There's a reason every recipe you've ever read calls for a dash of salt, and it's the same reason you usually add more than just a dash: Good old sodium chloride amplifies everything it touches. This is why, a few years ago, you couldn't order dessert without seeing salted-caramel this and salted-chocolate that—and it's why, thousands of years after our ancestors started seasoning with the stuff, we're finally discovering salt's final frontier: in the bottom of a glass.