We have all heard about how the food at restaurants are made tasty and addictive by additions of sugar, salt and lots of fat. But even the slightest amount of additional salt at home can make food inedible or at least noticeably salty. How do restaurants manage to hide the saltiness/sweetness/oiliness in the food while making it addictive? Only thing I could think of is that they balance flavours out – make it more spicy or tangy. Though how they make so much extra oil taste ok is beyond me.
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*Cheap* restaurant food is like that, because of the tricks used to stretch the budget for ingredients further. Fine dining is a totally different beast. Food chemistry in a nutshell:
* You can make food last longer in the fridge/freezer by adding preservatives that make food more bitter.
* To get around the food being too salty, you add more sugar.
* To get around the food being too sweet, you add fat.
Once you do all three, you’ve got something that still tastes appealing, just has wildly out-of-whack counts of salt, sugar, and fats.
When you add this extra salt at home, how are you adding it?
If you add salt at the very end of cooking, then it will often add a salty taste, but if you add salt throughout the cooking process, it ussually just enhances the other flavours.
You have to incorporate salt as you cook by adding a little bit at every step of the way as opposed to just plastering it in the end of the dish hoping it will give you the same result.
Possibly MSG (mono-sodium glutamate) to enhance the umami flavour. Or natural sources of glutamate, like tomatoes, mushrooms, fish, or seaweed. Coupled with the correctly balanced levels of other flavours of course. It can’t really on its own make bad food taste great.
>But even the slightest amount of additional salt at home can make food inedible or at least noticeably salty.
Your premise is wrong. Adding “the slightest amount of additional salt at home” will make everything taste better; chemistry works the same everywhere.
>We have all heard about how the food at restaurants are made tasty and addictive by additions of sugar, salt and lots of fat.
You have heard wrong.
Good restaurants make their food tasty by quality ingredients, appropriate herbs and spices and good cooking.
I’m guessing you’re using iodized (table) salt at home.
The iodine in table salt is what makes salt taste what most people refer to as “salty”.
Kosher salt does not have added iodine, so adding it to food won’t make it taste “salty”. It _will_ enhance the flavor.
One thing I’m not seeing…the salt you use at home is likely table salt. Most restaurants use sea salt or kosher salt. Iodized table salt is very strong.
How salty something tastes depends on how quickly the salt interacts with your tastebuds. If you use table salt on your food, it is all right on the surface and blasts your tongue with salt flavor, rather than being distributed in the food, enhancing the foods flavor. One example would be a steak that was salt brined overnight, which absorbs the salt throughout all of the cells, vs salting right before cooking, and the salt is only on the surface.
Also, people don’t realize how small an amount of salt, “A LOT” is. 1 teaspoon of table salt is 2,300 MG. Which is the full day’s recommend salt. So, at home, you may be adding WAY more than you think.
For sugar, it is the same thing with salt. However, we can tolerate a lot more sugar than salt.
For oil, depending on the food, some things will absorb oil, and some won’t, so you won’t always notice how oily something is, compared to if it was all just pooled on the plate.
One other major thing that affects our tasting of these flavors is the temperature of the food. Hot food will make the flavors more prominent, and cold will dull it. Have you ever drank a room temp soda or melted ice cream? It tastes way sweeter than when ice cold. So, knowing how to season food based on the desired temperature is something chefs/cooks know how to do.
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