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or braises, can often be salvaged if the salty cooking liquid is discarded. If beans are too salty, change out the water. Make refried beans or turn the beans, but not their liquid, into soup, adding unseasoned broth and vegetables. If braised meat is just a little too salty, serve it without the liquid and try to balance it with a rich, acidic condiment such as crème fraîche. Serve a lightly seasoned starch or starchy vegetable alongside it to act as a foil.

      

      Transform

      Shred an oversalted piece of meat to turn it into a new dish where it’s just one ingredient of many—a stew, chilli, a soup, hash, ravioli filling. Add more salt to oversalted raw, flaky, white fish and turn it into baccalà, or salt cod.

      Admit Defeat

      Sometimes the best thing you can do is call it a loss and start over. Or order some pizza. It’s okay. It’s just dinner—you’ll get another chance tomorrow.

      Never despair. View mistakes of under- or overseasoning as opportunities for learning. Not long after my salt epiphany over polenta with Cal, I was tasked with making some corn custards for the vegetarian guests in the restaurant. It was the first time I was trusted with cooking an entire dish from start to finish. I could hardly believe that paying guests would be eating something I cooked! It was thrilling and terrifying, all at once. I made the custard just as I’d been taught: cooking onions until soft, adding corn I’d stripped from the ears, steeping the cobs in cream to infuse it with sweet corn flavour, making a simple custard base with that cream and eggs, and then combining everything and gently baking it in a water bath until barely set. I was thrilled with how silky the custards had turned out, and towards the end of the night the chef came by and tasted a spoonful. Seeing the hope in my eyes, he graciously told me I’d done a good job, and then gingerly added that next time, I should increase the seasoning. Even though he’d delivered the criticism just about as gently as any chef ever could, I was floored, and completely embarrassed. I’d been following all of the instructions for making the custards so intently that I’d completely forgotten the most important rule in our kitchen—one that I had thought I’d already internalised, but clearly hadn’t: taste everything, every step of the way. I’d never tasted the onions, the corn, or the custard mixture. Not once.

      After that experience, tasting became reflexive in a whole new way. Within a few months, I was consistently cooking the most delicious food I’d ever made, and it was all because of a single tweak in my approach. I’d learned how to salt.

      Develop a sense for salt by tasting everything as you cook, early and often. Adopt the mantra Stir, taste, adjust. Make salt the first thing you notice as you taste and the last thing you adjust before serving a dish. When constant tasting becomes instinctive, you can begin to improvise.

      

      Improvising with Salt

      Cooking isn’t so different from jazz. The best jazz musicians seem to improvise effortlessly, whether by embellishing standards or by stripping them down. Louis Armstrong could take an elaborate melody and distil it down to a single note on his horn, while Ella Fitzgerald could take an utterly simple tune and endlessly elaborate upon it with her extraordinary voice. But in order to be able to improvise flawlessly, they had to learn the basic language of music—the notes—and develop an intimate relationship with the standards. The same is true for cooking; while a great chef can make improvisation look easy, the ability to do so depends on a strong foundation of the basics.

      Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat are the building blocks of that foundation. Use them to develop a repertoire of basic dishes that you can cook any time, anywhere. Eventually, like Louis or Ella, you’ll be able to simplify or embellish your cooking at the drop of a porkpie hat. Begin by incorporating everything you’ve learned about salt into all of your cooking, from the casual frittata to the holiday roast.

      The three basic decisions involving salt are: When? How much? In what form? Ask yourself these three questions every time you set out to cook. Their answers will begin to form a road map for improvisation. One day soon, you’ll surprise yourself. It might be when, shortly after standing before a near-empty fridge, convinced you don’t have the makings for anything worth eating, you discover a wedge of Parmesan. Twenty minutes later, you could be tucking into the most perfectly seasoned bowl of Pasta Cacio e Pepe you’ve ever tasted. Or, it might be after an unplanned shopping spree at the farmers’ market with friends. Returning home with an abundance of produce, you’ll lay it all out on the worktop, pull the chicken you seasoned the night before out from the fridge, and preheat the oven without skipping a beat. Pouring your friends a glass of wine, you’ll offer them a snack of a few sliced cucumbers and radishes sprinkled with flaky salt. Without a second thought, you’ll add a palmful of salt to the boiling pot of water on the stove, then taste and adjust it before blanching the turnips and their greens. As your friends take their first bites, they’ll ask you to share your culinary secrets. Tell them the truth: you’ve mastered using the most important element of good cooking—salt.

      Just after I began cooking at Chez Panisse, the chefs held a contest to see which employee could come up with the best tomato sauce recipe. There was only one rule: we had to use ingredients readily available in the restaurant’s kitchen. The prize was five hundred dollars in cash and an acknowledgement on the menu each time the recipe would be used . . . forever.

      As a total novice, I was too intimidated to enter, but it seemed like everyone else— from the maître d’ to other waiters, porters, and, of course, the cooks—wanted to try.

      Dozens of entrants brought in their sauces for a blind tasting by a team of “impartial judges” (i.e., the chefs and Alice). Some sauces were seasoned with dried oregano, others fresh marjoram. Some entrants crushed their canned tomatoes by hand while others painstakingly seeded and diced them. Others added chilli flakes while still others channelled their inner nonnas and puréed their sauces, pomarola-style. It was tomato mayhem and we were all atwitter, waiting to hear who would be the winner.

      At one point, one of the chefs came into the kitchen to get a glass of water. We asked him how it was going. I’ll never forget what he said.

      “There are a lot of great entries. So many, in fact, that it’s hard to narrow them down. But Alice’s palate is so sensitive she can’t ignore that some of the best versions were made with rancid olive oil.”

      Alice couldn’t understand why everyone hadn’t used the high-quality olive oil we cooked with at the restaurant, especially when it was always available to employees to buy at cost.

      I was shocked. Never before had it occurred to me that olive oil would have much effect on the flavour of a dish, much less one as piquant as tomato sauce. This was my first glimpse of understanding that as a foundational ingredient, the flavour of olive oil, and indeed any fat we choose to cook with, dramatically alters our perception of the entire dish. Just as an onion cooked in butter tastes different from an onion cooked in olive oil, an onion cooked in good olive oil tastes different—and in this case better—than one cooked in a poorer quality oil.

      My friend Mike, another young cook, ended up winning the contest. His recipe was so complicated I can hardly remember it all these years later. But I’ll never forget the lesson I learned that day: food can only ever be as delicious as the fat with which it’s cooked.

      While I was taught to appreciate the flavours of various olive oils at Chez Panisse, it wasn’t until I worked in Italy that I saw fat as an important and versatile element of cooking on its own, rather than simply a cooking medium.

      During the olive harvest, or raccolta, I made a pilgrimage to Tenuta di Capezzana, the producer of the most exquisite olive oil I’d ever tasted. Standing in the frantoio, I watched rapt as the day’s olive harvest was transformed into a yellow-green elixir so bright it seemed to illuminate the dark Tuscan night. The

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