Balancing Flavour: Salt, Acid, Sweet, Fat, Heat

Five dials

There are not actually many axes on which you can adjust a finished dish.

• Salt — sharpens everything else into focus.
• Acid (vinegar, lemon, lime, tamarind, kimchi brine) — cuts through weight and fat.
• Sweetness — blunts the edge of acid and heat.
• Fat — carries aroma and builds texture.
• Heat and bitterness — provide contrast and break up monotony.

Diagnosing "it's missing something"

When a dish tastes flat, it is almost always one of two things.

1. Not enough salt — the most common. Add a little and taste again. See Salt. 2. Not enough acid — if it is salted and still reads "heavy" or "muddy", acid is what is missing. A few drops of lemon, half a teaspoon of vinegar, and the dish comes back to life.

The second is the one people miss. When a long-simmered soup, a cream sauce or a stir-fry feels dull, try acid before you add more salt.

The order: salt → acid → sweet → fat

Work in the order of what is hardest to undo, in small steps.

1. Salt first. Under-salted, no other judgement you make is reliable. 2. Acid, a little, then taste. 3. If acid or heat sticks out, blunt it with sweetness. 4. If it is still harsh, round it with fat — butter, cream, oil, coconut milk.

One at a time. Change two things at once and you will not know which one worked.

That is an order for adjusting: it sorts by what is hardest to undo, and it assumes you can taste after each step. Where the seasoning has to travel into a solid instead of dissolving into a liquid you can taste, a different order applies and sugar leads it (what sugar does).

Except in dishes where two dials are joined and cannot be turned separately. There the order above does not hold: everything on the joined dial has to go in before anything else can be judged.

• Salt and acid on one dial. In Solyanka the brined cucumbers, brine, capers, olives and smoked sausage all arrive with both. So the stock is made unsalted and tasted for the first time only once all of them are in.
• Heat and time on one dial. Pikliz releases its capsaicin into vinegar very slowly, so a day-old jar and a month-old jar are not equally hot. The balance you set when you made it does not stay there.
• Body and sweetness on one dial. The sweet potato in Mee Rebus is the thickener and the sweetener at once. Make it less sweet and the gravy goes thin.

Acid is not one substance

The dial above puts vinegar, lemon, lime, tamarind and kimchi brine on one line, and step 2 of the order is "acid, a little, then taste." For an acid you are adding at the end to make something sour, that is right. What decides where the acid goes is which acid it is, and Rasam writes it down while pointing at this guide: "when you add the acid is not a preference, it is a question of which acid it is."

• Tartaric does not volatilise. That is what tamarind's sourness mostly is, so simmering never blows it off — which is why rasam puts the tamarind in first and boils it eight to ten minutes, and why Sinigang can sour forty minutes before serving. What decides the order in that pot is not the acid but what the acid would be sitting on: acid sets pectin firm (braising), so the dense radish cooks in a broth that is still neutral and the quick vegetables go into a sour one and stay crisp.
• Citric does not evaporate either, but boiling dulls it. It is why Tom Yum Goong adds the lime off the heat — and that is not the same instruction as the fish sauce beside it. The fish sauce is held back because heat drives its aroma off; the lime keeps its sourness and loses only the fresh top note.
• Lactic acid outlasts its own smell. Bigos simmers sauerkraut for hours: the raw sharp smell goes and "the non-volatile lactic acid" stays, which is why the kraut juice is kept back and returned at the end. Two things out of one jar with opposite fates, and that page calls the juice "the acidity control for the whole dish."
• They are not equally strong. Pikliz records it as a keeping problem rather than a flavour one: "citric acid is weaker than acetic, so it keeps less well and has to stay in the fridge."
• And one of them is not a liquid. The sumac in Fattoush is "tartness in powder form" — malic and citric in the coating of a dried drupe — so in a salad whose whole rule is to keep everything dry you can raise the acidity at the table, without a drop of liquid. The "few drops of lemon" above has a dry form.

So step 2 stands as a tasting instruction. What it does not ask is whether the acid you are reaching for survives what happens to it next.

Dishes where the balance is the identity

• Pad Thai: tamarind (acid) + palm sugar (sweet) + fish sauce (salt and savoury). Those proportions are what make it pad thai rather than fried noodles.
• Som Tam: lime, sugar, fish sauce and chilli, adjusted by tasting as you pound. In Thailand the cook asks you first.
• Tangsuyuk: the vinegar-to-sugar ratio is the recipe.
• Ceviche: acid is both the cooking method and the main flavour axis.
• Iraqi Dolma: take the tamarind sourness out and it is just vegetables and rice.
• Borscht: vinegar or sour cream is what carries the sweetness of the root vegetables.
• Caponata: the same axis as tangsuyuk above, built the opposite way. Tangsuyuk makes a sauce separately, thickens it with starch and pours it over; caponata boils the vinegar and sugar away onto vegetables that are already cooked. One runs, the other only glosses.
• Horta: bitterness above is listed as something that provides contrast; here it is the dish. Wild bitter greens are boiled long enough to soften the bitterness without removing it, and carried by nothing but olive oil and lemon.

