1,612 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 20261,5055

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 20261,0905

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 20261,1725

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 20261,5915

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 20261,3393

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other articles you might also like

Clean your mixer easily

If you use a "bowl" or "blender" mixer, as opposed to a plunger, you've probably noticed that it's a bit of a hassle to clean it after use. And yet, with a simple trick, it can be done very quickly. See how here.
June 26^th 20249,9955

Making the most of seeds: Dry roasting

In cooking, and particularly in baking, there are a lot of seeds we can use, such as linseed, sesame, poppy, etc. Usually, recipes simply say to add them just as they are to the mixture or dough. To make a seeded loaf, for example, prepare a plain bread dough as usual, then, towards the end of...
January 30^th 201566 K4.0

Chive flowers

Did you know that? Chive flowers are not only a beautiful purple color, but they are also edible and delicious.
May 29^th 201950 K4.4

Small, regular pieces

When we cook, bake or pastry, we often have to cut food into small pieces, often cubes, to incorporate them into a recipe or preparation. How do you get regular pieces fairly quickly?
November 28^th 202014 K4.5

Croutons

Do you use croutons, that typically French trick of toasting small pieces of bread on the side to add to a recipe? They're just delicious, but you need to know 2 or 3 things about them. .
December 30^th 202012 K5