How can fast food often contain so much salt, without tasting salty at all?
In: 8149
Have you tasted fast food? It’s pretty damn salty. I want to know where you’re getting your fast food
Two main reasons:
The first is that sodium chloride is the main molecule that you associate with the salty flavor and is the white crystals you and I associate as being “salt” and there’s usually plenty of that in there already. However, you can also have other sources of sodium that don’t necessarily taste salty. Many meats, fats and oils can be high in sodium without necessarily tasting salty. Monosodium glutamate ( You might know as MSG) for example doesn’t taste salty so much as it tastes savory. This is despite it being composed, mostly of sodium.
The other reason is that when you lump in a bunch of flavors together, then each of the flavors get less “loud”. A great example is soda. There’s actually a surprising amount of salt inside soda. So much so that if you removed all of the other ingredients and just tasted the water and the salt together, you would probably not like the taste. However, there’s so much sugar and other additives in soda that it disguises the flavor of the salt.
Like having food with large quantities of sugar if you eat the food all the time you stop noticing it after a time, I now am on a low salt diet and anytime I taste food with lots of salt in it it really tastes salty so much so that it overwhelms any other taste.
If you don’t think fast food is salty then I’d imagine you’re on a pretty highly-processed high-sodium diet already.
Prepare homecooked meals for a few weeks without any salt at all. Then go to McDonalds. It’ll make you gag.
One common technique to fix a dish if you’ve over salted it is to add fat actually – https://www.webstaurantstore.com/blog/3466/fixing-salty-food.html
Most fast food is fatty and oily, and so it can take more salt than usual
To add to some of the others: saltiness levels are also an acquired taste. Different regions have grown up with different levels of exposure to salt and have become accustomed to that in their food.
The way that fast food companies formulate their products is also to blame. Take a potato chip as an example. They basically get a focus group from the region and feed them samples where the levels of salt and/or sugar are continually dialed up right to the point the focus group tells them it’s too much for their taste. Then they dial it back one notch and people love it…
If you don’t regularly have salt, fast food is like licking a salt block. I find canned soup and Kraft dinner is also horribly salty.
Part of it is that you may be used to salty flavors and therefore don’t notice it. If you went for a period with a low sodium diet, you might be surprised at how salty fast food actually tastes.
French fries don’t taste salty to you? They’re coated in salt upon salt.
Not directly related to fast food, but Frito Lay was working on hollow salt crystals to season their chips and snacks with so it tastes salty on the exterior but is actually slightly lower in sodium than traditional salt would make it seem.
Latest Answers