I do. I don’t like really salty food and find that the salt added during cooking is sufficient. When I cook, I use the minimum salt required for the recipe and season meats with little, if any, salt. I just use garlic and onion powder and a little pepper. (Since chicken is blander, I will use a little seasoned salt.)
I don’t know if this is a general rule for French cooks, but I know a French restaurant where they don’t put salt and pepper on the tables, and are said to be offended if you ask for them.
The implication being that their cooking is perfect and doesn’t require additional seasoning.
There was one particularly hilarious story in the UK a few years back where a Michelin-starred chef threw a couple out of his restaurant and chased them down the road with a cleaver - because the guy asked for some ketchup.
Pardon?
I just watched season one of Chef! last night, and one episode featured Gareth going absolutely ballistic on a customer who tried to salt his food before tasting it. Hilarious.
Re-seasoning a dish without tasting it first is silly. Unless you are Miss Cleo, how the hell do you know what it needs before you even try it?!?
Hell yes I would take it as an insult, and think that the salter is an idiot.
Has anyone ever tried an experiment in which, when one doesn’t want to eat a particular dish, poisoning it with WAY too much salt when dining with Ms. Saltfirst Tastesecond?
Not an urban legend – Edison also didn’t believe in bathing. He had major body odor all the time. He was not exactly wise in all things. If true, the urban legend is just another example of Edison’s crankiness, not his brilliance.
It is not ordinarily an insult to salf food before eating it. People who are that desperate to be insulted will doubtless be insulted a lot in their lives. It is however dumb to routinely salt everything you eat before tasting it. Frex, it’s highly unlikely that any human being is going to want extra salt on his country ham.
To me, it’s sort of like saying pasta is salty because some people add salt to the cooking water (which is optional to begin with). Do you NEED to salt the cooking water for corn?