4 ms·
Interesting personal anecdote on salt. After our marriage, my wife's mother shared her precious cookbook with her and asked her to copy/translate it. My wife d
by gjkood 10y ago
Interesting personal anecdote on salt.
After our marriage, my wife's mother shared her precious cookbook with her and asked her to copy/translate it. My wife did so and she used that as the basis of her cooking since.
There was one important component of the recipes that my mother in law had neglected to add since it was second nature to her.
"Add salt to taste."
I was always confounded whenever I tasted the food that my wife made from one of those recipes and when I tasted the exact same food when my mother in law made it.
It was only a while later that we found out what the cause of the inconsistency was.
- thedudemabry 10y agoThis was one of the biggest level-ups in my own personal cooking, realizing that salting (and to a much lesser extent peppering) to taste makes or breaks the dish. Most home cooks I know will skip that step out of ignorance or health concerns, not realizing that it will make the dish taste awful. Why do you enjoy simple restaurant dishes (including salads) much more than your home-cooked equivalents? Salt.
- hinkley 10y agoI bought some truffle salt a couple years ago and now half the time I'm using flavored salts of one variety or another. When I dry rosemary I put all the broken bits and stems in a jar with some salt and leave it for a while, then I separate them before use. I'm curious what would happen if I just put a bunch of fresh sprigs in a jar to dry them, but I would have to start gifting it to people because damn that's a lot of salt.
- zhte415 10y agoAnd butter. Don't discount the nice creamy dish is complimented with a knob of butter near the end.
- beat 10y agoLast summer, my daughter was working as a prep/line cook in a sort of odd highbrow/lowbrow place. She is extremely sensitive to chili peppers - so much so that it's effectively an allergy for her. So for some dishes where chilis and "taco seasoning" (made in house) were "to taste", she'd have others taste-test for her. At one point, the head chef asked why she did that. She told him it was because "to taste", for her, would mean no chili peppers or taco seasoning in the dish!
- ska 10y agoThat is an implicit step in the vast majority of recipes, so it's not surprising she missed it. Outside of some baking, you can rarely measure salt anyway, but you should always be considering it.