The power of seasoning: Salt

I’m pretty sure that I’ve heard Tom Colicchio of Top Chef fame and Hubert Keller, one of America’s best and most famous chefs, both say that the single most important skill a chef needs to develop is how to use salt.  Michael Ruhlman’s Ruhlman’s Twenty, one of my favorite cookbooks, is dedicated to twenty key concepts all cooks need to know and the first chapter is about salt.  There are probably hundreds more citations I could provide that testify to the importance of salt in cooking.

Yet when I was first learning to cook, salt was considered one of those things that was bad for you.  As someone figuring out his way around a kitchen, the conventional wisdom was that sugar, salt, fats, and carbs would all kill you and the goodness of food was the unadorned glory of the ingredients.  So when I applied this conventional wisdom to a grilled chicken with steamed broccoli and roasted carrots, I found it somewhat frustrating when my true love complained that it “didn’t taste like anything.”   After a time, I came to realize that this meant I hadn’t seasoned the food properly and in particular, that more than anything else it was missing salt.

Seasoning doesn’t just mean salt but you need to start there.  Seasoning also means black pepper, acid (vinegar, lemon juice, wine, etc.), garlic, herbs, and spices – all the little things measured in pinches, teaspoons, and “to taste” that make the difference between a pile of tasteless dead green leaves, and a sparkling side dish of garlicky spinach with salt, pepper, sherry vinegar, and a touch of cayenne.  If done well, none of the seasonings blows its own trumpet (well, maybe the garlic) but the salt, pepper, vinegar, and cayenne bring out the native flavor of the spinach with a brightness and warmth that the spinach just can’t produce on its own.

Salt is the starting point for any seasoning and the first step in figuring out how to use salt properly is getting over whatever anti-salt prejudice you may have.  Americans eat far too much salt, not because they over-salt the food they cook, but because they eat too much prepared food that seriously over salted.  Forget about the bags of salty snacks we eat as a nation and just look at the ingredients of whatever frozen or prepackaged food you might be considering (or menu item from your favorite restaurant).  That’s where our national overindulgence with salt shows up, and there’s a reason for it – salt makes up for the universal blandness of packaged meals.

At home, there’s a tendency to go the other way and that’s a mistake, because using salt correctly will help make home prepared food far more delicious than anything you can buy in a box.  Now I’m not suggesting that the only taste sensation at the table should be salt.  In fact, if your food comes out tasting like salt, you’ve used too much.  The right application of salt should make the flavor of the ingredients sharper, more intense, more vibrant…more flavorful.

Here’s an experiment to try.  Steam or boil a bunch of broccoli.  When it’s hot and ready to eat, then dump it into a sauté pan.  Taste a floret and then sprinkle a small pinch of salt over the pan and mix everything up thoroughly.  Taste again – you may not notice a difference.  Repeat and soon you will taste a more vibrant broccoli.  There will be more “essence of broccoli” and instead of a tasteless mass of green gunk, the broccoli will actually taste good (seriously!).  Keep going, though, and you will start tasting salt, suggesting that you’ve gone too far.

Over the past few years I’ve come across several salting techniques that have become essential parts of my toolbox.  These include liberally salting meat before roasting, broiling, grilling, or sautéing – liberally to the point where you can actually see the salt glistening.  When pan-roasting or breading meat or fish, I add salt to the searing flour or breading.  When sautéing aromatics to build a soup base, I always include some salt and pepper – it helps bring out the flavor of the onions and other vegetables to add depth to the soup. Salting raw cucumbers, radishes, and zucchinis helps draw out excess water and increases the foundational flavor of these vegetables. Soaking meat in a brine adds juiciness and flavor.

One other dimension of salt you can explore are different kinds of salt. I always knew there was a difference between kosher and table salt, but I’ve also come across a wide array of different salts that can often make a large difference in taste and/or aesthetics.

The picture at the right is a salt cellar we keep on our table loaded with different salts.  The cellar itself was probably a gift my father received years ago from an Indian graduate student.  Today, it’s a table accent that allows us to feel delightfully anachronistic while also offering a variety of table salts. From left to right, there is a black, smoked salt that adds a smoky note to wherever its added.  There’s a seasoned salt from Bologna that incorporates oregano, rosemary, and other herbs – I use this often when roasting vegetables as well.  Finally there is a pink Himalayan salt that to my palate, tastes like ordinary salt. It is very cute, though, and there are a number of health related claims for this pink salt.  There are lots of other options, from prepackaged garlic salt to varieties I’ve concocted in my kitchen.

I’ll be talking about seasonings in some upcoming posts, but everything begins with salt.