Use enough salt

Warning: This post may be harmful to your health - but see the caveat at the bottom.

I chose salt as the topic for my first article as well as my online name since it is critical to good cooking.  Various cuisines have their favorite ingredients that deliver this taste, but for now let's just concentrate on plain salt.  When I go to restaurants, I see a remarkable range of approaches to salting food.  In some places the food is so bland it seems that I was meant to salt it myself - maybe good for health, but not my idea of a good restaurant.  In my experience this is also a common failing of home cooking.  In my experience, "bland" doesn't necessarily mean that the dish doesn't have flavor, but the lack of key components like saltiness, sweetness or acidity causes us to fail to appreciate the flavor that is there.  This is why food that smells great sometimes doesn't taste that good, and if you cooked something that smells great, you certainly want to finish it in a way that make it taste great.

If you have never truly over-salted your food, then I would say you don't yet know how much salt to put on it.  If you have done it, then you know that over-salted food can be truly inedible (like sea water is undrinkable).  But many good foods are very salty, and it pays to know the limits and how to use more- or less-salty preparations. Let's look at a simple recipe and its range of applications:

Marinated Tomatoes

1 medium tomato (2-3" diameter)
Extra virgin olive oil
Black pepper
Salt

You can use plain table salt or kosher salt for this recipe.  I like kosher salt because it dissolves easily.

Core the tomato and slice it into thin rounds (less than 1/4" thick).  Then stack these a few high and slice them again into strips and a third time into small dice.  It will pay to have a very sharp knife for this.

Set aside 3/4 of the tomato dice and put 1/4 of them in a small bowl.  Put a teaspoon of salt on them and mix briefly, then let them sit a few minutes.  Taste some of the tomato dice (just 2-3 of them).  They should taste pretty salty.  Put another half teaspoon or so of salt on them and repeat this process.  At this point they might be too salty for you.  In any case, keep doing this until you get something that you really feel is too salty to serve, even as a small condiment.

Now start adding in the additional tomato dice, and note for yourself when the saltiness of the tomatoes comes back to a tasty level for two cases:

1.  A tasty condiment, to be served in small quantities on or beside something else
2.  A dish by itself, such as bruschetta (you can try some on a piece of bread for this)

When you reach stage 1, you may want to set aside a little bit of the mix in a separate bowl.  You may want to drain some of the liquid that the tomatoes give up.  Add some olive oil and grind some pepper into it and mix.  This is now your marinated tomato condiment.  I use these on pizza.  For the condiment you can use quite a bit of olive oil.

With the rest of the tomatoes, continue adding more unseasoned tomatoes and mixing/resting until it reaches your bruschetta stage.  In reality there is a wide range that works, and personal taste varies.  The main idea is to get past the point where you know it's too salty, and then dial it back to something you really like.

There are many variations on these tomatoes:  You can add garlic, onion, shallot, fresh herbs like parsley, basic or oregano, a little vinegar or lemon juice, a little sugar, red pepper, etc.  The recipe works fairly well with tomatoes that are out of season though it's delicious with ripe summer heirloom tomatoes.  Use the marinated tomatoes for pizza (just cheese and tomatoes makes a great pie, if the tomatoes are seasoned well), paninis or other sandwiches, salads, bruschetta (I usually add onions or shallots and basil, and a bit of vinegar), or anything else you like.

The salty flavor is the keystone of most savory foods.  Pay attention and get the right amount of salt, and it will bring out the other flavors in the dish and make your food much more enjoyable.

Caveat: I don't mean to say that all of the food on your plate should taste particularly salty, and of course you should use good judgment about the overall amount of salt in your diet. If everything is equally salty then nothing will stand out. Highly seasoned foods will be more interesting if they come in small quantities and contrast with other parts of the meal.