By Brett Mundinger
I have many gripes with social media food culture, but my chief complaint is that anyone from amateur to professional chefs have started to focus on plating and making dishes look beautiful before seemingly all else. Both beauty and flavor can and should co-exist in a dish, but I feel one ingredient is to blame lately for a lack of the latter: salt. We’ve come to fear salt as scary headlines of its impact on things like blood pressure have dominated the conversation. The truth is, however, that salt’s role is more of a nuanced discussion, and we should be more attentive about where salt is hiding within everyday off-the-shelf products.
Sodium intake at extreme levels is obviously no more okay than consumption of other micro or macronutrients at unsafe upper-intake levels. They may be delicious, but I’ve personally never seen someone walking around snacking on nutrition gummies, for instance. We accept an intake at that level would be detrimental, but we’d never fully avoid taking vitamins each day. Salt is similar in that there’s a logical biological use case at the appropriate levels.
It’s a well-known fact that salt helps bring forward taste and flavors within a dish, and it often plays a critical role in chemical reactions throughout cooking. Pre-salting meat can enable the breakdown of internal proteins to tenderize it, sprinkling it on high-moisture foods like eggplant can draw out water prior to cooking, or it can speed up processes like caramelizing onions. Salt can be added to pasta water to enhance noodle flavors, help guard food against bacterial growth, and even enhance spice flavors within a dish to make them more piquant.
You wouldn’t walk around snacking on salt, but the processed food industry doesn’t seem to agree if you examine the labels on the back of many foods. A pack of store bought, pre-made anything likely has a tremendous amount of salt in it and far more than the fresh equivalents you could cook. Food companies have learned that you will, in fact, devour salt and other flavor enhancers religiously, and they’ve learned to add more over time to boost sales.
The tradeoff of salt caution in restaurants or our home kitchens on food quality is apparent when beautifully presented food sometimes tastes like…well, nothing. If you’ve ever been to a fancy restaurant and spent a lot of money on a meal only to have it fall flat, you’ve likely experienced what I’m talking about. We’ve become cautious with salting because we understand it as somehow objectively worse than, say, adding a bunch of butter to a dish. Avoiding it when cooking food turns otherwise well-cooked foods bland, and the plague of chefs not salting their dishes to taste or home cooks being too afraid or unaware to add salt to their dish is growing. When we put looks first above taste, we pay the price, even if salt isn’t the only component to great taste.
Salt intake is, however, a consideration within well-rounded nutrition and an active lifestyle. It’s a biological fact that sodium plays a key role within the human body as it regulates anything from bodily fluids to muscular movement and even nerve impulses. A lack of sodium is detrimental to the human body and dangerous, and the amount you sweat can also dictate your primary needs. The amount needed by a construction worker in the sun all day long or the marathon trainee will logically be more than that of the office worker tucked behind a desk. Likewise, the foods you eat being less processed and more fresh brings about a better balance of salt intake for when you do indulge in dishes with larger amounts of salt. Like most things, there’s a balance to be had.
Consider, for instance, a humble can of peas. A canned pea side is easier to prepare for a quick dinner, but frozen peas are picked at peak freshness and come with hundreds of milligrams less salt per serving since they aren’t suspended in liquid and preserved to be non-perishable. What is two minutes on the stove or in the microwave for prep time compared to a can opener though? It’s small adjustments like this that can open extra saltiness to us without undue burden when we need it in our cooking or night out. We can save space for sodium within our diets with choices like the above, and our cooking and meal prep will greatly benefit with better taste profiles.
Maybe the trend will swing the next several years to a more nuanced understanding of sodium within the blogs, news articles, and media we consume. After all, the same negative news spiral happened with eggs over the past twenty years until a more balanced recommendation emerged. So maybe there’s hope yet for consistently beautiful and tasty dishes! Until then, pass the salt.
This weekly Sponsored Column is written by Fountain Mortgage. Located in Prairie Village, Fountain Mortgage is dedicated to educating, and thus empowering, clients to make the best financial decision possible for their situation.
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