Sprinkle Apple Slices With Salt And Pepper For A Surprisingly Flavorful Snack

Salt and pepper are the unexpected pair to coax out apple's hidden flavors. With just three ingredients, you have everything you need to appease your palate with new aromas. It's like exploring an untapped domain of flavor combinations — you don't know what to expect. Yet one thing we know for sure: However much you like an apple, you'll like it 10 times better with salt and pepper. 

Salt has a way of brightening the natural flavor of food, be it meat, confectionery, pastries, or, in this case, fruit. It may seem counterintuitive, but salt helps to emphasize the apple's sweetness. Once you slice your apple and add salt to it, you can taste the slight pickle effect that takes place. Overall, it erodes the apple's tartness to a sweet and salty balance of flavors.

Pepper, on the other hand, adds a subtle heat. For this reason, you'll want to sprinkle very little pepper onto your apple slices — just enough to taste the seasoning. Pepper further balances the overall flavor profile by removing salted apple slices from sweet and salty and pushing them toward spicy. But spicy is probably the last hint you'll pick up on. Instead, you'll get a delicate kick of zest that adds a lovely crisp feel to your palate.

The practice of using, salt, pepper, or both to season fruits is popular in Asian cuisines, namely Vietnamese. Drawing on long-standing traditions of liberally seasoning their food, Vietnam offers salty seasonings specially made for fruits in Vietnam. The most popular one is called muối ớt — a blend of salt and chili pepper for sprinkling on tropical fruits. It's often paired with green or tart apples, pineapples, and green guavas, notably for their bitter tastes that mellow once in contact with chili salt.

In the same vein, salting watermelon is an unexpected way to sweeten it. Much like it does to an apple, salt counters watermelon's bitterness to highlight its sweetness. You can taste the contrast of flavors — salty and sweet — as soon as you bite into the seasoned watermelon. A reason this seasoning works so well on watermelon is that watermelon contains plenty of water, so the fruit delivers delightful relief following the sudden impact of dynamic flavors on your taste buds.

Strawberries also fare well with pepper because their tangy overtones are well rounded off by a hint of woodiness from black pepper. And there's no reason you can't extend this practice to most other acidic fruits like tart plums, peaches, grapefruits, or berries. Neither should you stop at salt and pepper. You can try these 14 ways to add more flavor to fresh fruits, including a lemon-sugar mix.