Salt

I'm reading a relatively new cookbook called Salt Fat Acid Heat written by Samin Nosrat. She might be cooking's answer to Jacob Collier's impact on music. She's taken a fundamentally different approach to explaining how to cook by defining it into four basic categories in the use of:

- salt; 

- fat; 

- acid;  

- heat;

I'm currently reading the section concerning salt. There are a lot of concepts about salt which I understood/assumed instinctively but never could articulate in any coherent way. For example: Salt has a greater impact on flavor than any other ingredient, and the flavor of salt should be clean, free of unpleasant flavors. 

This brings to mind the biblical metaphor of salt when it comes to flavor. Salt contaminated with impurities cannot be effective, and I suspect that that is the most common interpretation when believers elect to apply this teaching. 

But it occurs to me now that there's possibly a lot more. Salt's contribution to flavor is multidimensional: it has it own particular taste and it enhances the flavor of other ingredients. It minimizes bitterness (which is why some people add salt to coffee), balances out sweetness and enhances aromas. 

Moreover, salt's qualities are dependent on how it's formed which have an impact on its shape, size, color and taste. As a consequence, the same measure of different types of salt can result in under or over salting a particular dish. This is even true of different brands of the same type of salt. In other words, as salt, it's possible to be too much of a good thing, or to be undereffective due to being applied too early, or too late.

Having said that, the biggest mistake in cooking typically is under-salting, and as a result, foods are relatively bland. So the main imperative is to be salt. But even so, some discretion is involved in optimizing salt's impact. More on this later.