Balancing salt, sweet, sour
Salt makes bitter tastes less noticeable, so sweetness stands out. Try a tiny pinch in coffee, grapefruit or chocolate sauce. Start with an eighth of a teaspoon and taste.
Sugar softens sourness
Sugar softens sourness, which is why lemonade works. If a sauce is too tart, stir in a quarter teaspoon of sugar and taste. It dulls the sour but doesn't remove it. Go slowly, because you can't take sweetness back out.
Taste as you cook
Add salt, sugar or acid a pinch at a time, stir, then taste. Flavors shift as food cooks and cools, and cold food tastes less sweet, so taste again right before serving.
Test yourself
Questions from the interactive lesson, with the answer and the why.
Your homemade chocolate sauce tastes slightly bitter and flat. What does a pinch of salt do?
Dulls the bitterness so the sweetness shows. Salt turns down bitterness, so the sweet and cocoa flavors come forward.
True or false: A balanced dish has no single taste, such as salty or sour, standing far above the rest.
True. When one taste dominates, the others get hidden and the dish tastes unbalanced.
What went wrong? You dump a pile of sugar into a sour dish all at once. It swings to cloyingly sweet.
Sugar went in all at once. Too much at once overshoots into cloying sweetness. Add a pinch, stir and taste.
Fill the blank: To make a slightly bitter sauce taste sweeter without more sugar, add a pinch of ___.
To make a slightly bitter sauce taste sweeter without more sugar, add a pinch of salt. Salt mutes bitterness, so the sweetness already there stands out.
