Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
Salt
Season eggs cooked in the shell or fried in a pan just before serving.
Sprinkle salt on the surface of a piece of chicken and come back twenty minutes later. The distinct grains will no longer be visible: they will have started to dissolve, and the salt will have begun to move inward in an effort to create a chemical balance throughout the piece of meat.
Since diffusion is a slow process, seasoning in advance gives salt plenty of time to diffuse evenly throughout meat. This is how to season meat from within. A small amount of salt applied in advance will make a much bigger difference than a larger amount applied just before serving. In other words, time, not amount, is the crucial variable.
When in doubt, salt vegetables before you cook them.
When salting meat for cooking, any time is better than none, and more is better than some. Aim to season meat the day before cooking when possible. Failing that, do it in the morning, or even in the afternoon. Or make it the first thing you do when collecting ingredients for dinner. I like to do it as soon as I get home from the grocery store, so I don’t have to think about it again.
Most vegetables and fruit cells contain an undigestible carbohydrate called pectin . Soften the pectin through ripening or applying heat, and you will soften the fruit or vegetable, making it more tender, and often more delicious, to eat. Salt assists in weakening pectin.
Contrary to popular belief, salt does not toughen dried beans. In fact, by facilitating the weakening of pectins contained in their cell walls, salt affects beans in the same way it affects vegetables: it softens them.
Salt can take a while to dissolve in foods that are low in water, so add it to bread dough early.
Salt requires water to dissolve, so it won’t dissolve in pure fat. Luckily, most of the fats we use in the kitchen contain at least a little water—the small amounts of water in butter, lemon juice in a mayonnaise, or vinegar in a vinaigrette allow salt to slowly dissolve. Season these fats early and carefully, waiting for salt to dissolve and tasting before adding more.
15 minutes before cooking is sufficient. While mushrooms don’t contain pectin, they are about 80 percent water, which they will begin to release when salted. In order to preserve the texture of mushrooms, wait to add salt until they’ve just begun to brown in the pan.
Eggs absorb salt easily. As they do, it helps their proteins come together at a lower temperature, which decreases cooking time. The more quickly the proteins set, the less of a chance they will have to expel water they contain.
Water will also be visible on the surface of the chicken, the result of osmosis. While the salt moves in , the water will move out with the same goal: achieving chemical balance throughout the entire piece of meat.
Season your cooking water until it’s as salty as the sea (or more accurately, your memory of the sea. At 3.5 percent salinity, seawater is much, much saltier than anyone would ever want to use for cooking).
Think of a protein strand as a loose coil with water molecules bound to its outside surface. When an unseasoned protein is heated, it denatures : the coil tightens, squeezing water molecules out of the protein matrix, leaving the meat dry and tough if overcooked. By disrupting protein structure, salt prevents the coil from densely coagulating , or clumping, when heated, so more of the water molecules remain bound. The piece of meat remains moister, and you have a greater margin of error for overcooking.
Unlike meat, the delicate proteins of most fish and shellfish will degrade when salted too early, yielding a tough, dry, or chewy result. A brief salting—about fifteen minutes—is plenty to enhance flavor and maintain moisture in flaky fish.
In large enough quantities, for long enough periods of time, salt will dehydrate meat and cure it. If dinner plans change at the last minute, a salted chicken or a few pounds of short ribs will happily wait a day or two to be roasted or braised. But wait much longer than that, and they will dry out and develop a leathery texture and a cured, rather than fresh, flavor.
Add it early to ramen and udon doughs to strengthen its gluten, as this will result in the desired chewiness.
What is Salt?
A smaller amount of salt applied while cooking will often do more to improve flavor than a larger amount added at the table.
Salt and Flavor
Salt also reduces our perception of bitterness, with the secondary effect of emphasizing other flavors present in bitter dishes. Salt enhances sweetness while reducing bitterness in foods that are both bitter and sweet, such as bittersweet chocolate, coffee ice cream, or burnt caramels.
Used properly, salt minimizes bitterness, balances out sweetness, and enhances aromas, heightening our experience of eating.
There are two major producers of kosher salt: Diamond Crystal, which crystallizes in an open container of brine, yielding light and hollow flakes; and Morton’s, which is made by rolling cubic crystals of vacuum-evaporated salt into thin, dense flakes.
Diamond Crystal dissolves about twice as quickly as denser granulated salt, making it ideal for use in food that is cooked quickly.
Though we typically turn to sugar to balance out bitter flavors in a sauce or soup, it turns out that salt masks bitterness much more effectively than sugar.
Our taste buds can perceive five tastes: saltiness, sourness, bitterness, sweetness, and umami, or savoriness.
