Salt is not the enemy – this is how to use it properly

Its main use in cooking is to enhance flavours, and is imperative in techniques such as sweating onions and air-drying charcuterie – but why, asks Thom Eagle, are people so afraid of it?

After years of being told it is bad for our hearts, recipes have changed to only adding a ‘pinch’ at the end for seasoning (iStock)

We have to eat salt, so we may as well learn to use it properly. Ask any chef about their culinary secrets and they will tell you, if they are being honest, that they really begin and end with salting – with proper seasoning that can draw out and maximise the flavour inherent in anything. But the uses of salt go beyond taste. It is perhaps even more vital for its physical properties – for the transformations it can enact on our ingredients.

The results of these are many and varied – some quick, some imperceptibly slow, some wrought on vegetables, some on fish and some on flowers – but essentially they all boil down to one thing: salt draws out moisture.

This is, of course, very useful to the cook, since so much of cooking is really the process of controlling and moving around water. It became so standard for a while for recipes to mention salt only at the very end, when a pinch might be added to correct the seasoning, that it can be surprising and even mystifying to read one that keeps mentioning it, with salt apparently being added at every single step – but that is often how you can tell a good one from a bad one.

If you want to cook onions down to a collapsing sweetness, then just as important as the amount of fat you use and the heat you keep them on is the good pinch of salt you add to the pan, encouraging the onions to sweat their juice out and preventing them from burning.

Those who obsess over the details of grilling meat over embers argue endlessly over the best time to add salt – half an hour in advance, just before cooking or afterwards while it rests. The crux of the argument, though, is over which method loses the least liquid to the fire, the goal, of course, being juicy meat inside a good salty crust. Cooking gives you other ways of moving moisture around, too; those onions would, left unsalted, eventually collapse and give up their liquid anyway, though they might do so rather more unevenly and maybe burn a little in the process.

If you remove the heat from the equation, the salt becomes much more vital; you have to use it with a little more awareness, at particular times and in particular quantities, in order to get the results you desire.

Traditional European charcuterie, for example, although in its final form really the product of time and of air, relies entirely on salt in its early stages to begin the process of drying. Too much salt or too much time and your collar of pork might turn out inedible, both in texture and in taste, but not enough and you risk losing it to rot and mould.

At the risk of oversimplifying a complex and potentially dangerous issue, if you put enough salt in something it simply cannot go off; although in this state it may not be especially pleasant to eat, you know at least that it will not harm you. Think of those cricket bats of dried fish you see in the markets of Venice and Hackney, hanging from the tops of the stalls or sitting, fanned in buckets – pieces of essentially unperishable protein that could sit in your pantry for years, accessible year-round although the seas are too stormy to fish, the weather bad for the harvest or the wolf at the gates of the city. Salt is security.

It is incredible really that such a powerful factor in the continued and widespread survival of humanity has become so demonised by certain sectors of the supposed “healthy eating” lobby, who will tell you that salt is bad for your heart.

It is not the case that salt is absolutely bad for your heart, which the rest of us should be thankful for. Be that as it may, I am aware that many people for whatever reasons wish to reduce the salt in their diet, which is fine. I am not here to tell people how to eat.

When making fermented or dry-cured charcuterie, or any preparation of raw meat that is going to sit at ambient temperatures for days or weeks, you calculate the amount of salt required as a percentage by weight of the other ingredients once prepared.

There is an ongoing argument in the world of meat curing on the use of nitrates and nitrites, but it is not one I intend to get into here. In any case, these are questions that arise when talking not just about salted meat but about aged, dried and fermented meat and therefore belong in quite another article.

It is, I suppose, unlikely that air-cured charcuterie will ever become a major part of the British domestic culinary repertoire. Our climate is better for it than you might think, and it needs little in the way of equipment or even space, but making prosciutto or coppa is still very much a project, and if you don’t have direct access to whole animals or large cuts of meat, it can be a very expensive one.

In a salad of fruit and cheese, I recommend that greengages or nectarines be ripe enough to spill their juice easily into a bowl. But if they aren’t, then a little salt is the answer, rubbed straight into the cut flesh of the fruit until the moisture pools and beads on the surface and it takes on the kind of flush you would usually associate with cooking.

Salads made like this often need very little else in the way of dressing, the gentler acidity of the juices not demanding a placatory oil in the way that vinegar and lemon do.

You may still wish to add all of these anyway, of course, to provide a little blinking acidity to counteract the summer heat.

Extract from ‘Summer’s Lease: How to cook without heat; by Thom Eagle. Published by Quadrille, £16.99. Out now