Using Salt

This is a lesson from 80/20 Cooking, a course I put together that covers the fundamentals of cooking. Check that out if you’re interested in learning more.

Salt is the single most important ingredient in cooking, bar none. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that learning how to use salt properly is the single most important cooking skill that one can acquire. There’s almost nothing else you can do that will make as big an impact on your food and cooking.

Salt is the cornerstone of cooking— it’s the one ingredient that touches everything that you cook, and it’s the most important tool that we use to build and balance flavor.

In this lesson we’ll cover a bunch of topics— salt as the foundation of seasoning, how to source it, my favorite brands, and a bunch of tips for how to use salt well. This is a bit of a longer lesson, but it’s easily one of the most important in the course!

You’ve certainly heard the term “seasoning” before, but it might not mean what you think. In the chef world, seasoning doesn’t refer to spices, but rather to the use of salt and acid to elevate existing flavors. We’ll cover acidity in the next lesson, but when it comes to seasoning, salt is really the star of the show.

Seasoning is one of the core fundamental cooking skills— it’s one of the first things that’s taught in cooking schools and is constantly emphasized in professional kitchens. If you know how to season food properly, you can make almost anything taste amazing. And if you don’t season properly, your food will almost always taste underwhelming no matter what else you do to it.

Have you ever heard someone complain that their food at home never tastes as good as the food in restaurants? In 99% of cases, poor seasoning is the culprit. Professional chefs know how to season food, and that simple process goes a really long way towards making food taste great. If your food ever tastes “flat” or “flavorless,” it likely hasn’t been seasoned properly.

The good news is that seasoning isn’t just a skill for professional chefs—it’s something anyone can learn. And over the course of this lesson and the next, I’ll explain exactly how to do it.

At the most basic level, salt enhances existing flavors in food. In other words, salt makes food taste more like itself.

On its own, salt is simply a mineral that doesn’t have much flavor. However, when we add it to foods, it allows our taste buds to better pick up on existing flavors. You can try this yourself. Take an avocado and cut off two slices. Try the first one on its own and notice what you taste. Then, sprinkle a little bit of salt on the second slice and try that. Notice the difference. The flavors in the salted avocado taste sharper, brighter, and more pronounced. The unsalted avocado tastes flat by comparison. But it’s not the salt that you’re tasting in the second slice—it’s the existing flavors in the avocado, brought to the forefront by the addition of this precious mineral.

Salt does other things, as well—it draws out moisture, changes the texture of certain foods, aids in food preservation—but it primarily serves as a flavor enhancer.

For the vast majority of people, there exists just one type of salt: table salt. For salt nerds, there are literally hundreds of different types with various nuances. I personally keep a few different types of salt on deck, but most home cooks (and especially beginners) only need two types of salt:

1. Everyday Cooking Salt

Everyday cooking salt is what you’ll use for your daily cooking. This is what you’ll use to season your food. For everyday cooking salt, you want something with a medium-fine grind, which is small enough to distribute evenly but big enough to be easily used with your hands.

2. Flakey Salt

Flakey salt (also called finishing salt) is what you’ll use for finishing already-cooked dishes. Flakey salt isn’t really used for seasoning— instead, it allows you to add a bit of texture and salinity to dishes after they’ve been seasoned and cooked.

Once you feel comfortable using these two types of salt, you can branch out into other things like flavored salts, smoked salts, and rare salts sourced from specific locations.

If you go back far enough, all salt comes from the ocean. That does not, however, mean that all salt is created equal!

Most salt that you buy at the grocery store today is sourced from modern oceans, which are unfortunately highly polluted and full of contaminants. The salt that’s harvested from those oceans tends to carry those contaminants, including microplastics and heavy metals.

For that reason, some people (myself included) prefer to source salt that comes from salt deposits from ancient oceans. There are salt mines in Spain, Utah, West Virginia, Peru, the Himalayas, and elsewhere that contain salt from since-evaporated ancient oceans. Many of these salt mines are free of modern contaminants, so their salts contain no microplastics, have a higher mineral content, are more pure, and often have a “cleaner” taste than industrial alternatives, many of which are bleached and stripped of their minerals.

I know this might seem like overkill, but I’d argue that salt is one of the main ingredients that should be sourced as impeccably as possible, since it’s the one thing that touches pretty much everything you will cook and eat!

I’ve spent a lot of time researching and trying different salts, and my favorite by far is Vera Salt (you can find a discount code for them on the Brand Discounts page). Vera Salt is sourced from an ancient salt mine in Spain and is third-party tested for microplastics and heavy metals. It has a nice grind size, dissolves easily, and has a super clean flavor. I use their fine grind for my everyday cooking salt and their flaky grind for my finishing salt.

