SALT AND FLAVOR

James Beard, the father of modern American cookery, once asked, “Where would we be without salt?” I know the answer: adrift in a sea of blandness. If only one lesson from this book stays with you, let it be this: Salt has a greater impact on flavor than any other ingredient . Learn to use it well, and your food will taste good.

Salt’s relationship to flavor is multidimensional: it has its own particular taste, and it enhances the flavor of other ingredients. Used properly, salt minimizes bitterness, balances out sweetness, and enhances aromas, heightening our experience of eating. Imagine taking a bite of a rich espresso brownie sprinkled with flaky sea salt. Besides providing the delightful experience of its delicate flakes crunching on the tongue, the salt minimizes the espresso’s bitterness, intensifies the flavor of the chocolate, and offers a welcome savory contrast to the sugar’s sweetness.

The Flavor of Salt

Salt should taste clean, free of any unpleasant flavors. Start by tasting it all on its own. Dip your finger into your salt cellar and let a few grains dissolve on your tongue. What do they taste like? Hopefully like the summer sea.

Types of Salt

Chefs all have their saline allegiances and will offer lengthy, impassioned arguments about why one variety of salt is superior to another. But honestly, what matters most is that you’re familiar with whatever salt you use. Is it coarse or fine? How long does it take to dissolve in a pot of boiling water? How much does it take to make a roast chicken taste just right? If you add your salt to a batch of cookie dough, will it melt away or make itself known, announcing its presence with a pleasant crunch?

Though all salt crystals are produced by evaporating water from saltwater brine, the pace of evaporation will determine the shape those crystals take. Rock salts are mined by flooding salt deposits with water and then rapidly evaporating that water from the resulting brine. Refined sea salt is similarly produced through the rapid evaporation of seawater. When formed as a result of rapid evaporation in a closed container, salt crystals become small, dense cubes—granular salt. On the other hand, salt produced slowly through solar methods at the surface of an open container will crystallize into light, hollow flakes. If water splashes into the hollow of the flake before it’s scooped off the surface, it will sink into the brine and transform into a large, dense crystal. This is unrefined, or minimally processed, sea salt.

These varying shapes and sizes can make a big difference in your cooking. A tablespoon of fine salt will pack more tightly, and can be two or three times “saltier” than a tablespoon of coarser salt. This is why it makes sense to measure salts by weight rather than by volume. Better yet, learn to salt to taste.

Table Salt

Common table salt, or granular salt, is found in salt shakers everywhere. Shake some out into your palm and its distinct cubic shape—the result of crystallizing in a closed vacuum chamber—will be apparent. Table salt is small and dense, making it very salty. Unless otherwise noted, iodine has been added to it.

I don’t recommend using iodized salt as it makes everything taste slightly metallic. In 1924, when iodine deficiency was a common health problem, Morton Salt began iodizing salt to help prevent goiters, leading to great strides in public health. These days, we can get sufficient amounts of iodine from natural sources. As long as your diet is diverse and full of iodine-rich foods such as seafood and dairy, there’s no need to suffer through metallic-tasting food.

Table salt also often contains anticaking agents to prevent clumps from forming, or dextrose, a form of sugar, to stabilize the iodine. Though neither of these additives is harmful, there’s no reason to add them to your food. The only thing you should be adding to your food when you’re salting it is salt! This is one of the few times I’ll insist on anything in this book: if you’ve only got table salt at home, go get yourself some kosher or sea salt right away.

By Samin Nosrat in "Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking - Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat", Simon & Schuster, USA, 2017. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be be posted by Leopoldo Costa.