Salt has been essential to cooking — and the human existence — for thousands of years. Our bodies can’t function without it. Our food is often tastier with it.
Because salt is relatively inexpensive and universal, it’s easy to take this kitchen staple for granted. Your eyes may glaze over those instructions to season to taste, or you may decide to leave it out of a recipe where it doesn’t seem important.
That would be an oversight, because salt is actually important in more ways than you may realize. Sure, it’s crucial for flavor. But salt plays key roles in ensuring your food has the right texture and even color, among other things.
And yet its very ubiquity is part of what concerns many home cooks attentive to their health. We know that consuming too much sodium, an element in salt, increases the chances of high blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart disease. For many of us, though, there’s an achievable middle ground between using no salt and pouring it into our food with reckless abandon.
Part of getting there is understanding what salt does and does not do in cooking. Unfortunately, plenty of myths and misconceptions about this staple are often repeated as conventional wisdom. So, as I’ve done with persistent baking myths, I’m tackling some of the biggest ones to sort salt fact from fiction, from both food and health perspectives.
Salt only makes food taste salty.
Not only is salt one of the five tastes, it also impacts others. Salt reduces bitterness. It enhances aromas, which play a big role in our perception of flavor aside from just taste. It can also add texture.
Salt performs other functions that don’t have to do with flavor. When added to boiling water, it keeps pasta from sticking to itself by “reducing the gelatinlike layer that forms on the surface of pasta as it cooks,” Nik Sharma writes in “The Flavor Equation.” For blanching vegetables, “Properly seasoned cooking water encourages food to retain its nutrients,” Samin Nosrat says in “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.”
What else can salt do? It can ward off rubbery scrambled eggs by buffering the proteins from bonding too tightly and squeezing out water. In brining, whether wet or dry, salt helps meat retain moisture; in the case of a dry-brined turkey or chicken, it can contribute to crisp, golden skin.
Salt has long been valued as a preservative and an important element in fermented foods. It’s also key in baking bread and sweets; see below.
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2023-04-06 17:07:00Z
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