Salty & Clever
The Salt Calculator
How much salt, in the salt you actually own. Percentages by weight for meat, dough, brine, pasta water and sauce — plus a converter between Diamond Crystal, Morton, sea salt and table salt.
Salty and Clever · the salt calculator
How much salt, in the salt you actually own.
Salt is the only seasoning where the recipe and your box can be off by more than double and nobody says so. A tablespoon of Diamond Crystal and a tablespoon of table salt differ by a factor of about 2.1, which is the difference between seasoned and inedible.
The way out is to stop counting spoons and start counting percentages. Every line below is a percentage of the weight of the thing being salted — which is portable between brands, between kitchens and between countries, and is what professionals have used all along.
Pick a job.
—the answer
| The same weight of salt | By volume | Grams |
|---|
Weigh it if you can. The volumes are a conversion of a weight, and every one of them is rounded to something a spoon can actually hold.
The recipe says one salt and you own another
This is the other half of the problem, and it is the one that ruins a dish somebody followed carefully. Put in what the recipe asked for, then read off what to actually use.
| Use instead | Volume | Grams |
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Why a teaspoon is the wrong unit for salt
Salt is sold in crystals of wildly different shapes, and a spoon measures space rather than mass. Diamond Crystal is a hollow, pyramidal flake that packs badly and holds a lot of air. Morton kosher is a rolled, flattened grain that packs tighter. Table salt is a dense little cube with almost no air between the grains at all.
So one level teaspoon holds about 2.8 grams of Diamond Crystal, 4.8 grams of Morton kosher, and 6 grams of table salt. Doubling the salt in a dish is not a rounding error. It is the most common reason a recipe that worked for the writer fails in somebody else’s kitchen, and almost no recipe warns about it.
Percentages have none of that problem. One percent of the weight of the food is one percent whatever is in your cupboard, whatever country you are in, and whatever the crystal looks like. It is the only unit that survives being written down.
What the percentages are
| Job | Salt | Of what |
|---|
These are working numbers, not laws. Season toward the middle of the range the first time, taste, and move it. What matters is that you moved it from a number rather than from a guess.
Dry brine beats wet brine, nearly always
A wet brine works by osmosis and it does put water into the meat, which is why a brined turkey feels juicy. The water is the problem. It dilutes the flavor of the meat itself, it waterlogs the skin so it will not crisp, and it needs a bucket, a fridge shelf and a gallon of liquid you then have to pour away.
A dry brine — salt rubbed on and left uncovered in the fridge — does the useful half without the water. Salt draws moisture out, that moisture dissolves the salt, and the resulting concentrated brine is reabsorbed carrying the seasoning inward. The surface then dries in the cold air, which is exactly what skin needs to crisp.
The trade is time. A dry brine wants at least twelve hours and is better at twenty-four to forty-eight for a large bird. If you have four hours, salt it anyway: shallow seasoning beats none. If you have four hours and a small piece of meat, that is the one case where a wet brine earns its bucket.
The one that is always wrong
Pasta water is not meant to taste like the sea. The sea is about 3.5 percent salt, which is roughly three and a half times what a pot of pasta water should be, and anyone who has actually followed that instruction has made inedible pasta. One percent by weight of the water is the working number, which is about ten grams a liter.
The reason it feels salty in the pot and correct on the plate is that pasta only absorbs a fraction of that water. What you are seasoning is the pasta itself, from the inside, and it is the one chance you get.
Where this goes next
Salt is the first thing a recipe gets wrong when it is scaled, because most cooks scale everything at once. Salt does scale linearly with the mass of the food. Heat, time and pan surface do not.
Free, next door
The Scaling Calculator takes a recipe up or down and shows which numbers move with it and which do not. The Roast Clock works a roast backwards from the moment you want to carve, including the pull temperature nobody prints.
The one you pay for
The Field Manual is these tables printed — salt percentages, hold times, yields and temperature bands — sized for a cupboard door, for the evening when your hands are wet and the laptop is in the other room.
Also free: every number on one page, the pan calculator, the board calculator, the bar calculator, the oven traffic calculator, all of them.