Food Building Block- Salt

Despite what you will read here, I promise I am not a lobbyist for the powerful salt lobby. (the powerful bread lobby keeps blocking my research...)

Let’s take a minute and talk about salt quantity. Many people are weary of using too much salt because they think it will give them some kind of heart disease. This is true- too much salt will do that. The problem with this reasoning is that even the most liberal users of salt who cook at home don’t use nearly enough salt to create this problem. The problem of overconsumption of salt comes from eating processed food where salt is used in astronomical proportions. Look at the average daily recommended amount of salt- it’s usually somewhere in the ball park of 2300 miligrams. Think for a second, how much salt is 2300 miligrams? You have no idea do you. Most people think if you do a few shakes of salt on your potatoes you have gone over your daily allowance, but this simply isn’t true. I have a giant salt grinder, not in terms of stature but in terms of the amount of salt it churns out. Using a pocket scale I checked to see how much salt 2300 miligrams was. Using my usual wrist motion it took 12 solid twists to get to 2300 miligrams.

Next I paid attention to how much salt do I end up adding to a dish, here are some examples
-black bean soup- 3 grinds
-chili-4 grinds
-tomato soup-5 grinds

Each of these dishes is 5 or more portions.  If we say each grind is 191 miligrams, then in black bean soup I add approx. 575 mg of salt. Divided by 6 servings that is 95 mg per serving. Now, obviously the food has salt in it so this is not the total amount of salt content. However, if you read some articles/ watch youtube videos you will see people claim you get 75% of your allotted daily salt from just the food ingrediants, leaving 25% in the realm of seasoning. That leaves us with a salt budget of... wait for it.... 575 miligrams, or 3 grinds. So even my heavily salted food is under our daily recommended amount. Also bear in mind the 2300 number pretty much assumes you aren't working out/sweating much if at all throughout the day. 

Furthermore, you have to take into consideration that in many cooking applications the salt you put in is not the salt you get out. Take pan frying a steak for example. Most cooks will tell you to liberally salt the meat to help develop a nice brown crust. When you do this the final steak you serve does not come complete with all the salt you sprinkled on initially- much is lost when the steak hits the oil in the pan, when it is picked up with tongs and moved, when juices from the steak are released etc.

But let's assume none of it falls off for a second. If i grind one full turn on each side of a burger and it all stays on for the cooking process that would be about 400 mg of salt in that burger. Thats still below a fast food burger which clocks in at over 1,000 mg.

This dosage info is crucially important because salt is the gateway drug of flavor. If you don’t have salt, you won’t have flavor. Again- more science in the links- but the jist of it is that salt doesn’t just taste like salt, it helps to bring out and enhance the flavors of other foods. I have seen many people make a dish and be disappointed with the results “fix this!” they will say. As soon as I taste it I immediately know the problem- no seasoning. When I ask “did you put salt in this” the response is invariably either “salt is bad for you” or “I don’t like salt” which is just stupid. Add some salt and shockingly that terrible dish becomes not only edible but tasty.