My wife tells me off for adding salt to my pasta water, and seasoning my food during cooking – a pinch of salt as I cook my mushrooms just elevates them. How do I keep to sensible salt levels and should I add it to my mushrooms on toast?
Nick
Something tells me I’m going to get into all sorts of bother for wading into a marital debate, but here goes nothing: according to the NHS, adults should consume no more than 6g salt a day (that’s about a teaspoon), but Action on Salt says we are eating about 8.1g a day on average. So, Nick’s wife is right that we have a problem with salt.
To answer his question, though, you need to take a step back and look at what you’re eating as a whole. “Overall, ultra-processed and shop-bought, precooked foods have a relatively large amount of salt in them,” says Dr Saliha Mahmood Ahmed, author of The Kitchen Prescription and former MasterChef winner. By which she means ready meals, pasta sauces, crisps and the like. If much of your diet is made up of such foods, then, Ahmed says, you are probably getting too much salt. However, if Nick mostly cooks from scratch and avoids highly salted foods in the first place, then his mushrooms are in luck: “It’s probably OK,” Ahmed says. That said, be wary of hidden salt in, say, the toast: research by Action on Salt found that three out of four packaged sliced bread sold in supermarkets contain as much (or more) salt per slice than a bag of ready salted crisps.
And salt is a tricky thing to avoid. As Samin Nosrat writes in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, “Salt has a greater impact on flavour than any other ingredient. Learn to use it well, and your food will taste good.” While the likes of herbs and spices aren’t going to replace salt in your cooking, they can help if you want to cut back. “When you introduce complexity of flavour profiles, whether that’s citrus, floral or whatever, there is an argument that you can then reduce salt levels, because you’ve got so many other flavours in there as well,” Ahmed explains.
But Nick might also want to consider if he has just developed too much tolerance for the stuff: “Palate training is also important,” Ahmed says, “because even small amounts of salt change the way food tastes very rapidly.” As in any tricky relationship, sometimes you need to stop and reassess: “Ask yourself: has salt become desirable to me? Do I feel I can’t taste my food without salt?” And don’t be tempted to cook on autopilot. Case in point: while Ahmed does salt her pasta cooking water, “that light, inherent seasoning to the pasta means you don’t need the same hit of salt in the sauce”.
As with most things in life, it pays to be mindful: “Salt is one of the first things you taste,” Ahmed says. “If you spend time chewing your food, tasting all the flavours, sensing the salt, maybe you will realise that you’ve been adding too much.” Well, that’s the hope, anyway.
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