There’s a habit among home cooks — and we’ve all had it at some point — of treating salt like a finishing product. You cook the dish, taste it at the end, and add salt to correct it.
This works, after a fashion. But it’s a fundamentally different technique from the one professional kitchens use. And the difference shows in the food.
Seasoning as a process, not a correction
In a well-run kitchen, salt is added at multiple points through cooking. Onions get salted as they go into the pan. Boiling water for pasta or blanching vegetables is seasoned heavily — not lightly. Braises get tasted and adjusted as they cook, not just at the end.
The reason is that salt, when applied early in the cooking process, changes the structure of what you’re cooking. In onions, it draws out moisture and accelerates the softening process. In meat, it begins a surface cure that helps browning. In a braise, it seasons the food from the inside out rather than coating the surface.
Salt added only at the end tastes sharp and separate from the dish. Salt built in layers during cooking tastes integrated — like the food is naturally seasoned rather than corrected.
Salt and acid together
The other habit worth building is using acid — lemon juice, vinegar, white wine — alongside salt to achieve balance. Often when a dish tastes flat or dull, the answer isn’t more salt. It’s a squeeze of lemon. Salt amplifies flavour; acid brightens it. You need both, and getting the ratio right is what separates a good cook from a very good one.
We taste every dish we make three times: when the aromatics are cooked, when the liquid is added, and before service. Each tasting is an opportunity to adjust, not just to confirm.
The practical bit: what we use
We cook with fine sea salt — it dissolves quickly and seasons evenly. For finishing some dishes, we’ll add flaked sea salt for texture. We don’t use table salt; it’s iodised and has a slightly chemical edge that we find noticeable in delicate dishes.
We also lean on other sources of seasoning beyond salt itself: miso for depth in plant-based dishes, good fish sauce in curries and some braises (where it dissolves completely and adds savouriness rather than fishiness), soy sauce in slow-cooked sauces.
None of these are shortcuts. They’re additional tools in a seasoning process that takes time to learn but repays every minute of attention you give it.