Flavor lies at the intersection of taste, aroma, and sensory elements including texture, sound, appearance, and temperature.
Because solar salts are harvested using low-yield, labor-intensive methods, they tend to be more expensive than refined sea salts. Most of what you’re paying for when you buy these salts is their delightful texture, so use them in ways that allow them to stand out. It’s a waste to season pasta water with fleur de sel or make tomato sauce with Maldon salt. Instead, sprinkle these salts atop delicate garden lettuces, rich caramel sauces, and chocolate chip cookies as they go into the oven so you can enjoy the way they crunch in your mouth.
Remarkably, salt affects both taste and flavor. Our taste buds can discern whether or not salt is present, and in what amount. But salt also unlocks many aromatic compounds in foods, making them more readily available as we eat.
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.
Salt has a greater impact on flavor than any other ingredient
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.
Sometimes it really is that subtle; just seven grains can mean the difference between satisfactory and sublime.
Diffusion Calculus
The three most valuable tools to encourage salt diffusion are time, temperature, and water. Before setting out to cook—as you choose an ingredient, or a cooking method—ask yourself, “How can I season this from within?” Then, use these variables to plot out how far in advance—and how much—to salt your food or cooking water.
Using Salt
Add more unseasoned ingredients to increase the total volume of the dish. More of anything that’s unsalted will work to balance out what’s salted, but bland, starchy, and rich things are particularly helpful in these circumstances, because just a small amount of them can help balance out a relatively large amount of food.
This grasp—not the hovering pinch I was used to—was the way to distribute salt, flour, or anything else granular, evenly and efficiently over a large surface. Practice the wrist wag in your own kitchen over a piece of parchment paper or on a cookie sheet. Get used to the way the salt falls from your hands; experience the illicit thrill of using so much of something that we’ve all been taught to fear.
Develop a sense for salt by tasting everything as you cook, early and often. Adopt the mantra Stir, taste, adjust
The instance of underseasoning that made the biggest impression on me, though, was the time a very senior cook undersalted his lasagna, which he had already cut into one hundred pieces for that night’s service. Since salting the top would do little to correct a mistake that had been made from within, as the intern I was given the task of gingerly lifting each of the twelve layers on each of the one hundred pieces of lasagna to sneak a few grains of salt into each one. After that, I’ve never underseasoned a lasagna.
Stir a shaving of salty Parmesan into a cup of soup to bump up its seasoning. Other foods don’t respond as well: no amount of salty sauce or cheese or meat could ever make up for bland pasta—the tongue will always know the water was nowhere nearly as salty as the sea.
Fat
I learned that where olive oil comes from has a huge effect on how it tastes—oil from hot, dry hilly areas is spicy, while oil from coastal climates with milder weather is correspondingly milder in flavor.
What is Fat?
Cooking fats can be heated to extreme temperatures, allowing the surface temperature of foods cooked in them to climb to astonishing heights as well.
For example, fat ground into a burger will render as it cooks, basting the meat from within and contributing to juciness. Butter inhibits the proteins in flour from developing, yielding tender and flaky textures in a pastry. Olive oil contributes both a light, grassy flavor and a rich texture to pesto.
While salt is a mineral, used primarily to enhance flavor, fat plays three distinct roles in the kitchen: as a main ingredient, as a cooking medium, and, like salt, as seasoning.
Fat and Flavor
Put simply, fat carries flavor. While certain fats have their own distinct flavors, any fat can convey aromas—and enhance flavors—to our palates that would otherwise go unnoticed. Fat coats the tongue, allowing various aromatic compounds to stay in contact with our taste buds for longer periods of time, intensifying and prolonging our experience of various flavors.
While it’s a challenge to explain what good olive oil tastes like, it’s fairly simple to describe a bad one—bitter, overwhelmingly spicy, dirty, rancid—all deal-breakers. Color has little to do with the quality of olive oil, and it offers no clues to whether an olive oil is rancid.
As with wine, taste, not price, is the best guide to choosing an olive oil.
When four-legged animals are fattened up with lots of calories, the cuts of meat from the center of the animal receive the most flavor benefits. Some fat ends up layered between groups of muscles, or directly under their skin, as in the cap of fat on the outside of a pork loin or prime rib. Some fat ends up within a muscle. This is the more prized kind of fat—what we call marbling when we look at a steak. As a well-marbled steak cooks, the fat will melt, making the meat juicier from within.
How Fat Works
Even when the aim is not to render fat to use as a cooking medium, this technique is crucial for transforming texture. Crisp bacon is the happy result of properly rendered fat. Fry at too high a temperature, and it’ll burn on the outside while remaining flabby. The key is to cook it slowly enough to allow the fat to render at the same rate the bacon browns.
