Widespread cooking myth: should you only salt the water when it is hot?

If you like to cook, you know the advice to salt the cooking water for certain foods. This gives the ingredients their flavor and doesn’t make them bland.

The timing is said to affect how fast the water boils. Some hobby cooks add the salt to the cold water while others swear by not adding the salt until the water is boiling, otherwise the water would take longer to heat up. But is there really any truth to this claim? The Federal Center for Nutrition (BZfE) explains.

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Before cooking or only when it’s hot? When to salt cooking water

Depending on whether you salt the cooking water sooner or later, you will influence the boiling point. This is usually around 100 degrees Celsius. However, if you add salt to the water, the boiling point increases by a few degrees. For example, the boiling point for around 30 percent salt is 108 degrees Celsius. However, the small amounts of salt you add when cooking will have an effect only marginally on the boiling point, so salting has no noticeable effect on cooking time. If you really want to save energy while cooking, follow our tips from this article: How to use less electricity while cooking.

a notice:

Even though the timing of salting has only a marginal effect on the cooking time of food, we still recommend adding salt just add it to the boiling water. Because this protects your pots. If you already salt the cold water, the salt crystals dissolve worse and sink. Unsightly stains can then form on the bottom of the pot due to the high salt concentration at the bottom.

Why is cooking water salted at all?

If you add salt to the cooking water for noodles, potatoes or rice, the food will really taste good. This is because the salt content of the water and ingredient is balanced out in advance and remains in the food.

For example, if you were to cook pasta in unsalted water, the salt ions would only balance out during cooking. The noodles would then have a watery and less strong taste, since some of the inherent taste would transfer to the cooking water.

Behind this is the molecular process “osmosis”. Here, two solutions between which there is a concentration gradient strive to equalize this. The water from the solution with a higher concentration of dissolved substances migrates into the solution with a lower concentration of dissolved substances.

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