Kitchen Drill
The Salt Ladder
Five cups of the same broth, five levels of salt. Twenty minutes and about three dollars to finally learn what "seasoned" tastes like.
What you need
The drill
- 1
Warm the stock until it's hot but not boiling. Warm food tastes more like what you'll actually eat, and salt dissolves faster.
- 2
Put a strip of tape on each cup and label them 0 through 4 with the Sharpie. Congratulations, that's how every walk-in in America is organized.
- 3
Pour 3/4 cup of stock into each cup.
- 4
Leave cup 0 alone. Using Morton kosher salt, add 1/8 teaspoon to cup 1, 1/4 teaspoon to cup 2, 3/8 teaspoon (1/4 plus 1/8) to cup 3, and 1/2 teaspoon to cup 4. Using Diamond Crystal? Use about 1 3/4 times as much: 1/4, 1/2, 2/3, and a scant 1 teaspoon.
- 5
Stir every cup until the salt is completely dissolved, at least 30 seconds each.
- 6
Taste them in order, 0 to 4, sipping water between cups. Don't think yet. Just taste.
- 7
Now taste back down, 4 to 0. Pick your favorite, and the one where the broth first started tasting like chicken instead of hot water.
- 8
Bonus round: squeeze a little lemon into the cup just below your favorite and taste it again.
What to notice
Cup 0 tastes like chicken stock described to you over the phone. That’s what under-seasoned food tastes like, and it’s what a lot of home cooking tastes like.
Somewhere around cup 2 or 3, something strange happens: it doesn’t taste salty, it tastes like chicken. That’s the moment salt stops being an ingredient and starts being an amplifier. Remember what that cup tastes like. That’s your target for every soup, sauce, and pot of pasta water from now on.
Cup 4 is where you cross the line into salty. It’s useful to know where the line is, so you can walk right up to it without falling over.
If you used low-sodium stock instead of unsalted, everything shifts down a cup, because the stock started with some salt in it. That’s a lesson too: always taste before you season.
The bonus round is the sneak preview: a squeeze of acid can make a slightly under-salted cup taste brighter and more finished. Salt makes food taste like itself. Acid makes it taste awake.
Level up
- Go blind. Have someone shuffle the cups so you don’t know which is which, then put them back in order by taste alone.
- Try it with pasta water. Salt a pot of water to the level you picked, cook a handful of plain pasta, and taste a noodle with nothing on it. That’s how pasta should taste before the sauce even shows up.
- Do it with a different food. Mashed potatoes or plain rice work great, and they need more salt than you’d think.
Put it into practice
Cook it