salting your food before you taste it?

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My daughter does this and it drives me mad.There is even a name for them - autocondimentor.
 
DamageInc said:
Why do you let her?

I find it completely disrespectful to alter a dish before tasting it.
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Because she has a different palate from most people and it has taken a long time for us to get her to eat a reasonable range of foods(especially vegetables)so if this means that she will do this for now and continue to have a more diverse diet then so be it.I have faith she will grow out of it but as she is a teenager there are bigger battles to focus on.
 
XooMG said:
I personally like to put the salt directly on my tongue (or gargle soy sauce) before ordering the food, so I am extra prepared.
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That's a good one. Until now, I was drinking see water: a different approach, but you have to be next to the coast.
 
I don't , one of my pet peeves . I don't even allow salt on the tables in the restaurant, if someone asks my servers are trained to encourage guests to try to food first since I season more than "liberally"
If you insist we can give you Maldon sea salt and you can help your self
 
@scotchef if she is teenage, she's old enough to learn cooking. And before anyone implies sexism, I would have said the exact same thing about a son.
 
LifeByA1000Cuts said:
@scotchef if she is teenage, she's old enough to learn cooking. And before anyone implies sexism, I would have said the exact same thing about a son.
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Wow, you really have a problem with his daughter going through a phase she'll probably grow out of. I guess you don't have kids, because if you did you'd understand.

How is teaching her to cook going to fix anything? Have you ever tried to get a kid to take out the trash or clean their room? This would be a lot harder. What if she doesn't want to learn to cook?
 
I have no problem with it at all :) I think my tone must have come across 10000% harsher and less constructive than intended.
 
Why would you presume she doesnt cook? Both my kids can brunoise,bone out poultry and make souffles amongst other things.She just likes salt more than she should.
 
Thanks for the moral support,she is actually really tidy with her room but almost everything else is a fight:nunchucks:
 
scotchef38 said:
My daughter does this and it drives me mad.There is even a name for them - autocondimentor.
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My family does this autocondimenting all the time! I've noticed this practice whenever we eat pho. They instantly start smothering the broth with hoisin sauce and siracha. It bothers me a little that the kitchen could be delicately balancing flavors only for patrons to utterly destroy it with their own condiment concoction.
 
Serve a stronger pho then, can still be balanced... :) So they want it more sour, a tiny amount more "soft sugar" (honey, invertase,fruit ... as opposed to white sugar) sweetness, with more heat and stronger aromatics - hoisin sauce is in the end a five spice based sauce, and the five spice spices play a role in pho too, no?

If said daughter cooks, she probably knows what she is doing, so indeed what I said was unnecessary... get her on to capers then :)
 
If at a decent restaurant, no. Ethnic places, never. But most of the delis and Italian places here don't know how to season for anything so I find myself hitting with a little s+p out of the gate.
 
"Ethnic places, never"

I guess it is dependent on the ethnicity ... Wouldn't put using the condiment tray with a Thai meal at the same level as using your sushi as a vehicle for soy sauce. I guess it has to do with how these cuisine styles deliver sublety - one by clearing the stage with a bomb and inviting you to bring your firecrackers too*, the other by bringing a quiet stage along and giving you a stern eye if you party on it:)

*no slighting intended, I love Thai and Korean being loud cuisine to deal with a loud zeitgeist. I guess japanese cuisine is the unplugged-acoustic version of pan-asian cuisine...
 
Growing up, salt was always on the table, and generally needed. I got into the really bad habit of salting before tasting...

Then I grew up, was able to explore the adventurous side of my tastes and realized, for us, the salt was a direct result of not knowing how to use other seasonings. If it wasn't salt, pepper, or garlic it didn't happen in my house. More salt was the answer.

Bonus note: salting before tasting was one of Danny's biggest pet peeves!! Luckily, I'd grown out of it before we met, but I wish I could read his personal tirade on this thread. Guaranteed to make us laugh, which I desperately miss :)
 
Growing up in Scotland during the 1970s and 80s, salt and (fine ground white) pepper were always on the table. Pretty standard to add them to the food without tasting too. Always a good bet too since nobody in our family circle knew how to cook.

Well, that's a bit harsh, they did do some (only some, mind you) decent dishes, but "salt first ask questions later" was standard anyway.

Growing up, teaching myself to cook and becoming more independent I began to notice that 'decent' restaurants didn't have salt and pepper on the tables.

Now, it later years, hosting my Mum, I was having to ask her to taste before salting, since I am seasoning the food during cooking.

