The Ina Garten Salt Tip You Should Always Follow

Ina Garten is arguably one of the most well-loved Food Network stars, and it's easy to see why. A self-taught chef herself, the 73-year-old keeps the home cook in mind when putting her recipes together, making sure they are delicious and easy to recreate. She doesn't feel the need to have a bunch of fancy gadgets cluttering her kitchen and has no problem using store-bought ingredients, some of her favorites being puff pastry, chocolate sauce, and Rao's marinara sauce.

The "Barefoot Contessa" is also a rich source of knowledge and has shared a number of tips and tricks to help us improve our skills in the kitchen. For instance, the chef advises making vinaigrettes in a liquid measuring cup to avoid having an extra dish to clean, while also ensuring you're using the right ratio of ingredients and suggests cutting corn off of the cob over a kitchen towel so the kernels don't get all over the place (via The Kitchn). And when it comes to salt, Garten advises cooks not to be stingy with the ingredient to avoid bland, tasteless food.

It may seem strange to have a chef advise you to be a little heavy-handed with the salt, but that's exactly what Garten does in her cookbook "Cook Like A Pro." The television personality, who revers salt as "the single most important ingredient in cooking," lauded the importance of it in her eleventh cookbook, and warned her fans not to under-salt their food, per the Food Network. "Salt has gotten a bad rap, but it's what ramps up the flavor of everything you cook — both savory and sweet," she explained (via The Kitchn). 

Garten used chicken stock as an example to further emphasize her point, noting that the savory liquid made without salt can sometimes "taste like dirty dishwater," which we can probably all agree doesn't exactly sound delicious. Of course, this doesn't mean you should throw caution to the wind and dump a bunch of table salt into the next meal you make. In fact, Garten isn't a huge fan of iodized salt and instead prefers to use Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt in most of her cooking (via Showbiz Cheat Sheet). She also relies on Fleur de Sel or Maldon Sea Salt Flakes to put the finishing touch on her dishes.