Ruhlman's Twenty (3 page)

For a big pot of water, this requires more than a pinch. I add about 2 tablespoons of salt for every 1 gallon/4 liters of water, or, to be precise, ½ ounce for every 50 fluid ounces of water, or 10 grams for 1 liter, a 1-percent salt solution. The result, whether you’re cooking pasta or rice or any other grain, will be perfectly seasoned. So taste your cooking water. However salty it is, that’s how salty your pasta or grain will be.

Although cooking green vegetables in mildly salty water is perfectly fine—especially for vegetables with a lot of surface area, such as broccoli, that you plan to eat straight from the pot—cooking them in heavily salted, brine-strength water results in a nicely seasoned, vividly colored vegetable. This is especially so when precooking vegetables. Most green vegetables can be cooked through, then plunged into ice water, a process called “shocking,” so that they can be gently reheated later. In this case, cooking them in heavily salted water is best.

Heavily salted means roughly a scant 1 cup of salt per 1 gallon of water, or to be precise, 50 grams per 1 liter. This also happens to be a good level of salinity for brines.

Salt doesn’t dissolve in oil or fat. But all fat- or oil-based sauces—mayonnaise, vinaigrette, hollandaise—begin with water, so use it to dissolve the salt. When making a vinaigrette, for instance, season the vinegar first. This way the salt has a chance to dissolve. Then add the oil. This way your fat- or oil-based sauce will be uniformly seasoned.

One way to salt food is to use ingredients that are very salty. This is a form of seasoning. A great example is a Caesar dressing, which is seasoned with anchovy. The anchovy adds more than salt, but it does add salt, which enhances the flavors of the dressing.

This is something to keep in mind when you’re composing dishes. If a salad or a soup or stew needs a little something, instead of reaching for the ramekin of kosher salt, think about adding something salty—nuts, olives, salty cheese such as feta or Parmigiano-Reggiano, fish sauce (often called by the Thai and Vietnamese names,
nam pla
and
nuoc nam
), or bacon.

Most sweet preparations, and all flour-based ones, can be enhanced with a judicious addition of kosher salt. Salt is used pervasively in the baking and pastry kitchen, but much more judiciously. Bread without salt is insipid. Salt in a pie crust enhances the crust’s flavor. Use salt to enhance flavors in cakes, cookies, custards, and creams. In sweets, you should be less aware of the salt than in a savory preparation, unless it’s part of the contrast to sweetness. Some sauces, such as caramel and butterscotch, move from good to great when you get the salt level exactly right. Do taste tests and evaluate the salt level of sweet things in the same way you’d evaluate a soup or sauce.

Intensely sweet things, caramels and complex chocolates, benefit from a light garnish of salt, preferably a finishing salt such as
fleur de sel,
but coarse kosher salt works here, too. It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s not when you consider the pervasiveness of putting nuts on a chocolate sundae or in brownies. These provide a nutty salty counterpoint to the sweetness.

A brine is one of the most powerful tools in the kitchen. It seasons meat, inside and out; it delivers aromatic flavors (try a
ROSEMARY-BRINED, BUTTERMILK FRIED CHICKEN
if you doubt the power of this); and it alters the cells of the meat in a way that allows them to hold more water, resulting in a juicier finished dish.

Although brine is a powerful tool, it can be abused. Make the brine too strong or leave the meat in too long, and you may have an inedible piece of protein on your hands.

For an all-purpose, strong but forgiving brine, I recommend a 5-percent brine: 1 ounce of salt per 20 ounces of water, or 50 grams of salt per 1 liter of water (or, if you don’t have a scale, 2 tablespoons Morton’s kosher salt per 2½ cups of water). In order to dissolve this much salt, you need to heat the water. If you want to flavor your brine with aromatics, such as herbs, spices, or citrus, add them to the water before you bring it to a simmer.

It’s important to let the brine cool completely before you add the meat so that you don’t cook the meat. One way to shorten the cooling time is to add all the salt and aromatics to half of the water and bring it to a simmer to dissolve the salt; measure out the rest of the water cold (if you have a scale, weigh the remaining half of the water in the form of ice for brine you can use immediately). Remember that the aromatics need time, a good 30 minutes in hot water, to get their full infusion into the liquid.

The brine basics are these: Always brine meat in the refrigerator. Never reuse brine—it won’t have the correct salt level and will have drawn out blood and other impurities from the meat. When possible, it’s best to let meat rest after removal from the brine to allow the salt concentration to equalize.

Historically, the most important function of salt had nothing to do with flavor. It was most important as a preservative. And in that, salt still works as it did thousands of years ago. Salting food immobilizes the bacteria that cause food to spoil and also reduces the water activity in meat that encourages the growth of bacteria. We no longer need to preserve food with salt, but we still do it because it gives us some of our most cherished foods: bacon, ham, cured salmon, for instance. And it’s so easy to do. See recipes:
BACON AT HOME
and
CITRUS-CURED SALMON
.

Even if you’re salting correctly, every now and then, it’s going to happen. You’re going to add too much and render the food unpleasant to eat, if not inedible. Regrettably, there’s no quick fix, but there are ways to avoid wasting food you’ve oversalted. Removing salt from food you’ve cooked, say, a soup, sauce, or stew, is impossible, but you can add to the dish.

If you have time and ingredients, the best solution is to make a second batch of whatever you’ve oversalted and combine the two. If this isn’t an option, adding big starchy ingredients—potatoes, rice, pasta, bread—that need a lot of salt for flavor and adding fats such as cream can dilute the salt concentration.

Above all, there’s no reason to throw food away. Even if you don’t have time to make a second batch, refrigerate the food until you do.

Another instance where oversalting is not uncommon is in using brines or other salt-heavy dry cures. This can be easily fixed. If you fear you’ve left your meat too long in the brine or in the salt, soak the meat in fresh water for as long as you overbrined it. The salt will be drawn out into the water.

If you’ve oversalted something that has been brined or dry cured and then cooked (bacon or ham, for instance), simmer the meat in water, then discard the water and finish cooking.

To reiterate: Salting is not something that should be done at the table, after the cooking is finished, but at the outset and then throughout the cooking. Learning how to salt—done only by teaching yourself, by thinking and tasting and comparing, and tasting some more—will do more than any other single skill to improve your cooking. Most recipes in this book call for some salt, so pay attention to how it’s used. Here, I’ve created recipes to showcase all the powerful ways that salt works, from seasoning to preserving to altering texture.