Ask the Food Fairy!

Fear of salt is almost as common as fear of fat. Neither is necessary, and neither makes for interesting food. Food researcher/writer Jeffrey Steingarten has written that salt is only a health hazard for the small group of people who have a sensitivity to it. In their case, it can drive up blood pressure; for most people, it is nothing more than a useful nutrient. (One study showed that people could lose their sensitivity to salt by exercising regularly – which is a great tool for all of us!)

Steingarten rhapsodized about the purpose of salt in cooking. There’s a reason that “salt of the earth” is a compliment; salt “is indispensable to good food and good cooking. It sharpens and defines the inherent flavors of foods and magnifies their natural aromas. Salt unites the diverse tastes in a dish, marries the sauce with the meat, and turns the pallid sweetness of vegetables into something complex and savory. Salt also deepens the color of most fruits and vegetables and keeps cauliflower white. Salt controls the ripening of cheese and improves its texture, strengthens the gluten in bread, and can preserve meat and fish, while transforming its texture. Cooked without salt, most dishes taste dull, lifeless, and lacking in complexity; in some, flavors are unbalanced and sweetness predominates.”

Quite a ringing testimonial. He also quotes American Episcopal priest and author Robert Farrar Capon as saying that “to undersalt deliberately in the name of dietary chic is to omit from the music of cookery the indispensable bass line over which all tastes and smells form their harmonies.”

Dietary chic? Isn’t too much sodium bad for you? Doesn’t it raise your blood pressure and cause heart attacks?

There’s a bit of a link to health crises in there, but not from salt itself: from the highly processed, prepackaged foods that are such a large part of our diets in industrialized parts of the world. They have a lot of salt (as well as a ton of sugar and chemicals, and few nutrients) and so people whose health is affected by the low-nutrient diet with lots of these overprocessed foods are also eating a lot of salt.

But it’s a case of the logical fallacy “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”: “(X happened) after this, therefore it was because of this.” Even eliminating all preprocessed foods and refusing to salt foods leaves us eating two or three times the recommended daily allotment of sodium, because – as Steingarten pointed out – salt is integral in the making of bread and cheese as well as inherent in a lot of vegetables, which take it in as they grow. If salt caused hypertension and heart attacks, we should all be having them. Instead, an estimated 20% of Americans have hypertension – that is, blood pressure at or above 95% of the expected range for them.

Studies have been done around the world, for decades, trying to establish a link between salt intake and blood pressure. The closest they have come is to show that if rats eat a diet that is 8% salt, their blood pressure will rise. To get the human equivalent, eat two cups of salt a day. (Seems to me that if we ate two cups of salt a day, high blood pressure would be the least of our worries.)

There is one real link in the human world. 8% or so of the population has a sensitivity to salt; in these people, salt does lead directly to high blood pressure.

If you have high blood pressure – easily measured at most drugstores – you might be sensitive to salt. You can start testing yourself by measuring your blood pressure, cutting down on salt as much as possible for a week, and measuring it again. For salt-sensitive people, salt means not just high blood pressure but bloating, puffiness, and shortness of breath. On the bright side, it’s pretty awesome to be able to control such a large part of your health by simply avoiding salt.

So for a few of us, salt does cause dietary harm. But for the other 92% of the population, it really is “dietary chic” to avoid it – meaning that we tend to hear that something is bad for some people and assume that it is best avoided by all. It’s another logical fallacy – a “guilty by association” sort of argument. As Steingarten put it, “It’s like making everybody wear eyeglasses just because a few of us need them.”

Second only to knowing that you can use salt comes knowing how to use it. Here are some kitchen-sciency tips:

* Salt your cooking water. Pasta water, water for vegetables, even water for beans – the whole “salt makes beans split and harden” thing is a myth. (In “Heat”, Bill Bryson’s lengthy memoir of working in Mario Batali’s famous kitchens, he mentions that one of their “secret ingredients” is making cooking water ocean-salty. I made mashed potatoes this way last week and they were incredible – almost perfectly salted while cooking, without that slightly bitter aftertaste that you can get from plain salt.)

* Salt before cooking, except fried foods and salads. Okay, salads don’t generally “cook”. But french fries and fresh leafy greens have one big thing in common: they’ll get wilted and soggy if you salt them too early. A little salt tossed on either one before serving adds crunchy zest to the dish. (Chopped fresh herbs also make a great, surprising, and flavorful twist to either one.) Salting meat before you cook, on the other hand, helps the surface caramelize, developing great flavors.

