I can’t claim that I came up with this idea, I heard it on a cooking show.

Let’s say you’re making a soup that calls for a tablespoon of salt and you feel that the soup would be a flop unless you added some salt. Instead of dumping the entire tablespoon into the pot, measure your salt into a small container, like a ramekin. Then, you “layer” in the salt, bit by bit, tasting as you go. You may find that your food tastes just fine without all the salt that the recipe calls for, and if you do use up all the salt in the container, then you know exactly how much sodium your recipe has.