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I hate salt. Hate, hate, hate it. (I guess this explains why I'm so sensitive to bitter foods, too... I find coffee waaaay too bitter, for example. But I'm fine with beer. Go figure.) Though I personally don't understand how requiring food manufacturers to label their products with their sodium content isn't sufficient. People have the information necessary to make an informed decision. If they don't, it's not the FDA's problem.

Also, I don't think that a restriction on the salt content of food in restaurants is enforceable. Health inspectors would simply look at the written version of each recipe which would skimp on the salt, and cooks would be instructed to put a couple of extra shakes of salt into each dish before it's served. They're not going to send your seafood bisque to get lab tests.

Not that most restaurants use as much salt as the packaged stuff, anyway. Most of the time packagers just use it as a preservative. Which means that if this ban passes... hello, lots of sodium benzoate.

Posted by: Jeff at December 2, 2007 10:39 PM

You hate salt? How? I fucking love the stuff. How do you feel about bacon?

Of course it would be difficult to enforce, but not much more difficult than a ban on trans fats (NYC), foie gras (Chicago), sous vide cooking (NYC), etc.

Posted by: Barzelay at December 3, 2007 1:38 AM

I agree that salt rules. Ever seen someone put salt in their beer? My dad does that. He's a straight salt addict.

Posted by: Chris Santoro at December 5, 2007 6:52 PM

Nice blog.

Aside from the fact that most peoples' health won't be affected by salt consumption (you'd have to eat your own weight in salt or something to really harm yourself), here are some things to consider:

- you can't really cook beef or lamb nicely without salting. The salt draws blood to the surface when searing which then creates the crusty exterior that is so nice and flavorful.

- cooking vegetables without salt makes them limp and lose their color.

- cooking pasta without salt renders it flavorless

- in general, salt properly shouldn't TASTE salty, it should just enhance the actual flavors that we want to taste. The saltless crowd can't possibly taste those delicious flavors because our tongue doesn't "taste" flavor. It tastes the salt, which our brain then associates with the flavor coming through the receptors in our nose.

Posted by: Jon F. at December 6, 2007 3:10 PM

Jon, I'm curious where you got your information. Based on Herve This' experiments about which he reports in Molecular Gastronomy, it seems like the old wisdom about salt "drawing the blood to the surface" isn't accurate. We can easily see, when we salt meat and then wait, that water droplets form on the surface where the salt was. But if anything, that would inhibit browning, not promote it! Herve This, after some experimentation, indicates that it doesn't matter whether the meat is salted before, during, or after cooking, so long as it is salted at some point, because...

Salt makes things taste better. Your contention that our tongue doesn't taste flavor is absolutely new to me. Salts are one of the flavors for which our tongue has protein receptors, but they are by no means the only ones. It has been shown (see the same book by This) that salt inhibits the perception of certain flavors, which happen to be flavors we generally think of as bad, and promotes flavors we generally think of as good.

I agree with you that cooking any of those things without salt makes them horribly bland, it just might be for different reasons than you are indicating.

Posted by: Barzelay at December 6, 2007 4:51 PM

Actually, though Herve This is well known for his experiments, many have been discredited, mostly because cooking processes are very hard to observe. While a cold piece of meat doesn't draw blood when salted, let it sit for a while and get warm and then salt it and let it sit some more, and blood does get drawn closer. The reason the warmth is needed is to open up the pores of the meat. This process, in its most intense form, is called koshering, has been around for ages and is dependent on the application of heat. While This' experiments are very useful, they are also flawed to some extent. I've worked in restaurants of various levels (I'm a chef), and when a customer orders meat without salt, the crust is obviously inferior. Even if blood isn't drawn to the surface before cooking , there's a good chance it's done during cooking. Now, I agree with you that it may not be just because of the salt (it could JUST be the heat), but you'll agree that the combination of blood and salt does caramelize the crust. Cook any steak in a pan and you'll see that blood does escape the meat during cooking. The blood that doesn't form a crust goes to creating fond, the pan drippings that can then be turned into sauce. You can't get the same result by searing first then adding salt to taste. Believe me.

Also, my point about your tongue and flavor is that your tongue only has receptors to identify salt, sweet, acid, bitter and umami (savory, the taste caused by MSG). Scientists are trying to show that we have a sixth taste bud type that identifies fat as a taste. Though anything we put in our mouth affects each type of taste bud to a different effect, these combinations of taste bud uses from different foods aren't what actually defines the flavor. Flavor is a combination of the taste bud experience and the scent of the food, which we can smell from both inside and outside our mouths. Try this for an experiment. Take a piece of food, and put it in your mouth while holding your nose. You will only taste salt, or sweet, or acid etc. Once you open your nose, the flavors will actually be recepted by your brain, in delay if you will. The point I was making is that the flavor (let's say "carrot" or "chicken") is a product of both smell and taste. Without salt, to trigger the experience of flavor in our brains, we can't actually "taste" the flavor as well as without it. However, there is a point of saturation where, if there is too much salt, or if the salt is added later and isn't "part" of the food, all you "taste" is salt.

I get my information from equally respected (as This) writers and chefs such as Jeffrey Steingarten, Thomas Keller, Alton Brown, Daniel Patterson, etc...and by the way, I'm not some old school chef. I love molecular gastronomy as much as the next guy. But Herve This, along with Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal, have been shown to have holes in their scientific reasoning.

Posted by: Jon F. at December 6, 2007 8:30 PM

Actually, This constantly frustrates me by how little he worries about being rigorous. He conducts an experiment with one piece of meat and then declares it a universal law. Although he sometimes acknowledges that he isn't intending to close the subject, and leaves open the possibility that there are other variables, it is quite annoying to have to parse everything he says because he seems more interested in a tidy conclusion (as long as it can be said to be based on science) that cooks can turn into a new bit of "old wisdom" than he is in actually testing all the variables.

In any case, my reading has indicated that the old theories about only being able to taste salt, sweet, sour, and bitter are mostly inaccurate. We have identified (as you point out) that umami is also a quality that we recognize in food (the term "flavor" seems to carry too many connotations). But we've also blurred the lines between the various receptors in the tongue. If there were only five types of receptors in the tongue, the case would be closed, but in fact there are vastly more, some of which are only activated in combination with other receptors, and in particular conditions. You're absolutely right, then, that salty tastes could affect the other receptors as well. But so can receptors for all the other tastes.

As for the meat, I must confess that I simply haven't done enough experimentation of my own to confirm or refute what you're suggesting, but I trust that you are right, at least anecdotally. I have observed that salting meats before browning them to make a stock seems to promote the formation of fond. But I can't say why that is. It seems only to happen when there are salt crystals on the surface of the meat, and not when they have already dissolved. For all I know, it could simply be that the salt crystals on the surface physically raise a small part of the meat off the surface of the pan. I have no idea why that would promote browning, but who knows?

Finally, your point about the confluence of smell and flavor is exactly on point, because it can be partially attributed to an effect we know salt to have: adding salt to a food increases the ionic strength of the food, promoting the release of volatile aroma compounds. Given that, as you say, much of our sense of taste is actually its combination with smell, salting food would tend to intensify what we perceive as flavor.

Furthermore, I know very little about the difference between volatile flavor compounds and volatile aroma compounds, but it seems to me that if increased ionic strength leads to more release of volatile aroma compounds, it would also lead to more release of flavor compounds. I've never seen anything written connecting the increased ions to an increase in flavor release, but it seems likely given what we know about aroma. And if that is the case, you would be pretty much entirely right about your original contentions.

Posted by: Barzelay at December 7, 2007 3:02 AM