Edit: Thank you everyone for your responses! I’ve learned so much reading through them and I’m happy to have sparked an engaging discussion!
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Salt is its own flavor, but it also acts to enhance other flavors by increasing the “polling rate” of the cells in our tongue which detect flavors. By the same token a lack of salt will make most foods taste bland or one-dimensional.
Presumably this is an evolved response to encourage animals to seek out and consume salt, given how critical it is for us.
Your body craves 3 things. Salt sugar and fat. In the wild these can be harder to find, so when your body senses them it’s like hey this is good we need this. A million years of evolution hasn’t caught up with our ability to easily obtain these things.
salt causes reactions by breaking bonds on certain items, it irritates surface level bonds and releases those innermost compounds( the nutrients) and that’s usually the flavor part of our food.
People have a very strong taste for salt. Because unless you live by the ocean salt is very hard to come by and if you don’t have any in your diet it will start to cause problems.
Salt creates chemistry and chemical reactions when added to food. These reactions are like fuel to taste and consistency.
A good example is bread. If you add all the ingredients in one batch of bread and mix the salt with everything else, you will get a different texture, consistency and taste compared to the exact same recipe but adding the salt at the end.
In the bread scenario, it is better to add the salt at the end so it helps form/bond the gluten (bread glue) faster.
A chef explained in a culinary bootcamp (look up Jacob Burton on youtube) that your saliva contains a certain level of salt. If your food contains a lower salt content, it will taste bland. If it contains a much higher concentration, it’ll be overly salty. But if you match the concentration (forgot the actual number), it will enhance the other flavors.
Salt is sodium chloride. Saliva is 0.5% salt. Anything that you eat must be greater then 0.5% salt to be tasted. Furthermore most taste buds are sodium voltage gated receptors. Providing adequate sodium allows for optimum taste sensing ability.
I don’t know the science behind this, but as someone who’s been cooking for a long time, when you add the salt during cooking matters a lot. I salt (lightly) and add seasoning at multiple stages of cooking. For a lot of boiled food, like rice, if you don’t add salt during cooking it will never taste right no matter how much salt you add later.
Evolution. Back in the day it was rare to get the minerals that salt provides so we are “over geared” to like it. The more you like it the more you go out of your way to have it. Hunters for ages have used salt licks because deer are attracted and spend an inordinate amount time consuming salt.
If you see wildlife on the road a lot of the time they are there for the salt.
Salt does a lot of shit chemically for such a small amount. In baking for instance salt acts as an inhibitor to yeast. Basically stops it from growing out of control. If you’ve ever tried to make bread and added extra salt because you like more salt flavor in your bread, you may have noticed the dough took way longer to “double in size” as the recipe said. Because that extra salt combats the yeast a lot more. Baking is a science, if you’re off by an extra half teaspoon it could make a big difference in your final recipe. With cooking it’s mainly about the flavor, but it follows the same principle. You don’t need much to flavor food, so adding an extra pinch could drastically make your food taste saltier.
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