I’m sure Thomas Keller would title this, “The Importance of Salt and Pepper.” I’m somewhere between that and titling this, “Salt ‘n Peppa.”
Proper seasoning is a simple but major difference in restaurant vs home cooking. Seasoning is a general restaurant term for salt and pepper or salt alone; specifically fresh ground black pepper and clean salt, (clean meaning no iodine). If you want to know way too much about salt, read Salt: A World History. A fascinating but not riveting read that I got halfway through before I had to return it to the library :-|
Salt will blow up your taste buds and pepper will tickle ’em. Too much salt and you over expand, things get uncomfortable. Too much pepper is like too much tickling…shudder.
The balance between salt quantity and timing are like anything else in food. Care and intuition will take you a long way, but it takes time and experience to be great. Like anything in life.
Luckily with food, even failures can be good and/or easily fixed. It’s innate to learn from them because all your senses are in play with food. You aren’t trying to memorize a chapter; you’re smelling, seeing, feeling, touching, hearing and retaining…without trying.
You just have to keep cooking.
If someone really wants to be a cooking machine; make a drum of pico de gallo and see what happens. Seriously, if you made a drum of pico de gallo, knowing, that the result needs to make someone want to marry you? (meaning, it has to taste good)
You would learn
Knife skills for life; including sharpening and blade maintenance, dicing, brunoise, mincing, knife variance and preference
5 integral vegetable variants, and specifics of their structure
Salt maceration and pickling
Seasoning and flavor balancing with salt, sweet, spice, acid and oil
Oil maceration and garlic processing are optional :-)
Simple favorites have a magic balancing point. That point when the taster is forced to close their eyes and contemplate the pleasure blanket they were just wrapped in. This can happen with pico de gallo, or mashed potatoes, or fried chicken, or steak, or salad, or a hamburger. This level of pleasure is quite difficult to attain without salt. That being said; I don’t love salt on the dinner table unless we are serving plain tomatoes or boiled eggs. I also don’t love auto salters. You know who I’m talkin’ about…shaking salt on their food before they’ve glanced at their plate much less tasted anything yet. My cousin is an auto salter and it irks me. I imagine shaking her but never do, because I’d probably get salt everywhere.