Do you ever grab the salt shaker before even tasting your meal? For decades, the advice was to put it down and reach for the herbs instead. I see it the other way round. Good salt is where flavour starts, and everything else builds on it.
Salt has been a staple in kitchens for centuries for its flavour-enhancing abilities and its role in food preservation. It earned that place. It does more on the tongue than taste salty, and it changes what meat does in the pan. It also works hand in hand with the other things that make food worth eating: browning, the deep savoury taste of meat and fish, smell and acid.
Here is how flavour works, and how to build it.
Salt is a flavour, and a filter
A pinch of salt makes food taste more like itself. The reason is not only saltiness.
In a test of how tastes interact, salt turned down bitterness more than it turned down the pleasant tastes. Take some of the bitter edge off, and sweetness and the rest come forward. That is why a pinch of salt can make a dish taste richer, and why a flat dish so often needs salt rather than another spice. Salt is the spotlight, not the actor.
The salt itself matters. Use good salt: plain unrefined sea salt or rock salt with nothing added, such as . Ordinary table salt can carry an anti-caking agent, and iodised table salt can carry a stabiliser such as dextrose, a sugar. Why "Drink More Water" Is Incomplete Advice, linked below, has the rest: what sodium does in the body, why the chloride half makes your stomach acid, and which salt to buy. One honest note from there: unrefined salt carries almost no iodine, so get yours from sea fish, shellfish and eggs.
Salt early
When you salt matters as much as how much.
Salt meat well before it goes in the pan. Sprinkle it with coarse salt and leave it for a few hours. The salt draws moisture out of the meat to the surface, dissolves in it, and is then drawn back in. The meat brines in its own juices, and comes out seasoned and tender. It is the laziest technique in cooking that looks like skill.
This is called dry brining. Wet brining, soaking the meat in salted water, does a similar job. The Cooking Skills That Keep Your Family Healthy and Safe, linked below, has the rest of the habit: season a little at each stage, and taste before you serve.
Salt's older job was keeping food at all. Until the 19th century, drying or salting was the only widely available way to preserve fish, from salt cod to kippered herring, and salt-cured meat and fish gave people animal protein without a fridge.
Where the heavy salt is
The old worry about salt was about the amount, and the amount is largely due to the prevalence of processed foods. Salt is usually high in ultra-processed food. In South Africa, before a law capped it, about 60% of the salt people ate came from processed food. Salting real food at home with good salt is a different thing. A steak is not a bag of crisps.
Your taste follows your habits, too. When people ate less salt for five months, they came to like less of it. The salt article linked below has that test.
If you have high blood pressure, or heart or kidney disease, salt carefully. 7 Ways to Lower Blood Pressure the Usual Advice Misses has the honest evidence on salt and pressure, both halves of it.
Told to use a low-sodium salt? The same article has the villages whose salt had a quarter of its sodium swapped for potassium, and which had about 14% fewer strokes. Potassium salts are not for everyone, though. People with kidney disease, or on tablets that raise potassium, should leave them alone, and meat and fish already bring potassium of their own.
Brown it
Heat is the second seasoning. A hot pan browns meat, and browning is where much of the flavour lives. A heavy pan such as a holds its heat once the meat goes in. The Cooking Skills That Keep Your Family Healthy and Safe has the chemistry, a reaction named after the French chemist who described it.
Two things help. Pat the surface dry first. And leave it alone long enough to colour before you turn it.
The drying has a reason. Browning needs a surface hotter than about 150 °C, and water boils at 100 °C, so a wet surface cannot brown until the water has gone. Forget the old line that searing seals in the juices, too. Seared meat loses more moisture than meat cooked to the same temperature inside without searing. You sear for flavour, not for juice.
Black char is the part to cut off, and Hidden Toxins in Your Diet has why.
The savoury taste
There is a fifth taste besides sweet, sour, salty and bitter. It is umami, the deep, brothy, meaty taste, and meat and fish are full of it.
It feels good for a reason. The savoury taste triggers a pleasurable response that encourages us to eat protein, the material the body builds itself from. In 2015 researchers proposed a sixth basic taste, for fat, which they called oleogustus. Your tongue, in other words, is built to welcome protein, and perhaps fat as well.
Umami is the taste of glutamate, and of two smaller molecules called inosinate and guanylate. Glutamate was the first to be found, in seaweed stock. The Everyday Food Scare That Turned Out to Be a Myth has that story, and how monosodium glutamate earned its bad name. In 1913, a student of the man who found it, Shintaro Kodama, found the second one in dried bonito flakes, a kind of tuna.
