A Word About Salt

I tend to distrust salt. It's got nothing to do with sodium in my diet and blood pressure or any of that - as far as I'm concerned, if you want your food to taste like anything, you've got to have a salty flavor in there, and that usually means sodium, so nuts to it. What I mean is I don't trust salt. Just salt. Not salty things, mind, but salt itself.

Table salt.

There's nothing wrong with it. Not really - it's just sodium chloride, a basic cubic crystalline solid that makes up a decent portion of the oceans and tastes like salt, rather appropriately. By itself, it's not flammable, corrosive, or especially toxic, even in quite disgustingly large doses. Truth is, you need it to live - our brains rely on sodium ions to maintain voltage differentials that allow synapses to fire. Your blood needs to have a certain concentration of salt to prevent your blood cells from swelling up and bursting. Salt's really pretty good stuff.

But from a culinary perspective, I just don't trust basic table salt. The reason is simple - it's a pure flavor. There's really nothing else in your pantry or fridge that can deliver a more pure essence of one of the five principle flavors, save for perhaps refined crystalline fructose, if you happen to have that lying around. While that kind of sounds poetically beautiful, it's actually quite dangerous - you can really irreparably destroy a good meal with a teaspoon of table salt. And I have done that! Several times! The thing is, you really need salt - salt is the foundation of so many other complexities of flavor, that without it, you often can't really taste anything else. Most soups are pretty much dirty water unless there's some salt in there, and meats all just taste like gray until you put a pinch of salt on there. But two pinches of salt? Then that might be all you taste. Dangerous stuff.

I try to avoid salt whenever I can, as a result, and use less concentrated, more flavorful sources of salt. Spaghetti sauce? Add some olive brine. Thai curry? Fish sauce. Risotto? Anchovy paste. Stir fry? Soy sauce. Chili? Chicken stock. Goulash? Worcestershire. All of these are salty things we always have in our pantries (well, maybe not anchovy paste for most of you) that have a depth of flavor by themselves that they'll lend to whatever dish you put them in. Salt isn't just dangerous, it's boring, and by using a less concentrated salt source, I can make a more interesting dish without ruining everything because the appropriate amount of salt to add was actually an eighth teaspoon, and I had the utter gall to add a quarter. (You know another dangerous principle flavor? Bitterness.)

So I don't trust salt. To be sure, I use it when I have to, and there are several different varieties of granulated salt that have interesting flavors all their own - I have a special regard for smoked salt, for instance. But it's an edgy relationship I have, and only when I'm absolutely sure that no other salt source will work with the flavor I'm building will I pick up that shaker of sodium chloride, and slowly, hesitantly, lower it over my pot.