Don’t Fu@% it Up! (Seasoning)

Our “Don’t Fu@% it Up” Series is dedicated to helping you prevent common cooking mistakes. In this installment, we talk to you about seasoning.

Don’t Fu@% up the Seasoning!: The most common way to ruin your meal is not over- or under- cooking it; it’s over- or under- seasoning it!  There are many ways to season incorrectly, but the three most common are listed below.  In each case, there is one surefire method to ensure you don’t screw it up: Start with less, taste, and add more if needed.

When you cook,you should always work under the premise that you can always add more, but you can’t take away.

One way to guarantee perfect seasoning every time is to use an already mixed spice blend. These spice blends have been crafted by experts to make sure that the flavors, salt content and heat are balanced perfectly.  So we suggest that if you are not as confident in your skills, that you try a few blends, pick the ones you love and work with those as a base for all of your meals’ seasoning. And we just so happen to sell a few of our very own at the Bit@h Store.

The Most Common Seasoning Mistakes 

The main tip we can give you is to TASTE. Taste all of your ingredients before you work with them so you can get a feel for their flavors, salt content, and heat factor AND taste your meal as it cooks. Remember if you are cooking with meats, to taste your dish only when the sauce or flavoring has been brought to an appropriate temperature. You should start tasting your meal halfway through the cooking process to make sure the flavor is heading where you want it to go.

That being said, here are the three most popular seasoning mistakes you can make:

• Salt Content: The most common complaint about home cooked meals is that they are either too salty or not salty enough. The latter is much easier to fix, so when you cook make sure you under salt first (use less than the recipe calls for), taste it and then adjust in increments of half-a-teaspoon until the sodium level is perfect. REMEMBER, when you cook with processed foods such as chicken broth, canned vegetables, and condiments, salt has already been added, so you will want to adjust your recipes as necessary.
• Too Much Heat: The next most common mistake is to add too much heat to your meal! When working with any new pepper (Serrano,Jalapeno, Habanero), or pepper powder (Chili Powder, Cayenne, or Spice Blend that uses heat) it is IMPERATIVE that you taste a small amount of the pepper or spice before working with it. This will help you gauge how much to use. When tasting actual peppers like the Habanero, only taste a tiny tiny sliver! Then, as with salt, add less than the recipe requires, and adjust as necessary.  Also, as with salt, if you are using processed foods, make sure to know their heat content as well.
• Too Much of One Spice or Flavoring: We have all experienced the meal where we take a bite, and there is just this overwhelming taste of one particular spice. Almost to the point were it’s as if the chef accidentally knocked over the jar into the pan. As when using “hot” ingredients, one way to help prevent this is to taste and smell (carefully waft towards you especially when using spicy ingredients) all of your spices beforehand.  This way you can get a feel for what spices are more pungent and overpowering. Then, you will know which ones to start off lightly and add to as you cook. However, as we said before, if you are unsure of your spice blending skills, the best way to guarantee that you won’t overuse a particular spice is to find a spice blend that you love and use it.