You salt during cooking because layering in the salt ends up with better-tasting food and less salt used overall. Salting at the end of cooking simply doesn’t end up with the same depth as when you salt all the way through the cooking process. Salt allows flavors to penetrate into meat and vegetables in a way that won’t happen without it.
As far as using kosher versus regular, I use kosher 99% of the time because the bigger grains make it easier to measure. I keep a little dish of it by the stove and grab 2-finger or 3-finger pinches to easily add to food as I cook. It’s a lot harder to judge if you’re using a shaker, and I don’t want to have to pull out a measuring spoon all the time. And if you’re Kosher Salt is expensive, you’re buying the wrong stuff. Looking at the WalMart website, 26 oz of Morton table salt is $1.48; 3 pounds (48 oz) of Morton Kosher is $2.44. It’s cheaper.
As far as the OP - I don’t really cook from cooking shows, so no real opinion there. I watch 'em sometimes, but when it comes to actually cooking I either wing it or pull out a recipe.
I guess I’m in the minority. I enjoy spending time in the kitchen, leisurely putting a meal together.
Mondays are often one of my days to cook. It’s not unusual for me to be working on Monday dinner on Saturday or Sunday, say making rice for eventual use in fried rice. I then cut out of work early on Monday to get ready for a meal I’ll serve at 8.
Seven billion bakers can’t be wrong. Volume can vary wildly. Weighing the flour gives the exact same results every time. Dipping a measuring cup into a bag of flour compacts it into the cup, which can make the measurement off by way more than a a tsp or two, which then changes the amount of liquid added. Multiply the error times four cups for a loaf, and you’re changing the texture of the bread. I keep a scale in the kitchen just for this purpose. Also, different flour brands have different weights, so it helps to be consistent with the brand. I use King Arthur, which is 120g/cup.
Whenever I first try a new recipe, whether I got it from Tasty, or Pinterest, or a cooking show, or whatever, the first time I follow the instructions to. the. letter. I am NOT skilled enough in the kitchen to wing it. So if Celebrity Chef tells me to light an incense and invoke the Harvest Goddess before I add my potatoes, then I shall.
Once I’ve got it down, then I’ll experiment if/when I make it again.
For flour, it depends on the recipe. For all baking recipes, I use a scale, as I have for over twenty years. It’s much easier and more consistent. I know, for example, for my bread and pizza crust I want a 70% hyrdation dough. I could put any arbitrary amount in the mixing bowl, weight it, multiply by .7 (I weigh in grams) and add that much water, plus salt (that I usually eyeball at around a teaspoon per cup of water, or 2% by weight if I really feel like weighing it out–but that requires the smaller scale for its precision.)
But no, an extra teaspoon or two won’t ruin the bread, but you might be off by more than just a teaspoon or two using volume measures. Still, it’s just faster and easier for me to just weigh & go.
For the most part, I do follow instructions when making a recipe for the first time, unless I’m putting together a hybrid recipe using ideas from several recipes.
And yes to salt, salt, salt. I’m checking and adjusting at various stages in cooking (always keeping in mind that the longer the cook, the more the salt is concentrated by the end, so to be careful not to oversalt in the beginning.) My mother-in-law was raving about my goulash soup and wondering how I made such a nice broth. There was no secret to it. It was just water and beef shank stewed with onion, to which later a few root vegetables were added. Dead simple. Except she always undersalts the heck out of her soups and stews, so when served one that was salted to my liking, it was like a flavor explosion to her. Now, yes, I get not everybody has the same tolerance to salt, but I seem to have a very middle-of-the-road sensitivity to salt that works well with other diners. My wife, though, will still add extra salt to her dishes. But there does need to be a base level for the flavors to come through (except for those people who have weaned salt almost completely out of their diet.) Most people I know, when they complain about their food being bland, simply didn’t salt it enough. That’s it. (Or, yes, sometimes a splash of acidity is also helpful.)
Totally agree, but want to emphasize acid more since more folks don’t seem to realize that it’s as important as salt. Have a bland dish? 90% of the time you can fix it by adding salt and/or acid (lemon or lime juice, vinegar, wine, etc). Not sure how to do it? Take a spoonful of the food, sprinkle a little salt on it. Taste. Is it better? Add more salt to the dish. Is it not better? Do the same thing with a little acid. Voila, dish has flavor.
re: weighing over measuring. IMO the only reason people think weighing is more fussy is because they haven’t tried it or aren’t used to it. Once you get used to working with a kitchen scale you’ll start cursing recipes that don’t have weight measurements. It’s faster, easier, and you end up with a ton fewer dishes since you’re not having to pull out measuring cups & bowls for everything. One bowl on the scale, add the correct weight for ingredient #1. Reset weight to zero, add ingredient #2. Rinse and repeat. One dirty bowl, no guessing about ingredients that are hard to measure (1 cup of diced carrots can be very different depending on how small of a dice you’re talking), and in general, things just go faster.
