There is a funny thing how some pointed-toothed characters in Anne Rice’s vampire novels leave messages to each other, carve their notes on temple walls — hidden for those who don’t know how to look.
I get a bit of a “hidden message” feeling with the fascinating but harder-to-understand method of pre-salting vegetables. I once read about a New Zealand chef who soaked his cauliflower in salty brine, and I’ve seen this idea flash in my mind in recipes for pounded cucumbers. We are not talking about soaking the vegetables, but simply seasoning them first, thus giving more time to develop more flavors. You don’t necessarily have to use more salt than you normally would, just do it earlier and be more careful to try to make a dish tastier.
While home chefs go to the internet every holiday season to search for wet and dry brine for their turkeys, it’s easy to look up how to brine pork chops for an hour before cooking. they’re grilled, surprisingly there’s very little information out there for vegetables.
I’m pretty sure there’s no good reason for that.
As a regular sauerkraut, I know it takes an idea to salt things that might be considered earlier than usual. There’s an early step in the kraut recipe where the shredded cabbage sits in a bowl with salt, drains away the water, and magically turns a darker green after about an hour. I always take a bite before I put it in the jar to ferment, and although it loses a bit of its crunch, it does get what you might call a pleasant “snap,” and most importantly, flavor.
I asked the chef Eric Rivera about practicing before salting vegetables, and while he did it, it was a “super random” way, so he let me contact Preeti Mistry, chef, podcaster, seller spice and co-author of The Juhu Beach Club Cookbook. Mistry immediately noticed the texture changes I noticed, the railing was a bit counter to the “European standard” where vegetables should be bright green and bright white.
“On a basic level, you shouldn’t pre-salt as it will lose the crispiness,” they say, adding that pre-salting “allows salt and other flavors to soak into the flesh of the vegetables.”
Mistry especially likes salting before tastier root vegetables like potatoes, corn, and artichokes, adding rich flavor and spice along with salt.
“I would mix the broccoli with salt, ginger, garlic, dill and soybeans and let it sit for a few hours. If you do it first, your flavors will bond with the vegetables,” they warn. , “If you season it right before baking, it just falls off.”
Mistry especially likes to do this with foods they’ll be baking and deep-frying. (Testing later showed why they liked those methods; doing it in a sauté pan made my kitchen a smoky mess.)
Season change
As we talked, I realized what I really wanted was inbuilt simplicity — some easy-to-follow rules of thumb, and Mistry was always there to help.
“I can’t force people to brine by percentage,” they say, referring to the fact in which a quart of water and half a kilo of vegetables can have 150 grams of salt stirred in. Instead, they offer some simpler advice: “salt more than you would…if it’s on your plate.”