Too much fat can also inhibit gluten networks from forming. By coating individual gluten strands, fat prevents them from sticking to one another and lengthening. This is where the term shortening comes from, because the gluten strands remain short instead of lengthening.
The best way to learn how to fix a broken mayonnaise is to break it once deliberately so you can figure out how to salvage it. Here’s the mind-bogglingly simple solution: get out a new bowl, but keep the same whisk. If you have only one bowl, scrape out the broken mayonnaise into a measuring cup with a spout or, failing that, a coffee cup, and clean the bowl. Bring the clean bowl to the sink and spoon in half a teaspoon or so of the hottest water you can coax from your tap. Using your oily, eggy whisk, start whisking the hot water maniacally, until it starts to foam. Then, treating the broken mayonnaise as if it were oil, add it drop by drop, continuing to whisk with the urgency of a swimmer escaping a shark.
When you combine wheat flour and liquid to make dough or batter, these proteins link up with one another into long chains. As dough is kneaded or batter is mixed, the chains develop into strong, extensive webs or the gluten network. The expansion of these webs is called gluten development , and it’s what makes a dough chewy and elastic.
Remember that butter, unlike oil, isn’t pure fat. It’s fat, water, and milk solids all held together in a state of emulsion.
The pan should be hot enough so that oil immediately ripples and shimmers when added. Various metals conduct heat at different rates, so there’s no set amount of time to recommend; instead, test the pan with a drop of water. If it crackles a little bit before evaporating—it doesn’t have to be a violent sound—then the pan is ready.
Once you have achieved crispness, do your best to retain it: do not cover or pile up crisp foods while they are still hot. They will continue to release steam.
The warmer, and hence softer, your butter, the more readily it will combine with the flour. Because fat inhibits gluten development, the more intimately the two ingredients combine, the more tender—not flaky—a dough will be.
Oil-in-water emulsions always work better when their ingredients are neither too hot or too cold. If you’re starting with an egg straight from the fridge, bring it up to room temperature before you start.
As oil is heated, it breaks down, leading to flavor degradation and the release of toxic chemicals. Food is also more likely to stick to a cold pan—another reason to preheat. But exceptions to the preheating rule exist: butter and garlic.
For food to become crisp, the water trapped in its cells must evaporate.
Seamus Heaney, once described butter as “coagulated sunlight,” which might be the most elegant and economical way to describe its special alchemy.
Oil efficiently coats flour proteins and prevents strong gluten networks from forming, much like soft butter does in shortbread. Gluten development requires water, so this oil barrier significantly inhibits gluten formation, leading to a tender, rather than chewy, texture. As an added bonus, less gluten means more water in the batter, and, ultimately, a moister cake.
But mayonnaise—and this is true of all emulsions—is always looking for an excuse to break , or separate into the hostile groups of oil and water once again.
Using Fat
As with salt, the best way to correct overly fatty food is to rebalance the dish, so the solutions are similar to when you oversalt: add more food to increase total volume, add more acid, water it down, or add starchy or dense ingredients. If possible, chill the dish, let the fat come to the surface and solidify, then skim it off.
Acid
acid is salt’s alter ego. While salt enhances flavors, acid balances them. By acting as a foil to salt, fat, sugar, and starch, acid makes itself indispensable to everything we cook.
Acid grants the palate relief, and makes food more appealing by offering contrast.
How Acid Works
Acid keeps vegetables and legumes tougher, longer. Anything containing cellulose or pectin, including legumes, fruits, and vegetables, will cook much more slowly in the presence of acid. While ten to fifteen minutes of simmering in water is enough to soften carrots into baby food, they’ll still be somewhat firm after an hour of stewing in red wine.
Acid dulls vibrant greens, so wait until the last possible moment to dress salads, mix vinegar into herb salsas, and squeeze lemon over cooked green vegetables such as spinach.
On the other hand, acid keeps reds and purples vivid.
When cooking beans or any legumes, including the chickpeas for hummus, a pinch of baking soda will gently nudge the bean water away from acidity toward alkalinity , ensuring tenderness.
Using Acid
Though MSG is chemically manufactured, there are also many natural sources of glutamates. Two foods most abundant in naturally occurring glutamates are Parmesan and tomato ketchup.
Play to each element’s strengths: use Salt to enhance, Fat to carry, and Acid to balance flavor.
Heat
As I traveled, I noticed that in every country, whether I was watching home cooks or professional chefs, and whether they were cooking over live fire or on a camp stove, the best cooks looked at the food, not the heat source
How Heat Works
Freezer burn and dehydration, then, are the result of water escaping from the inside of a food’s cells and then crystallizing or vaporizing on the surface of the food.