What Can Salt Do For Food?

Salt or sodium chloride is one of the essential minerals needed by human body for its proper functioning. We are hardwired to crave for it, and can’t seem to get enough. Since our bodies cannot store it, we consume it regularly to maintain our blood pressure, water distribution, nerve transmission, delivering nutrients to and from cells and, muscle movement. What makes our craving for salt more important is that it makes everything taste better to us. As a flavour enhancer, salt increases the pleasure we experience as we eat.

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Years back, Samin Nosrat published the bible of cooking, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Cooking“, the four cardinal directions of cooking. The books explains how to use them in kitchen to make anything and everything delicious. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will guide you as you choose which ingredients to use, how to cook them, and why last-minute adjustments will ensure that the food tastes exactly how it should.

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In this article we will discuss the role of salt in our food.

The primary role of salt is to amplify the flavor of food in cooking. It affects texture and also helps modify other flavors. Nearly every decision you make about salt will involve enhancing and deepening the flavor. Does this mean to simply use more salt? It means use salt better. It means to add salt in the right amount, at the right time and in the right form. A small amount of salt applied while cooking will often do more to improve flavor than a large amount added at the table. And unless you’re advised by a doctor to limit your salt intake, you can relax about the amount of sodium intake from home-cooked food.

Salt affects both taste and flavor in our food. Our taste buds are capable of judging whether or not salt is present, and in what amount. Salt also unlocks many aromatic compounds in food and makes them readily available as we eat. Try this next time you make a broth or soup. The unseasoned soup or broth will taste just flat, but as you add salt, you will detect new aromas that were unavailable when unsalted. Keep salting and tasting, and you will start to sense the salt and more complex flavours. Keep adding salt until you get that zing! and this is how you learn to salt ‘to taste’.

The unlocking of flavour is one important reason why many experienced cooks prefer to season their sliced tomatoes few minutes before serving. The salt here helps to release flavour molecules that are bound within tomato proteins, with each bite tasting more intensely of tomato.

Salt reduces our perception of bitterness as well. It enhances sweetness, while reducing the bitterness in foods that are bitter and sweet, such as coffee ice-cream, burnt caramel or bittersweet chocolate.

How salt affects our food

Like we discussed the flavour unlocking mechanism that salt plays in our food, it also affects each type of ingredient differently. It is important to understand the right amount of salt, used at the right time in right form. Some food ingredients need a good amount of salt for a longer period of time to break the protein, the others might just use a little while cooking. This would depend on the water content, type of protein, fat content, desired texture and appearance of the final product.

Meat

Seasoning meat with salt in advance gives it enough time to diffuse evenly throughout the meat. This is how chefs season meat from within. Salt initiates osmosis and visibly draws out water from nearly anything it touches, many people think it dries and toughens meat. But, with time salt dissolves protein strands in meat into a gel, allowing them to absorb and retain water better as they cook

Seafood

Unlike meat, the delicate proteins in fish will degrade when salted too early, making them chewy and tough. Salting them briefly about 15 minutes is plenty to enhance flavour and maintain moisture in flaky fish.

Fat

Salt needs water to dissolve which means it won’t dissolve in fat. But, most of the fats we use in kitchen have a little amount of water in them- small water content in butter, lemon juice in mayonnaise allow salt to dissolve slowly. Season these fats early and carefully, waiting for the salt to dissolve and tasting before adding more.

Vegetables, Fruits, and Fungi

Most vegetables and fruits contain pectin, which is softened by ripening or applying heat. This makes the fruit or vegetable more tender and often more delicious to eat. Salt assists in weakening pectin. Salt your vegetables before you cook them. Toss vegetables with salt and olive oil before roasting, salt blanching water generously before adding vegetables. Add salt in the pan while sautéing vegetables. Vegetables with large watery cells- tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini should be seasoned in advance of grilling or roasting, allowing salt to do its magic.

Mushrooms are fungi and don’t contain pectin, they are about 80% water, which will begin to release as soon as it is salted. In order to preserve their texture, wait to salt until they’ve just started to brown in the pan.

Legumes and Grains

Salt affects legumes in the same way it does vegetables, it will weaken the pectin contained in their cell walls. In order to flavour dried legumes from within, add salt when you soak them or when you begin to cook them, whichever comes first. Since legumes takes longer time to cook, the salt gets a chance to diffuse evenly throughout the water. While boiling grains such as rice, quinoa, the water can be salted less aggressively than the water for blanching vegetables. In preparations where all cooking water will be absorbed, hence all the salt, be careful not to over-season.

Doughs and Batters

Salt can take a while to dissolve in foods that are low in water content. So add it early to bread dough, giving it time to strengthen gluten and give desired chewiness. Leave it out of pasta dough altogether, allowing salted water to do the work of seasoning as it cooks. Add salt later to batters and doughs for cakes, pancakes and delicate pastries to keep them tender. Make sure to whisk them thoroughly so that the salt is evenly distributed.

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Check out my other article on, ‘Are all Carbs bad?’ to learn about the difference between good and bad carbohydrates, and the role they play in our body.