* Salt more if a dish will be served cold. Weird but apparently true. This begs for experimentation. Maybe I’ll go eat a cold and a hot dish of mashed potatoes side by side to see if one of them begs for more seasoning.

* Add salt when food tastes flat. Add both before and after cooking, because it has different effects in each case. If you wait till after you cook to add the salt, you’ll get a bland dish with a salty punch instead of the flavorfully blended ingredients you deserve. When it comes to salting the finished dish, taste it before you salt, because people have wildly different standards for what is too salty.

* Acidify! If you’ve already added salt and your food still tastes like it needs a little something, add an acid. Citrus juice, balsamic vinegar, zest, or a little tomato or tabasco sauce all work.

* Beware over-salting. This most commonly happens at the table, for the reasons given above. If you over-salt at any point and end up with that bitter or just too salty taste, try adding a little starch like rice, potatoes, or pasta; a little cream or vinegar; or a bit of sugar. (The flipside of this is that when cooking a soup with pasta, for example, you have to really amp up the flavors because the pasta will suck a lot of the flavor out of the soup!)

It seems obvious. I’ve heard it a million times before. But it didn’t sink in until I had seen ignoring this one simple thing sink half a dozen contestants on Top Chef:

Taste, taste, taste.

And its unspoken crucial counterpart: adjust, adjust, adjust! Like a lot of people, I have a habit of just making the food and hoping it turns out the way it’s supposed to. I even sling in spices by the handful without tasting and adjusting along the way.

But I finally got it. Tasting and changing the flavors as I go is the one step that practically guarantees that I’ll go from a good dish to a great one – or a flat, bland dish to one I want to eat over and over again.

It’s not enough to follow a recipe. Especially for me, because I rarely REALLY follow a recipe in the first place. I think I’m following it, but I don’t have parsley so I’m substituting cilantro, and I have all but one of the spices, and I decided I didn’t need walnuts either because I’m not that into them….

And I know I’m not alone, because whenever I hit up a recipe website that allows comments, I see that most of the commenters are doing the same thing. The standard positive comment on any recipe goes something like, “This is an amazing recipe! I just doubled the butter, used a little less cream, oh and I threw in some pork that I had to use up, and used stock instead of water, and served it on top of pasta, with some marinara on top. Incredible!”

Even if you follow a recipe exactly, your tastes may be different, your variety of spinach or rice different, your chicken larger or your pan smaller than those the author intended. The only solution is to taste as we go, using the recipe as a jumping-off point for our own delight.

So how do you take a recipe from ehh to excellent? You need a good balance of low, middle, and high notes. Another way of looking at this is to think of them as earthy (meat, mushrooms, soy sauce), subtle (vegetables, starches), pungent (spices, garlic, citrus), and amplifying (salt, cream, sugar) flavors. In Thai food, dishes are supposed to balance the five flavors of salty, sweet, spicy, sour, and bitter.

A Maui restaurant called Curry in a Hurry writes about the effects of these flavors on our bodies: “The voluptuous sweetness of vanilla custard is diametrically opposed to the bitter bite of lemon peel; one is soothing, the other is a shock. Your whole body reacts to the difference, which begins on your tongue but continues throughout your body.”

My mental shorthand is that a dish isn’t done until my mouth wants to taste it again and again. It has to generate that “mmm!” response.

You don’t necessarily have to include every kind of flavor in a dish to get that response, but I notice that I most often generate it by making sure a dish is properly salted, and sprinkling in some balsamic vinegar or citrus to brighten the flavors. Bitter, savory, and creamy flavors are often in my main ingredients already; if not (or if I need more) there’s always cream, olive oil, soy sauce, Bragg’s amino acids, chili flakes, olives, preserved lemons, and garlic – just for starters.

Apartment Therapy has a lot of good posts about adjusting seasoning, and some good suggestions about playing with taste:

* “Try each raw vegetable before throwing it in the pot so you see how the flavor and texture changes.
* “If you’re making a salad dressing, try it by itself first and then with a few ingredients from your salad.
* “If you’re adding spices to a soup or sauce, taste the sauce after you add each spice to see how it changes.
* “Taste everything at the beginning, middle, and end of cooking to see how things change.”

Now you too can laugh smugly when Tom Colicchio sternly demands, “Did you taste this before you sent it out?” and yet another cheftestant hangs their head and mumbles “No….”

Coming up in the next couple of weeks: a more in-depth look at salting food just right, and how to extract the maximum flavors from food.