Why do food judges complain about lack of salt?

Cafe Society
1

Okay, I’ve established that I have an unsophisticated palate with my thread about not understanding layers of flavors in another thread, but what’s with food judges constantly complaining about not enough salt?

The other day I watched an episode of Chopped and all the contestants were dinged for not enough salt on their pork chops. I thought one Chef had the perfect answer when she said she tasted the chop and wanted the natural flavor to come through. But nope, she was still dinged for not enough salt. :confused:

Maybe it’s because my favorite food is Japanese (having grown up with it) and its emphasis on letting the natural flavors of the food come though. When I go to a nice Japanese restaurant and order tempura, my first bite is without any sauce to check that the batter (which has no salt) doesn’t mask the flavor of whatever is prepared.

If I get a really good piece of fish and eat it as sashimi, I’ll sometimes eat it without seasoning to savor the slight brininess and ocean flavor. Same with a really good piece of rare beef, especially prime rib where the jus shouldn’t outshine the flavor of the meat.
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Yes, I understand that salt enhances flavor, but shouldn’t GOOD foods shine on their own without it???

2

People get used to salt and food without salt then becomes very bland and tasteless. I’d think a food judge would be a prime candidate for becoming a bit “immune” to salt and therefore needing more than others might like. That said, you can’t just add salt afterwards and get the same effect as if you’d added it at each step along the way. My Mother in law is a terrible one for not adding salt. She eats my food and says how delicious it is, then eats her own food and complains it’s a bit tasteless, yes, it’s because you don’t use any salt and you don’t taste along the way.

The ocean is a pretty salty place by the way ;).

3

If you taste something and it tastes like it needs a little something, what it needs is salt.

4

I’m not one for adding salt and find the claim that salt beings out flavor ludicrous: salt makes things taste salty, just like pepper makes things taste like pepper.

That’s ok on some foods like French fries, but I prefer food that you can either actually taste the unsalted flavor, or you use another spice to enhance it.

People are so accustomed to salt that things without it seem wrong. But a grilled steak is delicious with nothing but peppercorns.

5

Make a loaf of bread from scratch and leave out the salt. Get back to us on the taste.

6

As noted above, there’s adding salt while cooking, and there’s adding salt after it’s served. The former is science and the latter is preference.

7

When a chef or a cooking show judge talks about adding salt, they are not talking about talking a salt shaker and going to town on a plate of food after it is cooked. They are talking about adding salt (or other seasonings) as part of the cooking process. Adding salt after cooking just makes things taste like salt. Adding salt (or other seasonings) before or during cooking enhances flavors.
Which do you think is more flavorful: marinating a piece of meat for hours before you cook it or cooking it and then dumping the marinating liquid on it? And salt, or brine, is the simplest marinade there is.

You salt meat well before cooking it, the salt draws moisture out of the meat, the salt dissolves into the meat juices, creating a brine, and then the meat re-absorbs the brine, allowing the flavors to penetrate deep into the meat. That prime rib the OP was talking about was almost certainly salted before cooking.

Fish and seafood are not really part of this. Seafood has a “slight brininess and ocean flavor” already (no one talks about salting on oyster), and fish flesh is more delicate and breaks down differently.

8

I do that all the time. Not only do I like the results, but I get requests for loaves to take home, from multiple people who otherwise eat various diets.

Two tricks to that: one is to use really good quality bread flours; the other is multiple risings over several hours.

9

Exactly. Those who don’t believe it need to read “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” by Samin Nosrat. It completely changed how I use salt, and everything I’ve made using the knowledge she imparted is delicious. For example, I never wanted to boil vegetables because I thought all the nutrients would disappear in the cooking water. She explains how cooking in SALTED water keeps the vitamins in the veggies, maintains color, and produces an evenly cooked, well-textured result superior to steaming/microwaving. I’ve adopted her approach and never looked back.

10

Actually, the trick is how you are going to eat the bread. Saltless Tuscan bread is fine dunked in a stew or soup, or dipped in olive oil and spices or eaten with spicy/salty meats and cheeses or made with roasted garlic and herbs. But plain Tuscan bread, eaten on its own is as appetizing as cardboard.

11

I was recently put on a diet that is very restrictive in many respects. I can easily forego animal protein, dairy, eggs, tomatoes, potatoes, brown rice, oranges, etc. But cooking without any salt whatsoever makes everything very bland-tasting. The only way I can live with this diet is to cheat, and add just a small amount of salt while cooking.

12

Yeah, it’s like the difference between salteens and matzos. I only eat matzos in matzobrei or spread with butter (salted). :smiley:

Oh, and they were venison chops on Chopped, not pork.

13

I use the stuff as chips for salsa, which I figure is basically the same point.

14

Yeah, you don’ need very much salt. But you do absolutely need some.

The simplest experiment is to take two glasses of water, both with equal amounts of sugar dissolved in them, but a little bit of salt in one, and then ask someone which tastes sweeter. They’ll pick the salted one.

15

Restaurants and commercially-processed ready-to-eat foods tend to contain significantly more salt, sugar, and fat than most home cooking, even that prepared according to published cookbooks. A french restaurant’s coq au vin will be saltier than what comes out of your kitchen even if you prepare it according to Julia Child (or Louis de Gouy). That actually gave me an idea. Both Child and de Gouy were Paris-trained, both wrote cookbooks, and both books are in front of me now. Assuming no significant differences arise just from the fact that de Gouy’s The Gold Cook Book came out in 1947 and Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out in 1961, the big difference, if any, should lie in the fact that Child tested her recipes at home and wrote her book to educate the mass of American home cooks, and de Gouy was a consummate industry professional whose book, while personable and even often funny, is definitely not aimed at amateurs.

