Why You Should Season Food From About A Foot Away

When it comes to seasoning your food properly — a vital step in turning everything from that spaghetti carbonara to cuts of meat or tray of roasted veggies from drab to chef-worthy, there are numerous steps to level up your game. From making sure your spices aren't expired to toasting your spices to bring out flavor or knowing exactly when to add seasoning and at what quantity, it's an art.

But a step you may have overlooked is simply to back it up — back it way up. That's right, there's a reason everyone from famed chefs to the guy in the viral Salt Bae meme (a famed chef himself, actually!) are seen sprinkling and dousing their culinary creations from about a foot up in the air, rather than directly on top of a dish. 

By giving yourself some space between the dish before you shake seasonings over top of your food — around a foot is ideal – seasoning scatters more evenly over the entire dish instead of clumping or concentrating all on one area. Think of the act of spraying an updo with hairspray or spray painting a wall. In both cases, backing up and applying from afar allows the product to be distributed more evenly across the entire surface, and the same logic applies in the kitchen. Sprinkling seasoning from a bit of a height allows granules of spice to distribute more evenly for a more balanced bite. 

Giving your seasoning and dishes a bit of breathing room is important, because no one, not even Salt Bae guy, wants to dig into a dish with overly salted spots or with under-seasoned areas. But unless you're a pro chef or have a kitchen crew to help you clean up, you're probably just as concerned with having a flavorful meal as you are with not having a huge mess to handle afterward. Understandable. 

You can still do the "from the air" technique without getting a dusting of pepper and garlic powder all over your kitchen by just creating a moat to catch spice scatter. Slip a baking tray or casserole dish under the area where you're seasoning to catch any flyaway spice. And like most anything in life or the kitchen, practice makes perfect. Bonus points: If you're seasoning mid-cooking, raining your seasoning down over food helps protect spice jars from hot, steamy dishes. This prolongs the spice's lifespan and helps keep the spice in good shape without giving the humidity from steam a chance to enter the canister and cause clumpiness (which is why spices should go in the pantry, not on the kitchen counter).

So back it up and season from a foot away. And yeah, you can revel in the showmanship and bravado of it too — because you can say it, it makes you look cool — but the uniform flavoring and balance of spice in your meals is the real win here.