There are a few other brands I like:

• Diamond Crystal is what I used for everyday salt before finding Vera. I can’t speak to their sourcing, but it’s a perfect grind size, widely available, and is preferred by many of the chefs I know.
• Redmond Real Salt is another alternative that’s sourced from an ancient salt mine in Utah. I like the brand, but I’ve found that their salt is quite “gritty” and not ideal for cooking as it doesn’t dissolve in a clean manner.
• Only Salt is available on Amazon and sources microplastic-free salt from a salt deposit in the Andes Mountains.
• JQ Dickinson has a wide variety of salts sourced from an ancient mine in West Virginia.

Now that you know why salt is so important and where to source the good stuff, let’s go over a few practical tips for how to use salt properly.

1. Pick one everyday salt and stick to it.

Once you’ve decided on an everyday cooking salt, stick to that brand. Salts are not created equal—they have different grind sizes and different levels of salinity. A teaspoon of salt from one brand can be significantly saltier than an equal teaspoon of salt from another brand, so it helps to familiarize yourself with one so that you can estimate exactly how much salt you’re adding.

By sticking to one brand, you’ll start to develop a natural intuition about how much salt you’re using and how that affects the flavor of the food. This can be hard to do if you’re constantly switching between different salts.

2. Measure salt by FEEL.

As much as possible, you should attempt to measure the amount of salt you’re using with your hands. Recipes will often call for specific amounts of salt, but usually this information is useless since, as mentioned before, different salts perform so differently even in the same amounts.

Instead, you should use your hands to develop an intuitive feel for how much salt you’re using. Take a quick mental note every time you use salt so that you can start to connect the amount of salt in your hand with the saltiness of your food. If you do this early on and really pay attention, this will eventually develop into a natural intuition where you can simply grab a pinch of salt, sprinkle it, and know exactly how much salt you’ll be adding to your food.

3. Use a salt cellar.

When I worked in professional kitchens, the first thing I’d do each day was fill up a pint-sized deli container with salt. That thing came with me everywhere, all day long, and I always kept it full. Because salt is the most important ingredient, you want to have easy access to it whenever you're cooking. The best way to do that is with a salt cellar that sits in a convenient spot on your counter.

A salt cellar (also called a salt box or a salt pig) is a large container specifically designed to hold salt. It’s wide enough that you can fit your whole hand in there to grab a large pinch. You can use anything for this—a small bowl, a wide cup, a squat mason jar, or even a plastic deli container— but there are also plenty of great options specifically designed for this purpose that are more functional and aesthetic. The important thing is that it stays on your counter where it's easy to access and that it's always full.

Because it’s so important to measure salt by feel, you need to keep your everyday cooking salt in a container where it’s easily accessible and big enough that you can put your hand in to grab a large pinch. It’s for this same reason that I’m not a fan of salt shakers, salt grinders, or the use of spoons for measuring out salt. Salt shakers and grinders almost never give you easy access to the amount of salt you need, and spoons don’t allow you to develop measurements by feel.

I use a simple wooden box like this, and I’m also a big fan of these ones from Zero Japan.

4. Salt in stages.

Salt needs time to permeate food. Salting your food right before you eat it will result in food that's super salty on the outside and salt-free on the inside. Not ideal. Furthermore, the salinity profile of foods will change as they cook (and as the salt permeates). If you salt in stages, you'll allow your food the opportunity to absorb salt at various layers, and you'll be able to slowly build towards the salt profile that you want, while still maintaining good balance.

5. Taste as you go.

There's no point in salting in stages if you're not tasting your food at each stage. This is absolutely critical, as you'll never master salt unless you do this.

If you're cooking something like a big piece of meat, you'll want to salt generously, then wait a bit for the salt to settle before cooking it. If you're roasting vegetables, you'll want to salt them beforehand, and possibly add more as the cooking process continues. Same goes for anything that's sautéed. For things that are boiled, you'll want to salt the water itself. You can taste these things throughout the cooking process and add more salt as necessary. Not only will the salt permeate and distribute more evenly, but you'll ultimately get a better flavor profile. Salting everything at once is a crapshoot. If you taste as you go, you're in full control.

6. Salt from up high.

When you are sprinkling salt on your food (especially for meat), you want to salt from up high, rather than from just above your food. The salt will distribute more evenly, coating the entire surface area of the food. If you hold your fingers just an inch above your food when you salt it, the salt will land in large clumps in certain places, and not at all in others. If you hold your fingers 6-10 inches above your food, it will layer far more evenly, and the food will taste better. This point was drilled into me so intensely when I cooked professionally that it's become instinct, and it’s worth developing as a habit.