When Should You Add Salt to Dishes: At The Beginning or At The End?

Salt is a precious element that we now take for granted but, if you think about it, it is a real, small miracle: just a pinch is enough to completely change the flavor of a dish, making it perfect if dosed correctly or inedible if dosed incorrectly. Understanding how much to salt dishes is fundamental, but it is equally important to understand when is the right time to do it. It is a very underestimated aspect – how many of us, in fact, add salt only when we remember? – but in reality it can make a dish good, acceptable or truly excellent. And it is not just a rumor: it has been demonstrated by an experiment and the explanation has to do with science.

The Salt Experiment

The experiment in question was carried out by Cook's Illustrated on its YouTube channel America's Test Kitchen with the precise intent of trying to understand when it is best to add salt to dishes, whether before cooking or at the end of cooking. The person who conducted the experiment tried several possibilities, adding salt at different times during cooking and, each time, tasting. The result is quite clear right away: dishes salted at the beginning of the cooking process  are tastier and more flavorful than those salted at the end.

Is it a coincidence? No, the explanation is purely scientific: salt, thanks to heat, penetrates more quickly to the center of the food, overcoming any multiple layers that make up the different foods or, in any case, in general, managing to penetrate more deeply. If salting is late, however, the salt will have less time to penetrate the food and will tend to remain on the outside, becoming the first thing the palate encounters when tasting the dish.

The result of the experiment is that salting at the beginning of cooking is much better – consider, for example, the case of meat , which becomes softer and tastier if salted early – but if you were to forget and find yourself having to salt it late, the video recommends using only 20 and 30% of the amount of salt you intended to use.

Exceptions to The Rule: Not Just Frying

As in many cases, for every rule there is its or its exceptions and also in this case the salting issue changes for some particular foods: in some cases, in fact, salting before cooking means ruining the preparation you are trying to obtain. One of the most famous examples in this sense is frying: whatever ingredient you are frying, the rules of perfect frying state that it should be salted only afterwards, when you have removed the fried food from the oil and before it cools. This is because salt tends to attract water due to a physical process called osmosis, so if added before frying it moistens the external surface too much, causing the fried food to lose its crispiness.

Less known, however, is the issue of beans: salting them before cooking is one of the biggest mistakes you can make, because if the legumes are dry it will make the skin so hard that it will be impossible to cook them, if the legumes are fresh you will have the opposite effect, that is, the beans will fall apart because the skin will break.