Salt in Desserts

Appears in

By Jeremiah Tower

Published 2002

  • About

Over a couple of decades ending in the late 1990s, most of the pastry chefs I trained thought I was crazy for insisting over and over again not to forget the salt in the desserts. Then in 2000, an article appeared in the New York Times extolling the qualities of salt when used with sugar in desserts, and noting that the great Pierre Hermé “takes his own box of fleur de sel to restaurants.” An ex-pastry chef called to tell me I could now officially say, “I told you so.”

As the article says, “salt does the same thing in pastry that it does in cooking. It enhances flavor.” And that means you can use less sugar since sugar enhances flavor only up to a certain point and then kills it.