How to taste properly

• Hot and cold taste different, and not symmetrically. Cold suppresses sweetness and saltiness while bitterness and acidity come relatively forward — the receptor for sweet is less active the colder it gets, which is why melted ice cream is cloying and the same ice cream frozen is not. Fat gains nothing either: below its melting point it reads waxy rather than rich (serving temperature). So season anything served cold while it is cold — the broth for Naengmyeon, the dressing for Yam Wun Sen, Koldskål. Seasoned hot, they all read flat once chilled, and flat is the direction to expect — not too sweet.
• Repeated tasting dulls you. Drink some water between tastes.
• Taste the liquid alone, without a piece of solid in the spoon — the solids confuse the judgement.
• Taste twice: near the end, and just before serving. Reduction keeps changing the concentration.

When you cannot taste at the moment you are adjusting

Everything above assumes the dish is in front of you in a state a spoon can read. Two ordinary situations break that, and both are answered the same way: the tasting moves off the dish onto something that stands in for it.

• The window is too short. Kung pao chicken writes it against this guide — its order is one thing at a time, tasting after each, "which assumes a pot you can lean over." A wok has no between, and pad pak boong fai daeng says minced garlic "burns to bitterness within seconds at this temperature." So the seasoning is stirred together in a small bowl before the pan is lit, balanced there, and goes in at one moment — pad see ew, chow mein and yakisoba all put the same step in the same place. Whatever you settle in the bowl is what the dish gets. (A cold starch slurry wants that same bowl for a different reason — thickening a sauce.)
• There is nothing to taste yet. A raw meat mixture gives no reading at all. Galantine states it: "you cannot taste raw forcemeat for seasoning, so skipping this means finding out at the table." Haggis says to fry a spoonful of the mixture and taste it before you fill anything, and gives the reason: "once it is boiling there is no adjusting it." The answer is a proxy, a spoonful poached or fried and seasoned exactly as the whole batch is.

And the points above then apply to the proxy rather than to the pot, which is where galantine gets one more line right: cool the test spoonful before you taste it. A galantine is eaten cold, and cold suppresses sweetness and saltiness, so a spoonful judged hot reads correctly seasoned while the terrine it stands for reads flat. The same page runs the move again for a texture question, chilling a spoonful of the reduced stock to see whether it sets.

When the dial is not yours to set

Everything above is a cook turning a dial and tasting to know when to stop. A family of dishes leaves one dial unturned on purpose and hands it to the person eating. That is not an unfinished recipe; it is a judgement about where the setting properly lives, and the guide already has one of those dishes above without saying so — Som Tam is "adjusted by tasting as you pound. In Thailand the cook asks you first", and Pad Thai sends its peanuts and lime out to the table.

The reason is not always the same reason, and separating them is what makes the move legible.

• The bowl differs from the pot. Seolleongtang: "Do not season the pot. Salt added early cannot be taken back, and rice or noodles going into the bowl shift the seasoning again. Seasoning at the table is the design of the dish". Each bowl takes a different amount of rice, so a correct salt level for the pot does not exist — not because nobody knows it but because there is no single bowl for it to be correct for. Samgyetang states the same rule in one line.
• People differ. Kongguksu: "Season at the table, not in the jug. Salt stirred in ahead tends to separate out over time, and more to the point salt-versus-sugar is a matter of personal preference." Both answers are regional and neither is wrong, so a cook who picks one has settled something that was not theirs to settle. Soup curry is the same fact sold over a counter: graded 1 to 10, with the cayenne "on the side for each person to add" so that "one batch feeds both the chilli-inclined and everyone else" — which is chilli and heat's own rule, since capsaicin does not cook off and keeping it out of the pot is the only control that runs both ways.
• The ingredient will not wait. Chueotang is explicit that this one is not about preference: "Sansho at the table, by each person. This is structure, not preference. The numbing aroma of chopi is what cuts across the earthiness and the fishiness, and boiled in ahead of time that aroma is gone." And what will not wait need not be a seasoning at all — Pozole puts cabbage, radish and oregano on the table because they "start wilting the instant they meet hot broth", so that "crisp and hot arrive on the same spoon".

