How do I work out what a dish is missing?

Most people reach for salt when a dish tastes dull, because salt is the only lever they have been taught. It is the right answer perhaps half the time. The rest of the time the dish is short of acid, of fat, of savoury depth or simply of contrast, and adding more salt makes it salty and still dull. This is a way of working out which before you commit.

Step by step

1. Taste a spoonful at eating temperature, not scalding.Heat suppresses the perception of both salt and sweetness. Judging a dish straight off a rolling boil leads to over-salting almost every time. Let a spoonful sit for thirty seconds.
2. Ask first: are the flavours faint, or are they wrong?Faint — as if the dish is behind glass, tasting of nothing in particular — is a salt problem. Salt does not only taste salty; it makes other flavours perceptible. Add a pinch, stir, and taste again.
3. If it is salty enough but still dull, ask: does it taste heavy, rich or flat on the finish?The lever is acid — lemon, vinegar, a spoonful of pickle liquid, tamarind, a splash of wine. Half a teaspoon in a pan of food, tasted before adding more. This is the single most common thing missing from home cooking, and the effect is often startling.
4. If it tastes harsh, thin or aggressive, add fat.Butter, olive oil, cream, coconut milk, yoghurt, a spoonful of tahini. Fat coats the palate, carries aroma and rounds off edges. A sauce that tastes sharp and shrill is usually short of fat rather than short of sugar.
5. If it tastes correct but insubstantial, add umami.Soy sauce, anchovy, fish sauce, Parmesan or a rind, tomato purée cooked out, dried mushrooms, miso, Marmite, or a pinch of MSG. A teaspoon, not a spoonful. This is the lever for a dish that seems to be missing body rather than flavour.
6. If everything is soft, brown and one temperature, the problem is not seasoning.Add contrast: something fresh, something crunchy, something cold, something acidic on top. Chopped herbs, a scatter of toasted nuts, quick-pickled onion, a spoonful of yoghurt, a squeeze of lemon at the table. This fixes more dull dinners than any seasoning does.
7. Change one thing at a time and taste after each.Two adjustments at once tell you nothing about which worked, and the two together often overshoot. This is the discipline that turns tasting into a skill rather than a guess.

Tips

• Season toward the end of cooking for anything that will reduce. Reduction concentrates whatever is already in there, including salt and bitterness.
• Acid and salt are easy to confuse. If a dish seems to want more salt but it is already salty, it almost always wants acid instead.
• Sweetness is the least often needed lever and the most often reached for. Use it to balance sharpness or bitterness, not to make a dish 'more'.
• Keep a lemon, a bottle of vinegar, soy sauce and a tube of anchovy paste within reach of the hob. Most corrections come from those four.
• Taste from the middle of the pot, not the top. The top is where seasoning sits after a stir.
• If a dish is genuinely over-salted, dilution and bulking are the fixes — the potato trick does not work, and the existing guide on over-salted food covers it.

Common mistakes

• Reaching for salt every time — Salt fixes faintness. It does nothing for a dish that is flat, heavy or lacking depth, and adding it repeatedly leaves you with a salty dish that is still dull.
• Tasting scalding-hot food — Heat suppresses the perception of salt and sweetness, so you over-correct and the dish is too salty once it reaches the table.
• Making three changes at once — You cannot tell which one helped, and the combined effect usually overshoots. One change, then taste.

Questions people ask