The best part came in 1957. Akira Kuninaka found that glutamate and these two strengthen each other. Put them together and the savoury taste is stronger than the two added up. That may explain some classic pairings: the Japanese stock made from seaweed and dried bonito, and chicken soup with leeks, in China and in Scotland's cock-a-leekie.
The Romans used the savoury taste without knowing the chemistry. Their fermented fish sauce, garum, was rich in glutamate and widely used. In the late 1800s the French chef Auguste Escoffier built dishes that layered savoury with salty, sour, sweet and bitter, without knowing what the savoury part was.
The trick survives on a British shelf. Worcestershire sauce, first sold by Lea & Perrins in the late 1830s, is a fermented sauce often made with anchovies, and it still goes on steaks and into beef stew for its savoury depth. Company lore says the first batch was so strong that it was abandoned in the basement, and that it had mellowed by the time someone tasted it again 18 months later.
For you, it means three things. Keep bones and make stock. Brown the meat before it goes into a stew. And let salt and the savoury taste work together, because they do.
Flavour is mostly smell
Pinch your nose and eat something, and most of the flavour disappears. Taste on the tongue covers only five things: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savoury. Everything else, the difference between lamb and beef or rosemary and thyme, comes from smell molecules rising through the back of the nose as you chew. That is why food tastes of so little when you have a cold.
Airlines ran into the same problem. As jets flew higher, caterers found that passengers' taste was dulled, because the dry cabin air affects the sense of smell, and menus had to be built from stronger-tasting food. Thirty thousand feet up, everyone becomes a fussy eater.
When food has stopped tasting of anything for weeks, look at the nose first. Aromatherapy Scents for Relaxation and Mood has how a cold or flu can take the sense of smell for months, and how smell can be trained back. A dulled sense of taste and smell can also be a sign of low zinc, and The Quiet Signals of Mineral Deficiency has that one.
So herbs, spices and aromatics work mostly on the nose. Use them to finish what salt and browning start.
Black pepper is salt's oldest partner. Peppercorns were found in the nostrils of Ramesses II, placed there when he was mummified after his death in 1213 BCE. Even a pharaoh wanted seasoning for the afterlife. Pepper later became valuable enough to serve as collateral, even currency, and when Alaric the Visigoth besieged Rome in the fifth century, his ransom included 3,000 pounds of it. Grind it fresh.
Rosemary enhances roasted meats and holds its strength through long cooking.
Thyme is a staple for stews and slow-cooked dishes that need depth.
Paprika, sweet, smoked or hot, makes a good dry rub for grilled meat. Mix it with your own good salt, and you have a seasoning blend free of the anti-caking agents and sugar that ready-made ones can carry.
Cumin adds a smoky, earthy note to chili and stews.
Chilli brings heat, and heat is not a taste at all. Capsaicin, the compound that makes chilli hot, sets off the nerve that reports texture, pain and temperature, which is why it burns.
Garlic turns sweet and mild when roasted, soft enough to spread like butter over a steak.
Ginger brings warmth and a bite to marinades for fish and pork.
Finish with acid
The last thing a dish often needs is a little sourness. Lemon zest wakes up fish and poultry. A squeeze of lemon juice lifts seafood. A splash of vinegar can brighten up a dish instantly, and cuts through the richness of fatty meat.
Taste, add a pinch of salt or a squeeze of lemon, and taste again. Most dishes that seem to need something more need one of those two.
Season like you mean it
The beauty of cooking is the endless variety of combinations you can try, and they all start in the same place. Good salt, used early. A hot pan. The savoury depth of meat, fish and stock. Herbs and aromatics for the nose, and acid at the end. Samin Nosrat builds a whole way of cooking on these elements in .
Tonight, salt your meat a few hours before it goes in the pan, and taste the difference.
Wondering what salt does once it is inside you? Why "Drink More Water" Is Incomplete Advice — what sodium does, where the salt fear came from, who needs more, and which salt to buy.
Want the rest of the kitchen habits? The Cooking Skills That Keep Your Family Healthy and Safe — planning the week, heat, seasoning as you go, and the food safety basics.
Know someone who still eats their steak unsalted? Send them this, and a jar of good salt.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, especially if you have high blood pressure, heart or kidney disease, talk to a qualified health professional.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
Sources
Breslin PAS, Beauchamp GK (1997). Salt enhances flavour by suppressing bitterness. Nature 387(6633):563. doi.org/10.1038/42388
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Bertino M, Beauchamp GK, Engelman K (1982). Long-term reduction in dietary sodium alters the taste of salt. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 36(6):1134–1144. doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/36.6.1134
Neal B, Wu Y, Feng X, et al. (2021). Effect of Salt Substitution on Cardiovascular Events and Death. New England Journal of Medicine 385(12):1067–1077. doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2105675
Wikipedia. Searing. en.wikipedia.org
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