1,610 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 77 videos

This site uses only a few technical cookies that are necessary for its operation.
By continuing to browse, you agree to their use (learn more...).

When should you salt?

In the kitchen, we salt very frequently, almost all the time, and we must be careful because this salt can influence the texture of what you are cooking.
I'm not going to talk about the amount of salt here, that's for another time, but rather about : When do you salt?

19 K 4.5/5 (22 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Salt Salt Time Cooking

Last modified on: August 13^th 2019

For this post Comments Lasts posts Follow

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

Let's imagine that you are going to prepare leeks. There are thousands of ways to do it, but one of the most classic is "sautéed".

poireaux sautés

How do you do it?

You peel, wash, dry and slice your leeks
You do the same thing with a shallot
In a saucepan or a frying pan, you heat a littleoil or butter or clarified butter
Once it's hot, you pour in the shallot, stir a little and add a little salt and pepper
Here is the first salt shaker, note that it is light, and concerns (for the moment) only the shallot, we continue...
Cook the shallot, 1 minute maximum, it must not colour or turn brown (we say"without colouring")
Add the leeks, stir well to mix, and do not add any salt.
Why not? Well, because the salt with its hygroscopic side, if you add it now, will "pump" the water out of the leeks, water that will end up at the bottom of the pan, and that you will have to remove later by overcooking.

Moreover, if the water is extracted from the leeks, they will become excessively soft and less appetizing, losing their beautiful green colour more easily. Let's continue...
You cook/sauté the leeks like this, uncovered, stirring from time to time, until they are soft to your taste, but still green
And finally, off the heat, you add salt and pepper to taste

sel et poireaux

You will have understood, it is just a question of timing, we will salt anyway, but we will also try to do it late, so that the salt is not too much in contact with raw vegetables. This is valid for "soft" vegetables, but also for mushrooms.

By doing so, you will have a cooking that preserves the structure of the vegetable, and you avoid the excess of liquid at the bottom of your pan.

To sum up: When cooking vegetables or mushrooms, it is best to add salt only once the cooking is finished, to keep your vegetables in good condition.

Lasts posts

Season to the right level

When you need to salt something—for example, fish fillets before cooking them—you’ll naturally sprinkle them with a pinch of salt using your fingers. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about this very ordinary gesture, which is done all the time in the kitchen, and yet there’s a...
October 14^th 20261,2935

How to Properly Fill a Jar

When you have a jar in your kitchen that’s almost empty—flour or almond flour, for example—you’ll probably refill it before it’s completely empty. And that’s a great way to go about it—no one wants to run out of an ingredient right in the middle of a recipe. Once you’ve...
October 2^nd 20261,0025

Serving Temperature for Wine

When it comes to serving wine, you may (like me) have a fairly simple rule of thumb: red wine at room temperature, and white, rosé, and yellow wines in the fridge until it’s time to serve them. It’s very easy to remember, but it’s a bit simplistic, and you’ll see that there’s a much...
September 23^th 20261,1035

Hot Emulsified Sauces

In French cuisine, sauces are a very important part of a recipe—not just a side dish. In fact, they’re so important that, especially since the time of Auguste Escoffier, they’ve been classified into categories. And among these categories are “hot emulsified sauces,” or lukewarm ones. ...
September 9^th 20261,5065

Hot Dishes and Cold Dishes

When plating or serving a dish—whether hot or cold—on a plate, it’s very important to make sure they’re both the right temperature; in other words: if the dish is hot, the plate should be hot, and conversely, if the dish is cold, the plate should be cold. Is this really important? Let’s...
September 2^nd 20261,2473

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other articles you might also like

The window-pane test in bread-making

The home bread-makers often ask themselves “Have I kneaded my dough long enough?” . A good question, as dough that is insufficiently kneaded will not rise properly or will fall flat when the top is slashed, which is very frustrating. To know when the dough is ready, one can rely on the length...
June 16^th 2021100 K 23.9

Burgers and cheeses

A quick look at burgers(article from 2 weeks ago), and in particular the cheese in burgers, many of you have asked me about this, and how to get cheese to melt in your burgers.
April 24^th 202111 K4.8

Divide and weigh dough into regular pieces

When you prepare dough for cupcakes in a pastry shop or bakery, at some point you're going to have to divide it, i.e. cut it into small pieces, which should all have the same weight. Sounds simple enough, but is it really that simple?
May 30^th 202314 K5

The importance of sieving

In recipes that use a fine powder (flour, powdered sugar, etc.), you'll often see the advice to sift before using it. To sift is to pass the powder in question through a sieve (a very fine strainer) before incorporating it into your recipe. It's often advice, but is it really useful?
September 3^rd 202512 K3

Should a sausage be pricked before cooking?

If you are using sausages in a recipe, you may have already asked yourself the question: Should you prick it before cooking it, or not? You will certainly find as many opinions "you should prick" as "you should not". Let's try to untangle all this.
September 29^th 201850 K4.1