10 Sweet Desserts That Utilize Salt:
- Brownies
- Salted caramel sweets
- Chocolate chip cookies
- Honeyed Custard Pie
- Dark Chocolate Tart with a Rich Ganache
- Any flavored Pretzel delights
- Ice cream
- Chocolate covered caramel bites
- Dulce de Leche cheesecake
- Donuts
BUT WHY?
Salt is a white, crystalline, mineral compound composed of sodium and chloride ions. Salt forms when hydrogen in an acid is replaced with a metal or group that acts like a metal(Each different metal yields a different element that is classified as a salt). An important factor that influences the taste and use of salt is the fact that salt is easily obtainable in its pure form, without any interfering flavors.
Our taste buds can taste all the flavors present in your food at once, salt plays a vital role in bringing all these flavors together to appeal to your taste buds the best. Different flavors and tastes suppress and enhance different flavors for the tastebuds. An example of this is how sourness, at lower concentrations, will enhance the bitterness of foods; however, at higher concentrations, sourness actually suppresses bitterness. This is why lime is put into Margarita, to suppress the bitterness. Salt enhances flavors universally for any flavor; low concentrations of salt suppresses bitterness, but increases sweetness, sourness, and umami(the taste of glutamic acid, which supposedly tastes very delightful and savory). However, at higher concentrations salt actually suppresses sweet flavors, and enhances umami flavors even greater than it does at lower concentrations.
While salt is mostly thought of as a human behavior, animals such as the Japanese Macaques dip their potatoes into salt water, and never freshwater. The use of salt in food can be first dated back to Ancient China, in some of the most developed cultures of all time. Historians, such as Macgregor and de Wardener, think that the popularity of salt came from eating foods that used salt, not to enhance flavor, but to preserve the food for longer. However, as more and more salt-preserved food was being consumed and salt’s flavors were becoming slowly popular, salt was accepted as an essential ingredient in our food.
Salt has brought upon the rise and fall of huge and powerful empires. Salt has brought people together through food. Salt changes how our taste buds perceive and taste food, and also enhances and suppresses other flavors in food to reach the desirable amount of each flavor present in our food.
“A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.”
Article Summary
Salt, in lower concentration, enhances sweetness and savoryness, but reduces bitterness. However, in higher concentrations creates a highly salty taste and helps nitterness take over your tastebuds. As a testament to its importance, salt has been used in food since ancient times and even some animals enhance their food’s flavor with salt. Salt, by itself, has risen empires and brought upon the fall of others.
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