Took her a while to get the hang of it, and I sometimes think she has modified her routine to take an obligatory taste and then add the damn salt anyway.

Some thing I specifically leave for table salting - chips (french fries) for example... it is personal preference how much salt one likes on chips, and you always want more as you get through the pile of chips.

Well, I guess chips is about it... chips and fried fish and seafood anyway.


Interesting discussion.

Steven
 
People are hilarious. Perception of taste is subject to a high degree of variation. No need to get butthurt about it. Some people like heavy smokers may have a reduce ability to detect salt. Others still may have various olfactory issues which may affect the palate ..in fact many people don't realize that much of a perceived flavour is due more to the function of the nose and retronasal cavity than the tongue.


And plus some people, like me, really like black pepper.
 
My grandfather did this all the time. No matter what what, he always salted his food at the table before tasting it and he did it for as long as I could remember. The funniest part was that my Grandma would give him grief over it, mainly because of the health risks of eating that much salt. One day when I was in my late teens I noticed that she stopped nagging him about putting salt on his food and just had a sort of sour look on her face. It stuck out to me because she would usually say something about it every meal, but she was being oddly quiet. I later asked her about it and she said that he recently went to the doctor's office to get some blood work. When they were in the office the doctor started to say something about his sodium levels. She immediately started saying something about how she is always telling him to use less salt. The doctor interrupted her and told them that actually his sodium levels were low and suggested that he should add salt to his food. Apparently after he said that my Grandpa just smiled and said "That's a good idea, I'll try that." I never heard her say anything about salt to him after that.
 
mise_en_place said:
Agreed. If I give you food that needs salt, I've failed.
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No. You've given me food that suits your tastes, not mine. And if you've taken the salt shaker off the table, NOW you've failed, because that's bad hospitality. There is no "correct level of saltiness" in food. People's perceptions and preferences vary, not only from person to person, but also over time.
 
Tastes differ wildly, and biology does play a role. But the initial point was (I think) the assumption that a dish needs something before you even taste it. I say taste it first. Then, go with Flying Spaghetti Monster and salt/pepper/soy/hotsauce all you want. It's going in your mouth, not mine. I might judge you for it, but it will be a fleeting judgment :)
 
@spoiledbroth I smoke, and I've still accidentally lowered my salt tolerance over time the more I cooked myself...
 
It's not true 100% of the time like any generalization :wink:

DaveInMesa said:
No. You've given me food that suits your tastes, not mine. And if you've taken the salt shaker off the table, NOW you've failed, because that's bad hospitality. There is no "correct level of saltiness" in food. People's perceptions and preferences vary, not only from person to person, but also over time.
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This.
 
Just to remind, the OP's point and most of the grumbling is not about adding salt at the table, but doing so before tasting the food.
 
spoiledbroth said:
And plus some people, like me, really like black pepper.
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This, this and this.... can never have enough black pepper. Put heaps in when I cook, much to my wife's dismay and I'll still add a heap post cooking.

I have drastically cut back on salting post cooking. Try put a enough (though try to keep utvas minimal as needed) when cooking and add none after.
 
Devon_Steven said:
Just to remind, the OP's point and most of the grumbling is not about adding salt at the table, but doing so before tasting the food.
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Yeah but that's sort of a silly discussion. Sure you can live life getting gassed about what other people do.. not much point though. Can't stop it. And not having shakers in a restaurant seems like a poor idea for the reasons mentioned above.
 
WildBoar said:
I grew up on food cooked without salt, as my mom believed it was 'healthier'. It led to many people oversalting at the table. I believe seasoning during cooking helps control the overall salt content vs leaving it to people to handle at the table (other then a small tweak). Plus seasoning during cooking incorporates it better -- at the table you get some salted and some without, which often leads to adding even more. Plus it just doesn't taste as good that way.
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+ some foods you cannot salt at the table, like mash potatoes...
 
spoiledbroth said:
Yeah but that's sort of a silly discussion. Sure you can live life getting gassed about what other people do.. not much point though. Can't stop it. And not having shakers in a restaurant seems like a poor idea for the reasons mentioned above.
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i think there is some irony in here somewhere.^^

it was just a silly question..just a regular silly question. really about flavor logistics. if a dish comes out too salty and you just start salting without tasting, arent you going in the wrong direction? that's all...i dont care about a chef's grand scheme, or a chinese mom's idea about balancing soy with ginger..just a regular question.

i'm not gassed about how anyone does things..especially not on the internet. and salt shakers at the restuarants isnt even a blip on my radar.

i was just wondering about the strategy of putting salt on food prior to tasting.
 
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