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Comment by throwawayboise | Hacker News Reader

One thing restaurants will do that most people at home don't do is use a lot more salt and fat. Salt tastes good, fat tastes good.

I don't know Chez Panisse but for example if you want to improve the taste of pasta you cook at home add a tablespoon or two of salt to the water when you cook it.

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Who cooks pasta without adding salt?

I'll do it if I know the sauce is already fairly salty due to its ingredients (cured pork, for example), in order to leave some room for adjustment later. Under-salted food is much easier to fix than over-salted.

One of the key observations in the excellent cookbook/cooking-theory-book "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" is that to a certain point, salt doesn't make things taste salty - it just makes them taste more flavorful, more "like themselves". I wouldn't be surprised if adding salt to your pasta water didn't change the apparent salt balance of the resulting dish.

> I wouldn't be surprised if adding salt to your pasta water didn't change the apparent salt balance of the resulting dish.

In the same chapter, the author also observes that you need to consider the total amount of salt coming from other ingredients, such as the cheese, stocks, or cured meats. Depending on the ingredients, especially cured meats, you might already be working with a lot of salt before you add any of your own.

In my case, there are two considerations at play. (1) I use the pasta water for thickening the sauce, so any salt I put in the pasta water is also going into the sauce at that concentration. (2) I finish the pasta in the already-seasoned sauce before serving, so the pasta isn't going onto the plate unsalted. End result is that I salt the pasta water when I know I have ample head room to work with, which is most times, but not always.

Exactly my thoughts!

If you're adding a tablespoon or two of salt to a pot of pasta water, you should be adding more salt.

Well, depends on how big your pot of water is of course. I tend to make smaller amounts, generally one or two servings.

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