break down the fibers in the protein. This is why many recipes for large cuts of meat ask for the meat to be salted before cooking (sometimes hours before).
Finally, adding salt to a cooking liquid (usually water) creates a nutrient-rich environment for the food you’re cooking, so that the nutrients won’t leach out of the product. This is why it’s so important to salt your vegetable blanching water. In several of these cases, most of the salt used is not actually absorbed into the food, but rather used as a cooking medium. It will be drained away with the water or the brine. Don’t panic and assume that every grain of salt used in the cooking process will end up in your body.
Salt preserves food.
Before the days of refrigerators and freezers, people literally buried meat in salt to keep it from going bad over long periods of time. Sometimes they dissolved that salt into a solution, so that the food would stay moist, rather than drying it out. In the case of some meats, the meats were actually cured (thus cooked) in the salt. We still use many of these techniques today, and they can be used to create delicious food! Here again, the salt is part of the cooking method, not just an ingredient. Not all the salt used to cure a piece of meat will end up infused into that meat. That’s scientifically impossible.
So salt is important. It makes our food taste better and it raises our cooking game. But how do we harness it to its full potential?
How do We Salt Appropriately?
Season throughout the cooking process.
Salt is a cooking tool, to be used throughout all the cooking stages as it is appropriate. For instance, if you are beginning a curry by sweating onions in oil, you should salt those onions to draw out their water as they cook. If you are par-cooking lentils before adding them into the curry, you should add salt to the water so the lentils are seasoned as they cook. Properly seasoned food is the result of seasoning the ingredients while they cook, not just throwing in a certain amount of salt at one time during the cooking. Often, you will be able to achieve better seasoning with less salt by cooking this way.
Taste as you go.
Check to make sure your food is appropriately seasoned as you cook. Trust your taste buds. No amount of salt added at the table is going to make up for food that is improperly seasoned as it was cooking.
Use the right salt for the job.
There are many different types of salt available with their own distinct properties and functions. Not every salt works well for every application. Below are the three most common salts and some tips for using them well.
Table salt
This is the densest of all the salts, and can be found in most salt shakers around the country. I personally prefer to keep it at the table and avoid using it in my cooking. All my recipes are made using Kosher salt (see below).
Kosher salt
This is my favorite type of salt to use in cooking. It is coarser than table salt, which makes it easier to pick up in my fingertips, but finer than flaky sea salt, so it dissolves easier. It’s important to note that the two most common brands—Diamond Crystal and Morton’s—have different densities and therefore different levels of saltiness by volume, so you cannot necessarily swap them out when using strict volumetric measurements. If you’re making a recipe that specifies one or the other, try to stick to the brand called for. If you want to sub them out, keep in mind that Morton’s is about twice as salty as Diamond Crystal, and adjust accordingly. (I typically use Diamond Crystal in the recipes I post to the blog).
Sea Salt
This is the coarsest grind. The flakier types, such as Maldon or Sel Gris, are produced through processes that require more intensive labor for a lower volume, so they are generally more expensive. Their texture is more interesting though, so I love it for finishing dishes, particularly meats and chocolate desserts.
The ability to season properly is not something that you can learn in a moment. I still don’t do the greatest job at it. I’m not an expert. But I do know this:
The way to improve is to start tasting.
Taste and season at every stage in your cooking. Soon your food will come alive and start to popping. When it pops, that’s when you know you’ve got that salt level just right.
Originally posted January 25, 2020.
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