The Art of Intuitive Seasoning
Seasoning is an intuitive art. I don’t measure out my salt and pepper — I just eyeball it. This can vary based on personal taste and the type of dish. For example, if you’re making something like a beef stew, you’ll definitely want to use more black pepper than if you were seasoning a chicken breast for roasting.
Essentially, seasoning is when you can leave the recipe behind and add your own flair to a dish. You don’t need to measure out the salt, pepper, and herbs — you know by tasting as you go and adding a pinch of this and that. You know when something needs a boost of flavor or when it’s time to hold back. In practice, that means not necessarily following the salt quantity a recipe calls for, because you know it will taste different depending on how fresh your ingredients are, or how you’re cooking them, or the phase of the moon. It means you can make food that you enjoy more often, because you’re not confined to a script.
Perhaps the most important thing you can do to learn to season intuitively is taste your food early and often. You probably already do this. You dip into your food at regular intervals and think, Okay, does this need a squeeze of lemon to brighten it up? A little splash of vinegar to offset the richness? A pinch of sugar to cut the bitterness? A pinch more salt to bring out all the flavors? Enough salt to make the flavors taste like themselves, but not so salty that it’s the dominant flavor? I think it’s a little salty. Am I crazy? You probably do all of these things pretty regularly and don’t even think about it. Eventually, you won’t be asking yourself these questions any more. You’ll just know. And you’ll also be able to tell when the balance of flavors has gone off, which happens sometimes if you’re working with seasonal ingredients that vary in flavor from one week to the next.
And what I love most about this is the permission to adjust. Perhaps the tomatoes were too acidic that day, so I add a squeeze of carrot or a drizzle of honey. Maybe they were sweeter the following week, so I need a pinch more salt. You are now having a conversation with your ingredients, not performing a rote action, so even in the most rushed of moments, there’s a sense of spontaneity to the food.
Besides these benefits, this practice will make you appreciate high quality ingredients and selective purchasing even more. If you are not using a pre-fab spice blend to tell you how much of what ingredients to use, it follows that you will naturally choose a few fresh, potent sprigs of thyme rather than a handful of dried thyme, a few flaky crystals of high quality sea salt instead of a tablespoon of bargain salt, and a tablespoon or two of warm, roasted spices you toasted and ground yourself instead of twice as much of the pre-ground, stale equivalents. And though the individual changes seem insignificant, their cumulative effect is significant. For example, when I oven roast vegetables and season with nothing but a generous drizzle of olive oil, a pinch of nice sea salt and a few sprigs of thyme, the results somehow taste fancy, even though they are one of the simplest dishes you can make, and I think this is the effect of not taking any of these ingredients for granted.
Ultimately, learning to season intuitively empowers you to claim your cooking. Dishes are no longer someone else’s ideas but your own, dictated by your tastes, your whims, and what you have on hand. Such agency makes the daily grind worthwhile and rewarding, rendering a typically mundane task into a miniature act of culinary art that stays with you long after the dinner dishes have been done.
