Question
Scott McNair
Many times you see recipes that say “season to taste”. How do you get to the point to know if it is as easy as a little salt or more like I need Nutmeg or ”X”?
Answer
So part of this is being a little bit familiar with the recipe. Um, you know, so when a recipe does say season to taste, they're usually saying just a little bit more salt or a little bit of black pepper or something like that. But it really is, uh, to each person's palette a little bit different. People have, uh, different taste buds and different, uh, flavor profiles. They pick up using their taste buds. If you know somebody that's like on a very healthy diet that doesn't eat salt at all and you have something that's high salt, it's gonna be inedible to them because there's too much salt in it. But if you have somebody that literally sits down to a plate and every time they sit down, they immediately add salt to the dish even before tasting it, um, something might always need more salt to it at the same time. So, uh, season to taste is usually kind of one of those workarounds that authors of recipes will do to be able to have you really season it to be able to make sure that it fits flavor profile that you're looking for. It might be something like nutmeg or something else as well too. So if you're looking for like, I don't know, say like thyme and a soup or something like that, um, you might want to add, uh, a little bit more of something to be able to give it a bigger pop of flavor. This typically is done better with, uh, fresh vegetables or fresh seasonings than dry because the dry ones take a little bit longer to be able to season, but salt and pepper being the exception to that usually, right? So if you're adding something like a dry thyme to a soup, it's gonna take a little bit for that time to absorb into the soup to be able to make it really seasoned to taste. But by and large, when people are saying the words seasoned to taste, they're meaning just add a little bit of salt or a little bit of black pepper to be able to make it to your liking.
