There's a small moment in second-to-last episode of the season two of The Bear (extremely mild spoilers) that I liked even though you blink and you'll miss it. One of the new chefs is tentatively salting some steaks and Sydney says "I need you to salt that like a sidewalk". Cut to Carmy, who walks up muttering "Where'd you grow up, Arizona?", takes the salt, and absolutely just drenches the steaks in salt. And I was like, yeah, that's how you salt a steak!
Several years ago, I started noticing in various cooking videos how much salt chefs put in & on food, particularly meat. I already knew that ample salting was important to the flavor, but I hadn't realized that I wasn't going far enough. I was being timid with my salting, afraid of oversalting and ruining dinner. Around this time, I read a Wired piece by chef David Chang about his Unified Theory of Deliciousness and I've been following his recommendation about salting food ever since:
My first breakthrough on this idea was with salt. It's the most basic ingredient, but it can also be hellishly complex. A chef can go crazy figuring out how much salt to add to a dish. But I believe there is an objectively correct amount of salt, and it is rooted in a counterintuitive idea. Normally we think of a balanced dish as being neither too salty nor undersalted. I think that's wrong. When a dish is perfectly seasoned, it will taste simultaneously like it has too much salt and too little salt. It is fully committed to being both at the same time.
This is the way. You'll screw it up sometimes and go overboard, but if you can consistently get right up to that edge, your food will taste the best it possibly can. This works particularly well with steaks and burgers...my burger went from "pretty good" to "holy shit" solely on the application of the proper amount of salt.
Tags: cooking · David Chang · food · The Bear · TVfrom kottke.org https://ift.tt/EV1Ud9u
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