Upon Salt, and the Fear of It

Home cooks are frightened of salt, and restaurant cooks are not, and this single difference accounts for a great deal of the gap between the two.

The professional salts at every stage: the water, the base, the sauce, the finish. The domestic cook salts once, timidly, at the end, then wonders why the dish tastes flat and reaches for cream or lemon or something else that is not the actual problem.

Salt does not make food salty until you have gone well past where you stopped. Before that, it makes food taste more like itself. It amplifies. A tomato with salt is more a tomato. A soup without it is a suggestion of soup.

Taste as you cook, which is the instruction everyone gives and nobody follows, and taste specifically for whether the flavors are arriving. If they seem to be behind glass, the answer is almost always salt.

And should you salt too far, you may add acid, or dairy, or bulk, and recover most of it. The under-seasoned dish, by contrast, arrives at the table finished and dull, and there is nothing to be done about it except pass the cellar and pretend not to watch.