Three Pantry Items That Will Absolutely Transform Your Cooking

Foodies talk about items that will transform your cooking in a tone of revelation as if they have just unlocked food. It is also the tone of access, of having crossed a border that other people did not know existed.

Foodies often look the part. Linen shirts that wrinkle, but not too much, on purpose. Glasses with frames thick enough to suggest ideas. Shoes that imply walking through a farmer’s market at dawn, though they arrived at 11:40 in a rideshare.

Many foodies are employed in fields adjacent to meaning. Branding. Consulting. Anything  described as “strategy.”

Without fail, the transformational item du jour is “sitting right there in your pantry, like salt.” Actually, salt is a transformational item. For centuries, salt has been performing its duties largely unnoticed. No more. Salt has been rebranded.

“I do not use salt casually,” said Marissa K., who keeps hers in a small ceramic bowl “so it can breathe.” The bowl sits on a reclaimed wood shelf in a kitchen that has never seen a spill.

“This is Maldon. It finishes the dish. It tells the story.”

The box, $14.99 (£11.50), is handled with the care you would give to something that might appreciate.

The story Maldon tells is that food tastes better when it is seasoned. Salt is therefore discussed in terms once reserved for gemstones and minor European nobility. Flake structure is analyzed. Provenance is invoked. A person will lean across the table and say, without irony, “You can really taste the coastline.” What he means is, the eggs are no longer bland.

Olive Oil, a second transformational food, has completed the arc from background utility to personality trait.

“I cook only with oil that has a point of view,” said Daniel R., swirling a small cup of oil as though preparing to detect notes of apricot and pretension.

Daniel is a product designer who has opinions about chairs and has recently started saying “mouthfeel” in professional settings.

“This one is grassy, assertive, slightly confrontational.”

The bottle, $38.00 (£32.00), is tall and unnecessarily opaque and just expensive enough to make it both precious and unusable.

It is unclear how olive oil becomes confrontational, though it may have something to do with that price–a price at whch olive oil is no longer poured, It is deployed. “Drizzled with intention.”

Conversations hinge on whether an oil is OK for cooking or must be reserved for “finishing,” a word that always suggests completing a degree or a sex act.

In blind taste tests, many participants cannot distinguish among olive oils. This has not slowed the EEVOO (Expensive Extra Virgin Olive Oil) movement. If anything, that movement has been freed from the burden of evidence.

Garlic, our last transformational food, has always been popular, but now it occupies a kind of moral position.

“You cannot rush garlic,” said Lena P., lowering her voice as though discussing a fragile ecosystem. Lena teaches self-centered yoga three mornings a week and refers to her apartment as a “space.”

“If you burn garlic, you have failed as a person.”

Lena’s garlic is sourced from a weekend market open three hours a week and is sold loose at $12.00 (£10) per bulb. It is displayed in a shallow bowl as if awaiting admiration.

Garlic is now treated less as an ingredient and more as a test of character. Cloves are “smashed,” “coaxed,” “allowed to bloom.” Personalities are built around the number of cloves one is willing to use in a dish, with higher numbers signaling courage, authenticity, and a willingness to alienate colleagues.

There is also a growing belief that garlic is best when described at length. Recipes no longer call for “two cloves.” They call for “two generous cloves, lovingly crushed, until fragrant but not yet nostalgic.”

In the end, these ingredients do transform cooking, in the same way that oxygen transforms breathing. They are essential, foundational, and, what is more, they are considered part of a lifestyle.

A lifestyle that will run you  roughly $61.99/oz (£51.00) before tax, shipping, and the quiet worry that you are now a different kind of person.

Choose from the rest of the food news menu here. Bon appetite.