Why does cheese taste salty while having almost no sodium?

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When I eat avocado toast, I put a lot of salt on it and it really brings out a salty flavor. When I eat a cream cheese bagel, it already has that same salty flavor even though the cream cheese I used doesn’t contain almost any salt. Why is that?

In: Chemistry

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Some cheeses might contain other compounds, like glutamate, that activate umami taste receptors. Umami is sometimes considered “tasty” or salty in some way.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Do you know the brand of cream cheese? Low sodium doesn’t necessarily mean low salt. Potassium salts taste salty without the Sodium and is pretty common as a substitute. So it’s likely there’s either this, or something else being used as a salt substitute.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The bagel is salted too. And I bet it’s way saltier than you might expect. Generally, bread dough is like 2-3% salt by weight – not uncommon to dump in salt by the tablespoon. Even though most of probably don’t eat bread and think “salty”. I would assume bagels to be in the same neighbourhood. Off the top of my head, I’d guess the bagel would be 15-20% of your daily recommended sodium because it’s probably equivalent to, like, 2 slices of bread.