Being a professional chef, a number of people have asked me, “How come the food I cook at home doesn’t taste like your food at the restaurant?” I would love to say “because you need to cook with the new line of ‘Sustainware’ copper cookware,” or “go out a get yourself that custom made ‘Sustain-o-matic’ stove with the 30,000 BTU gas burners.”
The answer, as with many things in life, is a bit more complicated. Yes, you need to procure fresh, high quality ingredients and learn proper techniques, but in my opinion, the real secret is to learn how to season. I agree with the food writer Bruce Cole when he said, “Nothing disappoints me like an under-seasoned dish, or more to the point, the lack of salt. Especially, if it’s a dish I’m paying for.”
What does it mean “to season?” It’s not the application of herbs and spices to food and it doesn’t involve anything called “Essence”. As Paul Bocuse, possibly the most famous French chef of the last half of the twentieth century and one of my mentors, said, “Seasoning is adding the correct amount of salt – a simple act that is most important in cooking; it requires great nuance from the taste buds, and much attention and sensitivity.”
Salt is generally added as a seasoning to food to enhance the flavor of other ingredients, not to give food a salty flavor. The amount of salt required is not a fixed ratio. A little may have no effect. A little more may start to liven up the taste. A further addition may make no additional improvement whatsoever. At some point, if still more is added, the dish will begin to taste salty.
I won’t bore you with talk of tongue receptors, taste cells and sensory nerve fibers, (see On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee, Scribner) but I will say, salt brightens food flavors and facilitates a balance between sweetness and acidity by decreasing the sourness of acid and increasing the sweetness of sugar. If you don’t believe me, try tasting your morning melon plain and then again after sprinkling a little salt on it.
Let’s be clear about something, salt isn’t bad for you – too much salt is bad for you. Processed foods can contain enormous amounts of salt; but if you eat fresh, natural foods and learn how to season them yourself, salt intake will not be a problem.
Try tasting different salts to understand their differences. Start with sea salts like fleur de sel, sel gris or celtic sea salt. Then move on to kosher salt and finally iodized table salt. See for yourself the amazing explosions of flavor and learn what chefs have always known – salt isn’t just salt.
Homer called salt a divine substance. Plato described it as dear to the gods. Salt was once considered so valuable that it served as currency. Today, we tend to take for granted a substance that was coveted, fought over, hoarded and taxed for thousands of years.
