"as salty as the sea"

January 22, 2022 8:52 PM

After I had read a few pages of Salt Fat Acid Heat, I told myself that I would try to read the whole thing once I got back to my apartment. That was May, and I waited til September to take the book out from the library, and after that it just sat on the shelf for month. (I'm really bad at returning library books in a timely manner. It takes me months, sometimes over a year.) But I finally started reading it again in earnest last week.

There is a lot of information in the book just about salt, but I figured the next place where I would try to incorporate another lesson is pasta. The author, Samin Nosrat, says this about boiling your pasta water:

season your cooking water as salty as the sea. [...] You might flinch upon seeing just how much salt this takes, but remember, most of the salt ends up going down the drain.

I filled up my pot with some water, started boiling it, threw two clumps of (table) salt in, and tasted a spoonful of the water. Not even close. I did this probably four or five more times, and wow this takes a lot of salt to get to what seems like "sea salt water". I'm not flinching because I'm worried about my salt intake, I'm just thinking about how much more salt I'll need to have on hand.

And now it has suddenly dawned on me how I kept running out of salt when my sister was staying with me.

Hey! I actually tasted the saltiness of the pasta! It was good! But yeah, this is a lot of salt. I think I'll keep trying to make properly salted pasta, but I'll stick to table salt in my cooking water.

I ended up making Creamy Chicken Fajita Pasta because I had a nub of cream cheese, along with a bell pepper and an onion sitting in my fridge. It was delicious. You can never go wrong with creamy pasta.

I might try and make a less saucy pasta next, one where the flavor in the pasta itself is much more apparent.

For now, I think I need to restock on salt again.