In sushi you’re meant to eat the fish with soy sauce, or ponzu, or some type of enhancement.
My daughter just “flubbed” a cake by adding too much salt. Obviously there are limits to this, but the extra salt was incredible with the chocolate and sweet flavors.
Oh, certainly if you add too much salt, then the dish will just taste salty. And a lot of convenience foods fall into this category: Even Campbell’s “low sodium” soups still have more salt than my grandma’s, and still don’t have anywhere near as much flavor.
But “don’t add too much” is not the same thing as “don’t add any”.
There’s a reason I specified "plain Tuscan bread " . Plain Tuscan bread is the simplest of breads- it’s unbleached white flour, yeast and water. Once you add other flavors - roasted garlic, herbs, soup , strongly flavored cheese, honey - the lack of salt is much less of an issue. It’s not the quality of the flour ( although the type of flour may make a difference ) and it’s not the multiple risings ( I don’t know of any bread recipe that doesn’t involve multiple risings) - it’s the additional flavor.
Something that I am seeing professional chefs comment on more and more, (I know Samin Nosrat mentions it in her netflix show and the BA editors have also mentioned it in some of their youtube videos) is that they tend to use Diamond brand salt and if a home cook is using Morton’s, they should halve the salt in the recipe. Which does explain why I would follow recipes and consistently feel like it wanted me to oversalt the food.
That’s specifically for kosher salt, as Diamond Crystal and Morton’s are made by different processes. If you have a recipe that calls for table salt , the brand doesn’t matter. The Kosher Salt Question | TASTE
Google “single rise bread.” Plenty of them out there. I typically do two rises with my bread, but have done one for certain recipes.
People have different sensitivities to salt.
I watched her videos, and while I thoroughly enjoyed them, I was appalled watching her salt some of the food. I’m sure she adds more salt than I enjoy.
Hmm, that’s not the part of your diet that I would find challenging.
I once used baking soda instead of baking powder in a cake. It looked perfect. But it was REALLY SALTY. I ended up throwing it away.
I was interested to see how different the salt content per volume is from type of salt to type of salt. I do use Diamond when I make soup, and perhaps that’s why I use as much of it as I do.
Indeed. Lest anyone think I’m a salt fiend, I find all the canned soups too salty for my liking. But, for me, if I’m using good ingredients and my herbs and spices are relatively correct, and what I’m eating still tastes a bit bland, then what it’s missing is almost always salt. And when it’s salted to my liking, my wife still adds more salt on top of that.
I suppose if you are on a low/no-sodium diet, you do eventually develop a finer sensitivity for salt. But I just cannot imagine going salt-less.
One Thanksgiving maybe 15-20 years ago, my siblings and I were at my mom’s. She didn’t want to make pies, so she ordered some from Coco’s. If I’d known, I’d have made them, or, at least, bought the pies from some place that actually made decent pies. But we had our meal, rested a few hours, then, started to have dessert.
UGH! Someone must have subbed the sugar for salt, because they were inedibly salty.
So disappointing. Thanksgiving Day – where are we going to get pies now? Raid the neighbors???
I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that food judges take only one or two bites of each presentation, so it has to pop immediately – there isn’t time to savor and let the taste grow on them. I see the same kind of thing on BBQ Pitmasters, where the competitors load up their meats with brines, injections, and heavy rubs because the judges will be taking only a bite or two of each. I don’t think non-competition barbeque is that heavily seasoned.
Tom Colicchio on Top Chef has said “Salt is the most basic seasoning skill. If a chef can’t get that right then he or she needs more study”.
I’ve seen Tom send cheftestants home (pack your knives) for over salting.
I’ve never been in competition Q, but I have watched a few Youtube videos on it and, man, what they do to a steak gets crazy. (Here’s an example of competition ribeye. Suffice to say, it ain’t just a little S&P and throw it on the grill.) I’ve done a couple of informal food contests and, yeah, I do the same thing in amplng up flavors and serving it in a more concentrated form than I would do the food in a non-competition setting, and that approach yields good results, for the reasons mentioned.
That said, oversalting is still oversalting, so you can’t just amp up the salt too much.
There are lots of bread recipes that don’t call for four risings.
I looked up Tuscan bread. The recipes I found generally called for two risings, not four; and some of them said it was purposely nearly tasteless. A couple were enthusiastic about the flavor; both of those called for long risings, one of them very long, overnight.
In any case, I wasn’t originally responding to ‘Tuscan bread is tasteless if made without salt.’ I was responding to ‘bread in general is tasteless if made without salt’.
I think quality as well as type of flour makes a difference, in that using poor quality flours may produce poor results even if the types of flours used would have produced good bread if they had been good quality flours.
I recall some years ago Consumer Reports had an article comparing a typical Japanese ‘fast lunch’ with an American. The Japanese was a bento box with cold tea, the American was a McD’s quarter pounder with cheese, medium fries, and a soda.
The Japanese was superior nutrition in every way save one. It was lower in fat, had a better carbohydrate to protein ratio, and more fiber than the American. The one failing was sodium. Between shoyu and pickled vegetables, it was more than two times higher than the already high Mickey D meal.
This was borne out by the fact that for the longest time, stroke was the #2 cause of death in Japan, following cancer. I just checked to confirm and it has dropped to fourth, following heart disease and pneumonia (Japan is aging).
Yeah, a piece of sushi is low in salt, but what’s the first thing you do after picking up a piece; dip it into that dish of shoyu/wasabi.
As much as I like salting things, I find sushi pretty good on its own, without a dip. If I do dip it in soy, it’s fish-side-down to just get a hint of it. Rice-side down is much too salty for me, and I can’t taste the fish, just soy sauce.
I agree-it’s ridiculous! I’ve watched famous chefs pour on gobs of salt and it’s ridiculous. A little seasoning is all any food needs and if a food judge thinks it needs more salt then maybe he or she needs to step away until his taste buds recover from his overuse of salt before he judges again. I never add salt and more often add a little pepper instead. Most food does have a pleasant taste without burying it in salt.
That depends on how long you boil them. My mother always boiled in salted water but she boiled things until they were all grey and mushy (in the case of vegetables) or coming apart (pasta and rice).
My mother always cooked in small amounts of water with a tight lid on the pan – in effect partly steaming the vegetables. And she used the cooking liquid in soups.
I use the same technique; but I find that I usually don’t get around to making the soup, so I usually just drink the bit of cooking liquid.
? Who dips their sushi in soy sauce rice-side down? You should only dip the fish side in the sushi. Dipping the rice in the sauce sauce will cause the nigiri to crumble and fall apart, at least if the nigiri is properly made and not too tightly packed.
Who? Pretty much everyone I’ve ever eaten sushi with. I know that’s not the “correct” way, but I’ve only seen my friends dip the rice part.