Seasoning calculator
The most common cause of bland food is under-salting. The most common cause of inedible food is over-salting. The fix is the same: stop measuring salt by intuition. Weigh your food, multiply by a known percentage, and you will be right every single time.
What are you seasoning?
Protein (raw)
Vegetables
Soups, sauces & cooking water
Bread & grains
Brines & cures
How much food?
1 lb = 454 g · 8 oz steak ≈ 225 g · whole chicken ≈ 1.4–1.8 kg
Intensity
Balanced · 0.85%Salt type
Coarse salts weigh half as much per teaspoon as fine. If you measure by volume, the salt type matters. By weight, every salt is identical.
Red meat — steaks & chops (raw)
That's about 1 ⅜ tsp of Diamond Crystal kosher.
Two-stage seasoning
First dose (now)
3.1 g
≈ 80% of target
Hold back (taste & adjust)
0.8 g
≈ 20% reserve
Salt 80% now, taste once cooked or rested, finish the rest only if needed. Salt over target is impossible to fix.
Companion aromatics (proportional to salt)
Aromatics are starting points. Adjust to taste — they have no chemistry deadline.
When to apply
40 min – 24 h ahead, uncovered in fridge for dry brine
Apply 40 minutes to 24 hours before cooking. Salt draws moisture out, then it re-absorbs as a brine — surface dries for a better sear. Under 40 min, salt sits wet on the surface and steams.
A recipe says "1 teaspoon of salt" for a 4-pound chicken. That tells you nothing about whether your chicken is actually 4 pounds, whether your teaspoon is the same as the recipe writer's (Diamond Crystal kosher and Morton kosher pack at ratios 2:1 by volume), or whether the chicken was already brined at the store. Weight-based seasoning removes every variable except the food itself.
Professional kitchens season by percentage. A chef seasoning a 2-kilo brisket uses the same rate as a 200-gram steak — they multiply the mass by the same percentage and the result tastes identical. That same precision is now in your kitchen.
Chicken muscle holds approximately 75% water. Salt at 1.0% of total weight translates to roughly 4% salinity in the meat itself once water draws out and re-absorbs. That is exactly the salinity of well-seasoned commercially raised chicken — measurable, not guessed.
Cod, sole, and tilapia have a soft cell structure. Above 0.85% the salt extracts too much liquid and the fish turns gummy. Under 0.4% and the fish tastes flat because there's no salt to balance the natural sweetness. The 0.6% window is narrow but it's the difference between "perfect" and "why does this taste like nothing."
Bread dough salt is calculated against flour weight, not total dough weight, because the salt only interacts with the gluten network. 1.8–2.2% is the global baking standard for one reason: under 1.5% the loaf tastes "wet" and flat; over 2.2% the salt suppresses yeast activity enough to wreck the rise. Bakeries in Tokyo, Paris, and New York all converge at 2%.
Seawater is roughly 3.5% salt. Pasta water at the recommended 1.0–1.5% is only one-third as salty, but it tastes much saltier than it is because you are tasting the dissolved salt directly. The pasta itself absorbs about 1–2% of the salt in the water during cooking — that's where the "seasoned through" flavor comes from that you cannot replicate by salting after cooking.
Recipes written in cups and teaspoons betray you the moment you switch salt brands. One teaspoon of Diamond Crystal kosher weighs 2.8 grams. One teaspoon of Morton kosher weighs 4.8 grams. One teaspoon of fine sea salt weighs 5.7 grams. That is a 2× swing for the same volume. Recipes rarely specify which salt — your dish will be either flat or inedible depending on what is in your shaker.
By weighing salt in grams, you remove the entire problem. Buy a $15 kitchen scale. Switch to grams. Cook better food than 90% of home cooks who refuse to.
The percentages here are cross-referenced from Samin Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat; Nathan Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine, Volume 1, pages 230–247; J. Kenji López-Alt's The Food Lab+ Serious Eats brine articles; America's Test Kitchen Cook's Illustratedsalting guides; and USDA Food Safety & Inspection Service curing guidance for the cure category. When professional cookbook recommendations differ, we use the median value.
Recipe content is currently in English. UI fully translated. Recipe auto-translation rolling out in 2026.
