The types that matter
Most salt guides list a dozen varieties. In practice, three cover everything.
Season your pasta water, sauces, and most cooked dishes with this. It dissolves fast and distributes evenly.
Maldon or similar. Larger, irregular crystals that give a burst of salinity and a slight crunch. Add at the very end - just before serving, or at the table. Cooking destroys what makes it worth using.
Coarser grain, no additives, easy to pinch and control. Good for seasoning meat before roasting. Interchangeable with fine sea salt in most applications, just adjust quantity.
Table salt - the fine iodised variety in a drum - is denser than sea salt. The same volume holds more sodium. Use it if it's what you have, but add less than a recipe specifies.
Why timing matters
Salt at different stages of cooking does different things. This is where most home cooks leave a lot of flavour behind.
Seasons from within. Salt added early draws moisture out of vegetables and meat, concentrates flavour, and starts the Maillard reaction (browning) sooner. Essential for onions, meat, any foundation ingredient.
Adjusts as you build. Each addition of an ingredient needs its own seasoning check. A sauce made from well-seasoned components will need less salt at the end.
Fine-tuning only. If you've seasoned through the process, this should be a small adjustment. If you're doing all your seasoning here, the dish will taste flat regardless of how much you add.
For flaky salt only - on eggs, steak, roasted vegetables, bread and butter, or anything where texture contrast matters. This is finishing, not seasoning.
The practical rules
Season pasta water aggressively. 10g per litre. The pasta won't absorb all the salt - but it will absorb enough to matter.
Season meat before it hits the pan. Not immediately before - ideally 20–30 minutes ahead for thicker cuts. The surface dries slightly and browns better.
Taste before you serve. Not to add more, but to know where you are. Your palate tells you what a recipe can't.
If it tastes flat, try acid before salt. A squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar often fixes what you'd otherwise reach for salt to solve. Flat dishes are frequently under-acidic.
Over-salting is recoverable - add starch, acid, or more of the dish's base liquid. Salt that's missing from the cooking is harder to add after the fact. Season through the process and you'll rarely need to correct at the end.