A dish with cheese, olives, tomato paste, or bouillon often needs very little or no additional salt because these ingredients bring their own salt. The right order is to add the salty ingredients, let the dish get close to its final consistency, then taste and add any salt it still needs. Do not follow the recipe’s salt quantity as written without knowing the brand and saltiness of the salty ingredient.
These ingredients are both high in salt and variable. The saltiness of white cheese differs significantly from brand to brand depending on the strength of the brine and how long it has been aged. Cured olives and brined olives are preserved with salt. Salt is added to tomato paste as a preservative; homemade pepper paste is often even saltier. When bouillon cubes are dissolved in the amount of water recommended on the package, they may provide all the salt a soup needs. One tablespoon (15 ml) of soy sauce also adds 2–3 g of salt. The same recipe can turn out with two different levels of saltiness when made with different brands.
There is no need to guess with packaged products; the nutrition facts panel lists the amount of salt per 100 grams. 200 grams of white cheese with a 3 percent salt content adds 6 grams of salt to a dish, which is enough to meet the salt needs of 1 liter of soup. For unpackaged cheese and olives, taste a small piece; if it tastes sharply salty on your tongue, it is clear from the start that you should not add more salt to the dish. When using bouillon, dissolve the cube in slightly more water than recommended and taste the dish for salt after the cube has dissolved completely.
Labels sometimes list sodium instead of salt, and these 2 numbers are not the same. Sodium is only one component of salt; multiply the sodium amount on the label by 2.5 to find the salt amount. A product listing 1 gram of sodium per 100 grams contains 2.5 grams of salt per 100 grams. Without this conversion, reading the label makes the product appear two and a half times less salty than it is. The same calculation applies to bouillon cubes, prepared sauces, and packaged cheese. After making the conversion one time, it is easy to calculate how much additional salt to add to the dish.
Timing matters too. Even if a salty ingredient is added later, it releases its salt quickly; as cheese melts and tomato paste cooks, salt moves into the liquid. That is why salt is not added before the salty ingredients. Water evaporates during cooking and the salt becomes more concentrated; dishes that thicken slowly over low heat taste saltier toward the end. Taste these dishes at the end of cooking. For uncooked fillings, such as an uncooked cheese-pastry filling, taste it with a spoon after mashing and mixing the cheese, then decide whether it needs salt.
When several salty ingredients come together, their effects add up. A baked dish with tomato paste, olives, and cheese often turns out well with no added salt. To balance the salt, you can choose an unsalted version of one ingredient: homemade vegetable broth instead of bouillon, or unsalted lor cheese or fresh cheese instead of brined cheese. If the dish turns out salty, adding more volume with an unsalted version of the same ingredient can help. The rule does not change for any recipe made with salty ingredients: add salt last, tasting as you go, because you can add more if needed, but you cannot take away excess salt.
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