Adding salt: when exactly should you do it?
When do you add salt to your food? Recipes often say to season ingredients beforehand, but then it’s not always easy to gauge the difference between deliciously savory and extremely salty. Maybe you can add salt afterwards. What difference does it make? Luckily, the experts at Chefs Circle looked into it for us.
It’s in every recipe: add salt to the pasta cooking water, sprinkle vegetables with salt and herbs before they go into the oven, sprinkle salt on a steak first and only then fry it. What happens if you forget the salt? Can you add salt afterwards, and can you use the same amount? Or does it have a different effect? The Chefs Circle test kitchen conducted an experiment: roasted carrots that were salted beforehand were compared with carrots that were seasoned afterwards. And a beef stew in which salt was added before stewing, and again when the onions went into the pan, was compared with a stew in which all the salt was added afterwards.
Much more delicious
The results? The pre-seasoned carrots tasted much better than the carrots sprinkled with salt afterwards. The flavor of the salt had really penetrated the carrots. The carrots that were salted afterwards tasted much saltier, even though the same amount of salt had been used. The same applies to the stew: adding salt afterwards resulted in extremely salty gravy, while the pan in which the salt had simmered from the start with the beef and onions tasted as though it had been perfectly seasoned throughout.
But why?
The experts can explain these results. When you add salt to a dish and then heat it, the salt is drawn into the dish. Even when brining beforehand—placing meat in a bath of salted water—the salt slowly penetrates the food. That doesn’t happen afterwards at all; the salt remains on the outside of the food. That also explains the salty taste.
Do you want food that is perfectly seasoned? Then use salt beforehand, so the flavors can blend together properly. If you want to eat less salt, you could choose to add salt afterwards. You’ll need much less salt, but honestly: your food won’t taste nearly as good.
Also read:
- Do you really need to salt eggplant?
- Recipe: Yvette van Boven’s chocolate ice cream with salt
- Emma’s food pet peeve: sprinkling on pepper and salt straight away
