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Vent: I looked up how much salt actually goes into a pot of restaurant stock
I was reading through an old culinary school handout from Johnson and Wales the other day and it said a gallon of brown stock should get 1.5 ounces of salt by weight, which is way more than I ever add. I salted to taste for 12 years and always thought I was nailing it, but now I'm second guessing every sauce I've ever sent out. A chef I worked under in Boston used to say salt is the one thing you can't fix later, but that number makes me think he was under seasoning everything. Has anyone else actually weighed their salt for stock or is this just a school thing that nobody uses in a real kitchen?
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averymitchell3h ago
Man, that Johnson and Wales number is probably built for volume cooking where the stock gets cooked down hard before it ever hits a plate. Here's the thing nobody ever brings up: salt level in a stock isn't a fixed target, it depends on how much you're gonna reduce it. If your stock goes into a sauce that simmers for two hours, that 1.5 ounces per gallon might end up just right. But if you're using it as is for a soup, you just wrecked the whole pot. The school number isn't wrong, it just assumes a certain path after the stock is done. Salt to taste still wins, you just have to taste it at the end of the dish, not the start.
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