Looking back now, I have never figured out at that time, "How to control salt while making dishes delicious?" The result is actually relatively simple, it is salt. Because the question of how to use salt is so basic, I almost completely ignored it for a long time. Since then, I have gradually paid more attention to the role of salt, and I have received Xiaopan's "A" score at the dinner table more and more frequently. It does not improve the types of condiments and props, but it brings the overall taste of the dishes to a higher level.
This is the mystery of salt. No.1 How to use salt: Please give it a little time. Zhuang Zuyi talked about the biggest difference between professional chefs and "home cooks" in the book "In fact, everyone wants to cook". In fact, it depends on the owner of the home. The chef "often doesn't use enough salt, and he doesn't have the habit of tasting food while cooking."
In the past, in order to achieve the purpose of eating less salt, I usually strictly controlled the amount of salt used. Maybe I achieved my goal of reducing salt to a certain extent, but the conclusion was that the dishes I cooked were bland and tasteless, and at the same time Xiao Pan and I had an unprecedented urge to eat snacks. Then I read Michael Ruhlman's "Common Sense of Cooking", and I gradually understood the problems of my own existence. Ruhlman repeatedly emphasizes in the book that "understanding the use of salt is the most important knowledge in the kitchen, and salt must be added from beginning to end of the cooking process."
He will use salt at the beginning of cooking and continue to use salt for seasoning in small and frequent meals until the meal is finished. "I can make all the seasonings at the beginning or add them after cooking, but the taste of the dish will be different." He believes that whether it is soup base, nourishing soup, sauce or iron pot stew, it should be prepared as early as possible. It is better to add salt than to put salt in the end. "You need to give the salt some time to perform the spell." Therefore, the actual situation is not that I realized the necessity of adding salt as soon as possible after studying this book. Instead, after going around a lot, I realized that in fact, "Common Sense of Cooking" had already told me the standard answer. It's just that I don't believe it.
So how should we use salt? The summary is this: Except for some foods with high water content (usually vegetables), there is no need to add salt too early. In other cases, you can add a little salt at the beginning until the cooking is completed. Taste it with your mouth during all cooking processes to make sure the amount of salt is just right. If you don't use enough salt, you'll get the impression that it doesn't taste good/it always feels like it's not good enough, but if you use too much salt, it will ruin a dish right away.