The Power of a Pinch of Salt

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Most of us know that adding salt to soup, a main course, or even some bread and butter, somehow makes the food “pop”, bringing out flavours, tastes, and more.

And it’s not just savoury foods that benefit from a pinch of salt.

Salt works miracles with chocolate! Many coffee aficionados will add a pinch to their coffee filters, and similarly, many pastry chefs add a pinch of salt to their croissants and pies.

Some Science

Hervé This, the famous French chemist and chef behind ‘modernist cuisine’, extensively researched how salt works these miracles. Along with a team of psychophysiologists at the Monell Institute, he carried out a series of experiments to test how the addition of different salt, sugars, and acids to various foods and drinks impacted people’s perceptions of taste and flavour. And the results were somewhat unexpected:

1. Salt masks bitterness even better than sugar in many cases (including with chocolate).
2. It also masks sour and acid tastes across foods, from meat to vegetables, and fruit to coffee.
3. As well as masking these “unpleasant” tastes, salt also “intensifies agreeable tastes” including sweetness.
4. Finally, salt also enhances various flavours (note: ‘Flavour’ is complex, involving our sense of smell, ‘taste’ is from biochemical receptors in our mouths (and elsewhere)).

Hervé This has also carried out a tonne of other experiments with salt. For example, he worked out that if you want to use salt to add “crunchiness” to a dish, you should fry the it in some oil. Adding salt directly to meat will cause the salt to dissolve, drying the meat, but coating it in oil adds crunch.

However, This is also remarkably candid in admitting that much more work is needed, specifically on how salt “softens” bitterness and “transforms” flavours.

“It is not yet known how the stimulation of taste receptors produces these effects, but we do now know why salt free diets make us wince”.

If you’d like to do some personal research, we’ve assembled a bunch of bars that really show how a small pinch of salt can provide an intriguing twist to dark, milk, and filled craft chocolates:

An Aside on Liquorice

Omnom craft a range of amazing single farm/cooperative milk and dark chocolate bars, along with extraordinary flavoured bars; everything from ‘cookies and cream‘ to ‘blackened barley‘. But their best selling bar remains their ‘salted liquorice‘ bar.

Salted liquorice is a Scandinavian and Nordic delight that divides people as Marmite does here in the UK; “you either love it or you hate it”.

Salted liquorice also showcases the peculiarity of one type of salt, ‘salmiak salt’ (technicaly salammoniac; ammonium chloride). Salmiak salt works like cocoa, coffee, or wine tannins, causing astringency; that feeling of dryness in your mouth. It also works as an expectorant, and may even have some antibacterial properties: Being slightly acidic, it reacts with alkalines in your saliva, releasing ammonium from the salt, which acts as a disinfectant). It’s these properties that are thought to have given rise to salty liquorice’s use as a medicine.

Salty liquorice is very much an acquired taste. In The Netherlands, Northern Germany, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Iceland, everyone grows up with it. However, for those trying it for the first time, it can be confusing: The smells of salty liquorice are normally associated with sweet tastes and flavours, but it’s taste is very different; sharp, bitter, tangy, and astringent. If you aren’t prepared for this, the discordance is so strong that many people want to spit it out!

Iceland’s Omnom and Sweden’s Standout both make distinctive salted liquorice bars. The chocolate in them provides a smooth mouthfeel, and the flavours provide a gentle entrance to the wonders of craft chocolate combined with salty liquorice.

Thanks again for your support for Ukrainian maker Stranger last week. We’ve already raised over £500 for their chosen charity (The Prytula Foundation), so please do continue to purchase these great gifts!

And don’t forget to order some Halloween treats! Please purchase ASAP given next week’s postal strikes in the UK.

A Final Quote

Over the last few weeks we’ve had two departing British Prime Ministers quote Roman senators in their leaving speeches (Boris Johnson quoted Cincinattus, Liz Truss quoted Seneca). So we thought we’d quote Cicero as you savour your bars enhanced with some salt:

“Trust no one unless you have eaten much salt with them”

Savour these bars, share them with friends, family, or colleagues, ponder the miracle of salt; and help save the planet!

Thanks for your support.

Spencer

p.s. Hervé This didn’t just research salt; he also worked out how to create the most amazing chocolate mousse by just adding water. For more on this, and a demonstration of how you can do this at home, with just some of our 63% Menakao cooking chocolate and some ice cubes, Click HERE.