I started by looking at sauces, figuring that would be the area where there was the least room for individual variation. Except for the wiggle room provided by the most frequent instructions for salt, i.e., “to taste,” which doesn’t tell us much, and “pinch,” which is also vague (you can pinch salt between thumb and forefinger, or between thumb and two, three or four fingers), the only difference I found was for bearnaise, in which Julia puts a pinch and Louis instructs us to use none at all. So that was frustrating. Louis de Gouy does use a lot more butter. Usually sweet though, so no effect on salt.

Then I just started looking for recipes they had in common. Here are some (I accounted as well as I could for quantity differences in the final product):

Onion Soup. Julia: 1 tsp Louis: to taste

Sauteed Chicken Breasts w/Brown Sauce. Julia: 1/4 tsp. Louis: “very little.”

Carottes Vichy. Julia: “Salt and Pepper”. Louis: “a few grains salt.”

And here I decided two things. First, I use much less salt than I get in restaurants, and I use a lot more salt than either Julia or Louis, going by their books. Second, restaurants don’t get the luxury of vague measurements or a line cook’s palate. Their food has to be punchy, something that doesn’t taste like the leftovers in your refrigerator, and consistent. So, salt, fat, sugar, as much as a recipe will hold, and the same every time. It’s also undeniable that some professional cooks just do not like it when people re-season their efforts. I don’t know how much that plays into it, but the impetus is to add, not subtract. At the low end, salt fat and sugar are cheap ways to get cheap ingredients to taste like something.

So you have some people who eat out a lot and at both the high and the low end there’s lots of salt, and that drags the middle along. And you have people who can’t afford to eat out much but eat lots of salty processed foods. And then you have the people who like to cook, and do a lot of it, and follow recipes, and wonder why everybody thinks it’s undersalted.

16

Nope. I have often had the first loaf of a batch disappear more or less instantly if there are several people in the house, straight out of the oven, eaten either entirely plain or with a little bit of butter on it. The rest of the batch gets eaten in a wide variety of fashions.

I can’t speak to Tuscan bread. That’s not what I’m making. What I’m making involves mostly whole wheat flour; sometimes but not always some unbleached white flour; a cup or so of some other flour, usually either cornmeal or rye; water; yeast; usually but not always a small amount (maybe a tablespoon for three large loaves, I don’t measure it) of honey. Oil isn’t added directly but the bread bowl and the pans are both oiled (usually with canola oil) so some of that is absorbed by the bread. Rise once as a sponge, add the rest of the flour and knead and let rise again, punch down and let rise a third time, form into loaves and let rise a fourth time in the pans before baking.

Again, use good flour. The flours themselves ought to taste like something.

If I’m going to drink that water, I don’t want either sugar or salt in it. And while I like some things sweet, “sweeter” does not automatically equal “better” to me; for me there’s a right amount of sweetness for any particular thing (which depending on the thing might range from ‘zero’ to ‘lots’), and going over that makes it taste worse to me, not better.

– Certainly people need some salt in their diets, and most people like the flavor, and want that additional flavor on particular items. I like some things salty, myself; at least by my standards of ‘salty’ – though I like pickles saltier than most people I know are willing to eat them. But that doesn’t translate, to me, into ‘everything must have salt added to it.’ YMMV.

– King of Soup, I think a whole lot of processed foods, as well as the food in many (not all) restaurants, is filled up with salt and sugar because the ingredients have little or no or even bad flavor on their own. Most people at this point, at least in the USA, are eating food that has been bred and grown/raised for yield alone, with little or no attention paid to what it tastes like – I’ve been to a seed company day in which the representatives were extolling yield and to some extent disease resistance but were utterly flabberghasted to be asked about flavor, and had no idea what their varieties tasted like; it wasn’t an issue remotely under consideration. (Seed companies catering to home gardeners and/or to farmers’ market vendors may have a different attitude; though I’ve learned to translate terms such as “mild flavor” to mean “tasteless”.)

17

It looks to me like you’re missing the point of Chronos’s comment.

The claim being made in this thread is that adding salt to something doesn’t just make it taste saltier; it can bring out the something’s natural flavors and qualities. Chronos suggestion was a way to test that claim.

18

I’ve done this, and the bread went into the trash. I didn’t realize what had happened until after i tasted it, and no amount of salt at this point was going to save it.

19

The point is not that sweeter is better, it is that the presence of salt enhances the sweetness, rather than adding saltiness.

The best way I would describe it is that salt fills in the background flavour.

It’s pointless arguing about it though. It is subjective and can vary depending on circumstance. I once had a restaurant steak when I was getting sick and thought it tasted horribly salty. I took it home and tried it the next day, it tasted delicious. Go figure.

20

Ah. Sorry for misunderstanding.

I’ve run into a whole lot of prepared foods, however, that to me just tasted salty; there didn’t seem to be much if any other flavor.

Definitely true. Maybe running coach and pulykamell would hate my bread; no way of telling, as it’s impractical to get them a slice.

What I’m arguing isn’t that nobody should put salt in their bread, or that everyone should put in anything only the amount of salt that I’d like in it. What I’m arguing is exactly that it’s subjective and can vary depending on circumstance; and therefore that saying in general that unsalted bread is inedible for anybody no matter how it’s made, or unsalted vegetables are awful for everybody no matter what variety the vegetables are or how they’re grown and handled, or pork chops must have at least a specific amount of salt on them to be any good, is inaccurate.