Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Samin Nosrat
prepared, or restaurant food.
SALT AND FLAVOUR
James Beard, the father of modern American cookery, once asked, “Where would we be without salt?” I know the answer: adrift in a sea of blandness. If only one lesson from this book stays with you, let it be this: Salt has a greater impact on flavour than any other ingredient. Learn to use it well, and your food will taste good.
Salt’s relationship to flavour is multidimensional: it has its own particular taste, and it enhances the flavour of other ingredients. Used properly, salt minimises bitterness, balances out sweetness, and enhances aromas, heightening our experience of eating. Imagine taking a bite of a rich espresso brownie sprinkled with flaky sea salt. Besides providing the delightful experience of its delicate flakes crunching on the tongue, the salt minimises the espresso’s bitterness, intensifies the flavour of the chocolate, and offers a welcome savoury contrast to the sugar’s sweetness.
The Flavour of Salt
Salt should taste clean, free of any unpleasant flavours. Start by tasting it all on its own. Dip your finger into your salt cellar and let a few grains dissolve on your tongue. What do they taste like? Hopefully like the summer sea.
Types of Salt
Chefs all have their saline allegiances and will offer lengthy, impassioned arguments about why one variety of salt is superior to another. But honestly, what matters most is that you’re familiar with whichever salt you use. Is it coarse or fine? How long does it take to dissolve in a pot of boiling water? How much does it take to make a roast chicken taste just right? If you add your salt to a batch of cookie dough, will it melt away or make itself known, announcing its presence with a pleasant crunch?
Though all salt crystals are produced by evaporating water from saltwater brine, the pace of evaporation will determine the shape those crystals take. Rock salts are mined by flooding salt deposits with water and then rapidly evaporating that water from the resulting brine. Refined sea salt is similarly produced through the rapid evaporation of seawater. When formed as a result of rapid evaporation in a closed container, salt crystals become small, dense cubes—granular salt. On the other hand, salt produced slowly through solar methods at the surface of an open container will crystallise into light, hollow flakes. If water splashes into the hollow of the flake before it’s scooped off the surface, it will sink into the brine and transform into a large, dense crystal. This is unrefined, or minimally processed, sea salt.
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. This is why it makes sense to measure salts by weight rather than by volume. Better yet, learn to salt to taste.
Table Salt
Common table salt, or granular salt, is found in salt shakers everywhere. Shake some out into your palm and its distinct cubic shape—the result of crystallising in a closed vacuum chamber—will be apparent. Table salt is small and dense, making it very salty. Unless otherwise noted, iodine has been added to it.
I don’t recommend using iodised salt as it makes everything taste slightly metallic. In 1924, when iodine deficiency was a common health problem, Morton Salt began iodising salt to help prevent goitres, leading to great strides in public health. These days, we can get sufficient amounts of iodine from natural sources. As long as your diet is diverse and full of iodine-rich foods such as seafood and dairy, there’s no need to suffer through metallic-tasting food.
Table salt also often contains anticaking agents to prevent clumps from forming, or dextrose, a form of sugar, to stabilise the iodine. Though neither of these additives is harmful, there’s no reason to add them to your food. The only thing you should be adding to your food when you’re salting it is salt! This is one of the few times I’ll insist on anything in this book: if you’ve got only table salt at home, go get yourself some kosher or sea salt right away.
Kosher Salt
Kosher salt is traditionally used in koshering, the traditional Jewish process by which blood is removed from meat. Since kosher salt contains no additives, it tastes very pure. There are two major producers of kosher salt: Diamond Crystal, which crystallises 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. The difference in production methods yields two vastly different salts. While Diamond Crystal readily adheres to foods and crumbles easily, Morton’s is much denser, and almost twice as salty by volume. When following recipes requiring kosher salt, make sure to use the specified brand because these two salts are not interchangable! For this book, I tested all the recipes with Diamond Crystal, which comes in a red box and is widely available online but sea salt can be used as an alternative.
Diamond Crystal dissolves about twice as quickly as denser granulated salt, making it ideal for use in food that is cooked quickly. The more quickly salt dissolves, the less likely you are to overseason a dish, thinking it needs more salt when actually the salt just needs more time to dissolve. Because of its increased surface area, Diamond Crystal also sticks to foods better, rather than rebounding or falling off.
Inexpensive and rather forgiving, kosher salt is fantastic for everyday cooking. I prefer Diamond Crystal—even when I’ve accidentally salted dishes twice with this salt while enjoying a little too much my conversation, the company, or a glass of wine, the food has emerged unscathed.
Sea Salt
Sea salt is what’s left behind when seawater evaporates. Natural sea salts such as fleur de sel, sel gris, and Maldon are the less-refined result of gradual, monitored evaporation that can take up to five years. Taking the shape of delicate, distinctly aromatic flakes, fleur de sel—literally, “flower of salt”—is harvested from the surface of special sea salt beds in western France. When it falls below the surface of the water and attracts various sea minerals, including magnesium chloride and calcium sulphate, pure white fleur de sel takes on a greyish hue and becomes sel gris, or grey salt. Maldon salt crystals, formed much like fleur de sel, take on a hollow pyramid shape, and are often referred to as flaky salt.
Because natural salts are harvested using low-yield, labour-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.
The refined granular sea salt you might find at the grocery store is a bit different: it was produced by rapidly boiling down ocean water in a closed vacuum. Fine or medium-size crystals of this type are ideal for everyday cooking. Use this type of sea salt to season foods from within—in water for boiling vegetables or pasta, on roasts and stew meats, tossed with vegetables, and in doughs or batters.
Keep two kinds of salt on hand: an inexpensive one such as sea salt or kosher salt for everyday cooking, and a special salt with a pleasant texture, such as Maldon salt or fleur de sel, for garnishing food at the last moment. Whichever salts you use, become familiar with them—with how salty they are, and how they taste, feel, and affect the flavour of the foods to which you add them.
Salt’s Effect on Flavour
To understand how salt affects flavour, we must first understand what flavour is. Our taste buds can perceive five tastes: saltiness, sourness, bitterness, sweetness, and umami, or savouriness. On the other hand, aroma involves our noses sensing any of thousands of various chemical