How can fast food often contain so much salt, without tasting salty at all?

Question

How can fast food often contain so much salt, without tasting salty at all?

In: 8149

Answer 1

Food cooked with salt tastes less salty than food salted after cooking. A lot of the salt in highly processed foods is added in the manufacturing process and is cooked in.

Try cooking at home sometime and experiment. Make a hamburger and mix in an entire teaspoon of salt before cooking. Then, cook a hamburger with no salt mixed in, but dump a teaspoon of salt on the patty after it is cooked. You may not be able to eat it because it will taste too salty even though it is the same amount of salt.

This is also the reason that corn tortilla chips taste so salty. If you look at the nutritional info, they do not have an extremely high salt content per serving. They taste salty because they are dusted with salt after being fried and the salt hits your taste buds before the corn chip taste.