How can fast food often contain so much salt, without tasting salty at all?
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I’ve been curious about sugar recently, I love pizza so looked into how much sugar was in a slice of pizza. 4g (1 teaspoon) per slice! I now just assume any fast food or heavily processed food is just layers of salt and sugar to make our taste buds think it’s nice food when really it’s damaging our insides.
1. Only what we know as table salt (sodium chloride) really tastes salty in the way we recognise, however many preservatives are also salts but don’t taste salty. A salt is a compound with an ionic bond between two or more elements, typicallt a metal and non-metal pair.
2. The saltiness of a food can be augmented with fats/oils and sugars. That’s a fun little cooking tip. It’s a 2 birds 1 stone situation for fast food makers as they can get away with low quality meats and further pack them with fat trimmings as fat is cents on the dollar compared to meat, unless were talking wagyu, where even though still cheaper, the fat is quite costly.
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.
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