Salt, Sour, and What I Didn't Know I Didn't Know

My friend Beth is my sister from another mother. We share most holidays, all our secrets, and a division of labor that is frankly perfect: I love to cook and hate to clean up. She hates to cook and loves to clean up. Easter is especially wonderful because she and her family love lamb as much as I do, which means I get to make it every single year without argument.

A while back, Beth bought a book called Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat. After a quick look she decided it wasn't for her. Lucky me. I sat down and read it cover to cover like a novel. I couldn't get enough.

I have been cooking for more than forty years and have learned my way around a kitchen. I know what I like, and I have fed a lot of people very happily over the decades.

But I learned something from Samin Nosrat that stopped me in my tracks.

Salt cancels sour.

I had always thought that when a salad dressing was too sharp, too acidic, it needed more oil or maybe a pinch of sugar. It never occurred to me that salt was the answer. I use that knowledge all the time now in everything from salad dressing to tomato sauce.

The science goes both ways too. I know, because a squeeze of lemon rescued a pot of over-salted stew recently.

Forty years of cooking, and I was still working with an incomplete picture.

The thing about learning by doing

Here is the thing about learning by doing: it will take you very far. Trial and error is a real teacher, and there is no substitute for experience. But experience alone has gaps in it — gaps you don't even know are there, because you've been getting along fine without the missing piece.

You don't know what you don't know.

If I had gone to culinary school, someone would probably have told me about salt and sour on day one. But I didn't go to culinary school. I just started cooking, and I learned what I learned, and the rest stayed invisible.

Knitting is the same.

You can knit beautifully for twenty years and still be working with an incomplete picture. Not because you aren't talented or haven't put in the time, but because there has never been a culinary school for knitters. There is no place that teaches the whole ecosystem — the why behind the what, the principles underneath the pattern, the understanding that lets you stop following instructions and start making decisions. You learned what someone showed you, or what YouTube offered, or what trial and error painfully revealed. That knowledge is real and valuable.

But the gaps are still there. Quietly. Invisibly.

That is exactly what I built the Crazy for Ewe Sweater System to address.

Not to teach you to knit. You already know how to knit. I built it to give you the missing pages — the ones about how sweaters actually work, why different sweaters fit the way they do, why yarn and fabric behaves the way it does, and how to make choices with confidence instead of crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

Because knowing why salt cancels sour doesn't make you a different cook overnight. But it can change everything you make from that moment on.

Learn more about the Crazy for Ewe Sweater System — Saturdays at 2pm Eastern time starting April 25th.

~Ellen

TL;DR: Salt cancels sour — and I didn't know that after forty years of cooking. Knitting has the same kind of missing pages. That's exactly what the Sweater System is for.