Don Silvers

Restaurant chefs use lots of salt. Home cooks are afraid of it. That is one key reason people enjoy eating out_the food is properly salted. Use more salt than you think you need and check the salt level when a complete dish is assembled. (For example, a pasta sauce should taste a bit too salty on its own, because it is later tossed with pasta. Sauces, in general, should be boldly flavored, because they are always served as a complement to another food.) Also taste for salt five, six, even ten times during cooking. Don't be afraid to add salt in numerous small pinches. Keep at it until you get it right. There is one other problem with salt and home cooking: Most people don't know that 1 teaspoon table salt and 1 teaspoon kosher salt, for example, are not the samething. In fact, they are very different. The teaspoon of table salt weighs about 7 grams, and the kosher salt weighs only three to four grams. That means that table salt is a lot saltier by volume than kosher salt. Why is that? Its simple. How a particular type of salt is produced affects the size of the crystals. Morton's table salt, for example, comes from underground salt deposits, and the process of extracting it produces finer crystals than those produced by a sea salt producer such as Maldon or Fleur de Sel. The bigger the crystal, the less salt by weight fits into a specific volume. Hence, table salt is "saltier" by the teaspoon than any sea salt. Here is a simple chart to help you make substitutions. Salt Equivalency Chart: Most cookbook authors use regular table salt (such as Morton's) as their standard. If you are using another variety--a kosher salt, for example--the chart below indicates how much salt you will need per teaspoon of table salt. 1 tsp. - (Morton Table Salt) 1 1/2 tsp. - (Morton Coarse Kosher Salt Fleur de Sel) 2 tsps - (Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt Maldon Sea Salt) One other thought: Be sure to find out what type of salt the recipe writer was using. If it is not expressly stated in the recipe (e.g., 1 teaspoon table salt), look in the front matter of the book. This information is usually buried somewhere. If you are still not sure, use a light hand with the salt, adding less than the recipe calls for and adding more as you go. This of course, doesn't work for baking but will for most other recipes. I assume that an author is using table salt unless otherwise noted. (In my recipes, I use table salt unless otherwise indicated.)