Has he corrected his egregious mispronunciations? Plantain, arthropod, oligosaccharide, and astaxanthin come to mind. It always amused me to hear him butcher certain terms. Since he’s from Georgia, I’m surprised he got salmon right!
I enjoyed Good Eats, and other shows, but no way do I put every little ingredient into its own tiny glass bowl!
I’m a chemist; the ultimate reference of any measurement I ever took in a lab was always a weight. The only times I measure by volume is when I have a recipe in which everything is by volume. The scale sits on my countertop; the measuring glass lives in a high shelf with the flan molds, flan being one of the few things I use it for.
My partner’s favorite meal is fettucine carbonara, and I could never get it right. It was always an eggy mess. Marco Pierre White had a segment on Masterchef where he demonstrated how to make it. I started following his method and now my results are much better. It’s not a complicated dish, though. Australian chef Matt Moran gave risotto tips on Masterchef that improved my risotto tremendously as well.
I’ve heard so much about Alton Brown, but he’s not on TV here.
The point of following a recipe to the letter isn’t so you get something passable, it’s so you get something as close as possible to the same taste as the example you’re following. If you want to settle for “near enough”, that’s fine too.
I scarcely watch TV; but in the matter of recipes written-down / in print / on the Net – my brother and I are at opposite poles on the “follow meticulously” / “wing it” continuum. We share a house, and approximately, cook alternately – we both enjoy cooking, with him rather more of an impassioned and knowledgeable “foodie” than me.
He is very much of the “wing it” school, and (affectionately) twits me on being a hide-bound, ridiculously slavish recipe-follower down to the smallest particulars. For me, that’s the way I like doing it – I figure that there is room for both approaches, and “pros and cons” to each.
Lots of people don’t realize that up to a certain point, adding salt to something doesn’t make it taste salty, but rather makes it taste more like itself. Salt is first and foremost a flavor enhancer.
Another thing I hear - “eewww I don’t want THAT much salt in my diet!” Unless you are on a totally-no-salt-diet (and I realize some folks are), you’re going to put some salt on stuff. If you salt while you cook, you will end up with less salt in the food overall, because (as Alessan says) it’s a flavor enhancer. Anyone who wants to try this for yourself, make some scrambled eggs with and without salt, and measure how much salt you have to add to the unsalted eggs as you eat them; it’s 1) almost impossible to make them taste good and 2) you end up using a whole hella lotta salt (and they still don’t taste good.)
Fat, too, acts to spread flavor throughout the dish, and adds a certain depth that you can’t get in fat-free foods.
Your tongue can detect five tastes. Salt is one of them, so adding salt (or sugar, acid, bitterness, or umame) can enhance the perception of flavor. Other things we think of as flavor are experienced through the olfactory, not direct contact with the food.
I remember a show where Rachael Ray was making some kind of Caribbean jerk chicken. And she said, ‘I’m going to use SOME OF THE FLAVORS to make this dish’. That comment stayed with me, I then felt even if I lacked some of the ingredients (allspice berries or juniper berries), as long as I had the mains (scallions, thyme, cinnamon, hot sauce or peppers), it would come out ok. I’ve always been the type to realize I lacked an item and dropped everything and ran out to buy fennel or two habanero peppers. As I’m not cooking for goor-mays here, close is good 'nuff. (even easier: buying a bottle of jerk sauce or marinade).
I have a scale and a lot of volume measuring implements. The only food where I find it significantly better to use the scale is flour. (And even there, I can get consistency by “fluffing” my flour before measuring it.) The only food where it’s a lot more accurate to use volume is brown sugar (the amount of water can vary quite a lot, affecting the weight much more than the volume or the sweetness.) Pretty much everything else, whichever seems easier is likely better.
If I already have the scale set up to weigh the flour, I’ll weigh the white sugar, too. And it’s nice to weigh out the molasses or honey or vegetable shortening, and not dirty a dish. I have a strong preference for measuring spoons for small quantities – you need to measure those separately so you can adjust if you go over, so you are already dirtying a dish, why not just measure in that dish. Besides, my scale isn’t all that accurate for tiny amounts. Butter and eggs come with their own measurements (number of eggs, or the tablespoon/oz marks on the side of the stick of butter)
Of course, eggs vary considerably, even more so than volumes of flour, so if it ever actually really matters (hint: It often doesn’t), you probably want to measure those, too. The easiest way to get it right is to get the approximately-right number of eggs, measure those, and then scale everything else to match.