How do I taste and adjust as I cook?

Tasting as you go is the single habit that separates people who follow recipes from people who cook. It is a skill rather than an instinct, and it has a structure.

Step by step

1. Taste early, not just at the end.Once the base is built and again mid-cook. Problems found early are cheap to fix; the same problem found at the end may not be fixable at all.
2. Ask the four questions.Salt, acid, fat, sweetness. Nearly every flat or unsatisfying dish is short of one of them, and running through the list is faster than guessing.
3. Start with salt.It is the most common deficiency by a long way. Salt does not only add saltiness; it makes every other flavour more perceptible. Under-salted food tastes of nothing in particular.
4. Reach for acid when it tastes flat but salty enough.Lemon, vinegar, tamarind, a splash of wine. Acid lifts and brightens, and it is the most under-used correction in home cooking.
5. Add fat when it tastes thin or harsh.Butter, oil, cream, tahini, yoghurt. Fat carries flavour and rounds off sharp edges. A dish that tastes aggressive rather than flat usually needs fat, not sugar.
6. Use sweetness to balance, not to sweeten.A small amount of sugar or honey takes the edge off excessive acidity or bitterness. If you can taste the sweetness, you have added too much.
7. Change one thing at a time.Adjust, stir, taste again. Adding salt, lemon and butter together tells you nothing about what the dish actually needed and makes overshooting easy.
8. Add gradually — you cannot take it out.Half of what you think, then taste. Over-salting is much harder to correct than under-salting, and correcting it usually means adding bulk.
9. Use a clean spoon every time.Basic hygiene, and non-negotiable when cooking for others. Keep a small pot of teaspoons beside the hob.
10. Taste at serving temperature where you can.Cold and very hot food both read as less seasoned. Something tasted piping hot from the pan may seem under-seasoned when it is not, and something tasted warm may be over-salted when served hot.
11. Remember reduction concentrates.Season lightly in anything that will reduce, then correct at the end. A sauce salted correctly at the start is too salty when it has halved.
12. Taste the components as well as the whole.The sauce, the vegetables and the grain separately. A well-seasoned sauce over an unseasoned base still eats as bland.
13. Reset your palate.After several tastes you stop registering salt. A sip of water, or a break of a few minutes, restores it. This is why cooks over-season late in a long session.
14. Ask someone else near the end.Someone who has not been smelling it for an hour notices things you no longer can.
15. Write down what you changed.In the margin of the recipe. It turns one meal's adjustments into something you keep.

Tips

• Salt, acid, fat, sweetness — run the list rather than guessing.
• One change at a time, then taste. Otherwise you learn nothing about what it needed.
• Season lightly in anything that reduces, and correct at the end.

Common mistakes

• Only tasting when the dish is finished — By then many problems are locked in. Something under-seasoned early never fully recovers, because seasoning added at the end sits on the surface rather than through the dish.
• Adding several corrections at once — You cannot tell which one worked, and it is very easy to overshoot. Adjust one, taste, then decide about the next.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask