SALT (Part Two): The Quiet Alchemy in Your Cooking

If salt once built empires and kept pantries full, today it mostly sits in a shaker, humble and overlooked. But don’t let that fool you. Salt is still the unsung hero of every great meal.

Salt doesn’t just make food taste salty—it makes food taste more like itself. It brightens, deepens, and balances. It softens the bitter, sharpens the sweet, and lets sourness shine without puckering your mouth shut.

Our grandmothers might not have had recipe books or cooking shows to learn from, but they knew the power of a good pinch of salt. They salted by feel, by instinct, and by generations of taste memory passed through soup pots and Sunday dinners.

My maternal grandmother, Elsie Finlay, in her kitchen on the farmhill, St. Shotts

Here are a few salt tricks worth remembering:

1. Salt early—but wisely. Let it soak in and do its work. Meat and root veggies? Salt before they hit the heat. Delicate greens or quick eggs? Add it later and in layers.

2. Build in stages. A pinch in the onions, a whisper in the broth, a flake on top at the end. Salt is like a good story—you don’t give it all away at once.

3. Taste it hot. Salt blooms with heat. Always take a final taste before you serve and let your tongue do the talking.

Salt as Preserver & Curator

Beyond flavour, salt is also the keeper of time. It preserves—not by force, but by finesse. It slows down the bad and makes room for the good.

That’s where fermentation comes in.

Before fridges, folks didn’t just survive winter—they thrived on the tangy magic of salted vegetables, pickled roots, and brined fish. And they didn’t always know the science—but their tastebuds loved the results.

Salt doesn’t kill. It curates. In the world of fermentation, it invites friendly bacteria to do their work while keeping the spoilage at bay.

From red cabbage kraut to salt-pickled plums and kombucha, fermentation is part chemistry, part heritage, and part kitchen witchery. And your gut microbiome loves this stuff.

Next week in Part Three of our Six-Part Blog Series on Salt, we’ll dive into the wild world of lacto-fermentation—what it is, why it matters, and how your belly (and your tastebuds) will thank you for it.