Salt.
I used to use ordinary table salt, like everybody else. Then I read The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten , who instantly became my favourite food writer.
Steingarten devotes a whole chapter of the book to salt. He organises a blind taste test among his friends and fellow foodies, where he gets very expensive culinary salts from around the world and compares them to cheaper, grocery store varieties.
Steingarten's winner (hands down) was Fleur de sel de Guérande , a hand-collected French sea salt. I was browsing in a French deli one day and found some. As an experiment (and it wasn't cheap) I bought some. Oh. My. God. It's so much better than ordinary salt. I have never gone back.
In his book, Steingarten goes into great detail about the different types of culinary salt available, and their different compositions. In addition, he explains that the slightly larger flakes of salt (fleur de sel is flaked, not ground) add a salty hit which granular salt seems to lack.
He points out (and I think he is right) that the effect of Sel de Guerande is only any good if you sprinkle it onto food right before eating it. If you dissolve the salt in the food (e.g. added to soup, or the water you boil your pasta in), then cheaper salt is just as good. This was brought out in his taste test, where even experienced foodies couldn't really tell the difference between different salts dissolved in water.
So give it a go. You won't be sorry.
Read other answers by Vivienne Marcus on Quora:
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