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Let’s cut right to the chase: Garlic powder is simply dried and ground garlic cloves. As it’s a dried product, the flavor is more concentrated, and only about ¼ teaspoon of the product is needed to get the same flavor result as 1 clove of fresh garlic. Garlic salt, on the other hand, is salt (usually, flaky kosher or sea salt) mixed with garlic powder at about a 3-to-1 salt to garlic ratio. Read More >> …

Chef Kevin Tien started cooking professionally 15-odd years ago, around the time umami, the pleasantly savory fifth taste, catapulted into the national conversation after scientists identified umami taste receptors on the human tongue. If you’d asked Tien to describe what it tasted like back then, he would have probably replied, “like comfort.” As a Vietnamese kid growing up in Louisiana, Tien’s umami took such savory, nostalgic forms as bun bo hue (spicy beef and pork noodle soup) and bo kho (slow braised beef stew with warm spices and lemongrass), and that of Southeast Asian home cooking brimming with fresh mushrooms and tomatoes, and seasoned with fish sauce and MSG. Read More >> …

There’s nothing worse than bland turkey on Thanksgiving. There, we said it. The antidote to blandness? Salt, of course. It seems obvious, but whether you go the route of fancy compound butters and fresh herbs and citrus and spices—which are all lovely ways to make your turkey, well, yours—the only molecules small enough to actually penetrate the meat of the bird is salt. As The Food Lab’s J. Kenji López-Alt says, “Most … flavorful molecules are organic compounds that are relatively large in size—on a molecular scale, that is—while salt molecules are quite small. So, while salt can easily pass across the semipermeable membranes that make up the cells in animal tissue, larger molecules cannot.” So what does all of this mean for home cooks? Well, it’s not as easy to add flavor to a Thanksgiving turkey as you may expect (if you’ve ever cooked turkey for Thanksgiving, then you already know this to be true)….