There are many reasons why the food you’re cooking at home isn’t up to scratch when compared to your treasured haunts around town. There’s the fact you haven’t spent days prepping ingredients and years training as a cook. And for the overall experience? I’m just guessing here, but you probably don’t have a collective of staff to stir your Negroni, top up your bread and, most crucially, do the washing up. This is why we never truly replicate the dining-out feel at home. But something you can do is learn from the well-seasoned pros.

Seasoning is one element that could be holding you back. Now this isn’t just salt, it’s all the salty little things that add flavour and oomph. I’ve taken note of the salty tricks at play around town – to help you become a standout seasoner.

Baba’s Place is a brilliantly briny place. Olives, capers and pickles are scattered far and wide across the menu. Its adored tarama toast – topped with an ultra-thin house pickle – is one such thing, but the dish that’s stuck in my head is this curried potato salad from a couple of months back. Topped with pickled celery and flash-fried capers, this salad has made a potato-shaped indent in my mind – and I’m hopeful it’ll make a return to the menu soon. Till then, give fried capers a go. Whack them in a hot pan with a little olive oil for a quick’n’easy, crisp’n’salty hit to your next bucatini all’amatriciana or caesar sal.

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Good Ways Deli’s Jordan McKenzie uses the best spread of all (Vegemite) as a flavour booster in his and Tom Pye’s Redfern and Alexandria bakeries. “We use it in our curried-kangaroo sausage rolls and in the caramel slice, as a sort of Vegemite-salted caramel,” McKenzie tells me. “It gives more depth than just adding salt on its own, I think of it similarly to miso.” So friends, it’s not just for toast. Instead of reaching for the salt, try adding a spoon of Vegemite to your ragu for a more umami experience.

A sharp, hard cheese like Parmigiano-Reggiano is one of my cooking essentials. You can find Fiandino, a farmhouse Grana Padano moonlighting as a Parm-Regg for less than half the price per kilo, at Penny’s Cheese Shop (where, hot tip, you can also get a handful of cheese rinds gratis for your next veggie stock or chicken soup). While you’re there, stock up on the salt: Olsson’s red-gum-smoked salt for sprinkling on your eggs, supersized quantities of anchovy-stuffed olives and Bonilla a la Vista crisps for snacking.

The dream salt-stacked shopping list goes on with all the different varieties of soy sauce, miso and anchovies. Stock your pantry with all that and never have another dull dinner. Be warned: perfected seasoning will lift everything without ever tasting overly salty, whereas too much will ruin dinner – and leave you feeling like a shrivelled raisin, reaching for your water bottle. Proceed with caution and curiosity, salt fiends.

Gemma Plunkett is a Sydney-based dinner party tragic. She works as a food writer, recipe rambler, producer and content strategist. Find her (but mostly food) in pictures or fortnightly in your inbox via her newsletter Ding!