In this chat with Rachelle, we’re diving into:
How much salt to use (it’s likely more than you think!)
When to add it to your dish
What kind of salt you should be using for optimal flavour and health!
Introduction
Hello and welcome to episode four of the Beyond Nourished podcast. This is the place where you can learn to become a better, more efficient health-focused cook in just 10 minutes or less.
I'm your host, Rachelle Girardin. I'm a Certified Nutritional Practitioner, the founder of Beyond Nourished, and I've been actively working as a holistic chef for the last 10 years.
The Secret to Cooking Flavourful Food
In today's episode, I'm going to be uncovering the secret - or I should say one of the secrets - to cooking flavorful food. The reason that this is a hot topic for me right now is that I was recently training a new chef in the kitchen and we were cooking a curry dish on the stovetop. I don't know if it was nervousness or just a little bit of forgetfulness, but the chef forgot to add the salt to the dish and didn't end up noticing until the dish was nearly finished cooking. At that point, it was almost impossible for us to get the curry to taste the way that it should. This experience reminded me of why it’s so important to not only use salt, but to know how to use it properly!
At this point in my career, I've trained hundreds of people - whether it be training new staff members, hosting cooking workshops across Western Canada or teaching private cooking classes. I also taught so many students at the Institute of Holistic Nutrition in Vancouver, where I taught their holistic food prep class. All this to say that no matter where I’m teaching, one of the most common pieces of feedback I find myself giving people is that their food lacks a “wow factor”.
Mistakes to Avoid with Salt
I’ve come to realize that there are usually two reasons for people missing the mark - number one, they’re are afraid of salt! We've been societally conditioned to fear salt from a health standpoint - but that is a whole other episode on why I believe that to be untrue.
The other reason is that people don't know how to use salt properly. We know that we need it for a dish, but we don't necessarily know how to use it properly. And so it comes down to three things you need to know:
When to use it throughout the cooking process for best results
How much to use
That not all salt is created equally and that the type of salt you use really matters for the result that you're trying to achieve.
Whatever it is that you're trying to cook, sometimes it requires you to change up the type of salt that you use, and a lot of people don't realize that the type of salt that they're using is going to affect the flavour of the food differently.
When to Add Salt to Your Dish
So let's get right into it and talk about the first piece: knowing when to use salt. While salt is used in the food preparation side of things in many different ways - sometimes it's preserving food, sometimes it's breaking down proteins and meat, sometimes it's being used as a binder - in this episode, we're specifically talking about using salt when cooking.
Let's assume that we're cooking something on the stovetop - maybe it's chilli, maybe it's a soup - whatever it is, most of the salt that you're going to be using is going to be at the beginning of your cooking process. You will salt your dish throughout the cooking process, but will only be using a little bit of salt toward the middle and then very little at the end to just adjust and fine-tune what you've created.
The reason for this is that food is broken down with the usage of salt. It draws the moisture out of every ingredient that you're using, and so you must use it throughout the cooking process to give all of those ingredients a chance to dance together and come together as one so that all of your flavours create this epic showcase at the end.
If you don't salt your food throughout the cooking process in this way, it won’t be dimensional enough - the flavours will have all stayed separate and they won’t have had a chance to really come together.
How Much Salt to Use
The next thing you need to know is how much salt to use. I have a general rule of thumb: for every inch of ingredients that you're adding to your pot, you want to do a gentle sprinkle of salt over the entire surface. For example, I did a little experiment at home, and for a ten-inch pot, which is typically going to be the largest pot that you have in your traditional pot set that you might have at home, you want to use just under one teaspoon for every layer that's just over an inch deep in that pot.
For a smaller pot, you maybe want to do about a half teaspoon or so. This might be a little bit more salt than you're used to using, and it’s just a general rule for when you're putting ingredients into a pot.
As a side note, this is especially true when you're putting meat into a pot. You want to make sure that the meat is seasoned, and when I say seasoned, I mean salted on all sides of the surface before you put it in the pack. This is crucial for that flavour to be locked into that meat and to really make it pop throughout your dish.
What Type of Salt to Use
The last thing that we want to talk about is the type of salt that you're using. If you're using common table salt, please do me a favour and stop using it today! Iodine has been added to this type of salt and which makes your food have a slightly metallic taste. Table salt also carries attacking agents, and there's oftentimes dextrose or a type of sugar that is added to it to help stabilize it hiding in there. These are all very unnecessary ingredients to have in your salt.
Instead, you want to look for a pure unrefined salt source - think sea salt or pink Himalayan rock salt - either one of those is a great choice to use. You could even use kosher salt, which would be a step in the right direction. I use Himalayan rock salt. It's not necessarily because it's the best. There's a lot of research that suggests that both sea salt and rock salt have great minerals in them, and they have a lot more nutritional value than a common table salt that has been stripped of all its essential minerals. It doesn't matter which one you use, just pick one you like and know how it works!
Each granule of salt, depending on how they've broken it down, is going to flavour your dish differently, so if it's a tiny granule it's going to act differently when you add it to your dish than if it’s a little bit larger. There's nothing to be said that smaller granules are better or bigger are better, it truly doesn't matter - you just have to know how you’re flavouring your dish so that you can adjust accordingly and know if you need that teaspoon that I was suggesting, or if maybe you need a little bit less than that.
Remember to Taste Test!
One of the most important parts about making flavourful food and really up-leveling your cooking is to make sure that you're tasting along the way so that you can see how the salt is helping your dish. Remember, you want to make sure that you are salting throughout your cooking - a lot in the beginning, some in the middle, and very little toward the end. At the end you should just be making slight adjustments - you want to make sure that you're not over-salting! This is easy to avoid by simply taste testing along the way.
Using these tips will guarantee that your food has that wow factor - you’ll find that salt really helps accent your dishes!
If you have any questions about this topic, head over to our Instagram page and ask away! I would love to get into this discussion a little bit further.
If knowing how to properly salt food is not new to you, and you were already familiar with all of this information, I’d encourage you to consider cooking for a career! Check out our Holistic Chef Certification for more information.
I hope you enjoyed today's episode, and as always it would be very helpful if you could review, subscribe, and most importantly share this podcast with anyone else that you think might enjoy it. I will see you guys in the next episode!