What it costs the cook is step 1 of the order above. Salt goes first there because under-salted, no other judgement is reliable — so a pot that is never salted cannot be judged on any other dial either, and what is left to check stops being a seasoning question. Seolleongtang is read by its whiteness and its body; samgyetang by whether forty minutes has turned the broth milky.

And which dials can be handed over at all is a fact rather than a choice. Whatever goes out to the table has to do its work cold, in a bowl, in seconds.

• Salt, sugar and acid dissolve on contact, which is why they are the ones that usually travel — pozole's lime included.
• Heat travels only as something already made. Soup curry hands over ground cayenne; Khao Soi hands over nam prik pao, a paste that was fried long before it reached the table. Raw chilli dropped into a finished bowl is not the same ingredient (blooming spices).
• Fat can go, and it is worth naming because it looks like cooking. Caldo Verde: "Both fats go in late and neither is a cooking fat. The chorizo oil and the raw olive oil at the table are seasoning" — cooking oils files unrefined olive oil as a finishing oil for exactly that reason.
• Body cannot go at all. Nobody hands a thickener to the table, which is what makes Koshari the limit of this rather than an exception to it: "Nothing in the pot is seasoned; the dish is seasoned at the table." And the rice, pasta and lentils are still cooked plainly in the kitchen, because they are the one part no diner can adjust.

The handover also buys time, and there is a dish that proves it by being served both ways. Steak tartare: "Non préparé … the chopped beef and the garnishes come separately and you mix it at the table. The other is préparé, seasoned in the kitchen. Same dish; the only difference is when salt and acid reach the meat, which is why non préparé is in principle the fresher of the two." Salt and acid start working on raw beef the moment they touch it (salt and seasoning, what marinades do), so a dial left to the eater is also a dial that has not begun acting yet.

Each of those dials has a guide that already hands over its own: salt and seasoning has a bullet for when the seasoning happens outside the pot (Dak-Hanmari, Ramen), stocks and broth has a broth where "every bit of seasoning happens in each diner's sauce" (Kongnamul-gukbap), and grilling and cooking noodles both have the dip — once the eater is doing the cooking the seasoning stops being brushed on, and the strength of the cup is settled before anyone sits down. What none of them asks is which dials can be handed over, or what the cook gives up by handing one over.

When you have overdone it

• Too salty → add a starchy mass (potato, tofu), or lower the perception with acid, sweetness or fat.
• Too sweet → acid and salt; heat works surprisingly well too.
• Too sour → sweetness and fat. A pinch of baking soda is a last resort and can taste soapy.
• Too hot → dairy is the most effective; water just spreads it.
• Too rich → acid. Lemon, or pickled onion alongside.

Every one of those changes the taste, not the amount

The list works on the tongue: acid lowers perceived saltiness, sugar blunts acid, dairy damps heat. None of it takes anything out. There is another kind of move — change how much of the offending substance is in the pot — and whether it is open to you is not a question of taste. It is decided by where the fault came from.

• Usually it is shut, because the amount was fixed before you started cooking. Taramasalata blends roe that has spent weeks in salt, and its page draws the conclusion: "the adjustment only runs one way: too salty is corrected with more bread and oil, never with less salt." Godeungeo-gui says it of salted mackerel — you can pull salt back out by soaking it in rice-rinsing water or milk for ten minutes, "but that is much harder than not adding it." Fermentation fixes an amount the same way: how sour the kimchi in Kimchi jjigae is, is however far that jar went, and Umeboshi turns the order around because of it — make it at full salt, and take the salt back out afterwards.
• Which is why that stew corrects sourness with an onion and not with sugar. Its page separates the two moves in one line: sugar "masks the sourness at the tongue and nothing else", while onion brings sugar and water, so it lowers the concentration of the acid itself — and it collapses as it simmers, so the liquid it added leaves body behind instead of thinness. The "too sour" row above carries only the first half of that.
• And where the amount can be moved, what you move it with is the question. Plain water carries the dish away along with the fault, which is why salt and seasoning puts dilution last and chilli heat says to add bulk rather than water. The dishes that do dilute name a substitute and refuse water explicitly: Sukiyaki — "if the broth has gone salty, loosen it with kelp water rather than plain water"; Daoxiaomian — "if the broth tastes salty, do not add water, loosen it with a little of the noodle water"; Uroe-jangajji, where one cup of water into stiff sake lees "drops the alcohol concentration far enough to open the door to mould", so it is loosened with soju instead. Taramasalata's bread and oil is the same move made out of two of the dish's own ingredients.

So the row you read off the list above settles perception. The amount was settled earlier, and usually not at the stove.