How to Calculate Salt Quantity to Season
Salt can make or break a recipe. While many of us focus on the fact that we need to limit our daily sodium intake, we sometimes forget the value of this essential spice. We all need a certain amount of salt in our diets to remain healthy. Salt is used on meat to tenderize it before it's cooked and in cooking water to make pasta tastier. There is a specific calculation that bakers use for bread. For most other recipes, it's pretty much "salt to taste," although there are a few basic guidelines you can follow. Does this Spark an idea?
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Instructions
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Determine how much flour you will use in your bread or dough recipe. Add 1 teaspoon of salt for every 4 cups of flour. Salt is a necessity in bread, where it interacts with the yeast and affects the texture of the loaf.
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Determine whether your recipe actually needs salt. If the recipe tells you to "add salt to taste," add 1/2 teaspoon at a time. Taste the recipe after each addition. The goal is to add enough salt to increase the other flavors of the dish but not enough to make it taste salty. Most of the time, the recipe requires some amount of salt to liven up the taste of the dish and reduce bitterness.
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Determine how much pasta you will boil. For each pound of pasta, add 1 1/2 tablespoons of salt to the boiling water, then add the pasta. This small amount of salt improves the taste of the pasta.
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Sprinkle salt over meat, poultry and fish several hours before cooking. How much you'll use will depend on your individual taste, but start with the amount that you would use on cooked meat at the dinner table. Salting the meat well ahead of cooking time tenderizes the meat and enhances the flavor.
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Tips & Warnings
The salt amounts listed here represent the amount of table salt to use in recipes. If you use kosher or coarse salt, each single tablespoon equals 2 teaspoons of table salt.
Be careful about how much salt you add when you're seasoning "to taste." Remember that you can always add more salt, but you can't remove the salt after it has been added to the recipe.
If you have a medical condition that dictates that you limit your sodium intake, remember that adding salt to recipes --- with the exception of bread and dough, where salt is essential --- is optional. You can always choose to eliminate the salt you add while you cook and instead elect to add salt or a salt substitute at the dinner table.
References
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