I had originally planned a badass recipe as my first post.  My go to dish to entertain and wow, but then someone DM'ed me over twitter asking if they could substitute something else for salt.  "Substitute something else for salt?," I asked myself.  I won't go into further details, but the gist of the conversation was that they'd always watched their sodium intake and wanted a new way to season food.  They had tried herbal mixtures, spice mixtures, low/no sodium salt substitutes (yes, they exist), all to no avail.  And the thing is, there is no real substitute for salt.  At all.  Sure, it's a rock, and there are other salts out there that have a cation other than sodium, and sometimes an anion that isn't chlorine, but it's the only damn rock we eat.  That we need to eat.

Aside from the sodium-potassium pump, sodium is a necessary regulator for normal body function.  But more important to this blog, salt is taste.  Remember the tongue/taste map from elementary school?  Yeah, throw that out the window.  Salt's role in taste goes beyond just "salty."

When you put a piece of food in your mouth, there are a bunch of flavors hitting those taste buds.  With the exception of "pure" compounds - sucrose, urea, salt, acid - the flavor of what you have in your mouth is a mix of all four.  Some of them are in high concentration, some of them are in low concentration.  Grab a piece of fruit, say a mango.  Open it up and take a bite.  There's some salt, some sweet, some acid, and if it's under ripe just a little undercurrent of bitter.  Now go into your pantry and grab your kosher salt.  What?  You don't have kosher salt?  Why not?  Go out and buy some.  Right now.  Chop chop.  I'll wait.  Trust me, you'll want to use kosher salt from here on out.  As I start throwing out recipes you'll see why you should have it.  Now sprinkle a tiny pinch onto an untouched piece of that mango.  Wait a second or two.  What does it taste like now?  Go ahead.  I'll wait for you to realize it.

It tastes even more like a mango!  There's a nice balance of sweet and acid, but not bitter.  Why?  Turns out that salt masks bad and bitter flavors.  Not sugar.  Not acid.  Salt.  It makes ok stuff taste great and bad stuff taste (a little) better.  Any bad/bitter flavors in foods are obfuscated by the addition of some salt.  There are stronger bitter flavors out there that don't get completely hidden, but those end up with a much "softer" note of bitterness.  In the masking of flavors, it opens up the rest of the flavors present that normally get overpowered by even a hint of bitterness.  Seriously.  Go try it out.  Hate salad?  Add a pinch of salt and check out the new depth of flavors you'll find outside of the harsh bitterness of greens.  This is why you salt your water when making pasta.  The salt gets into the pasta and makes it taste more pasta-y.

Now, you don't want to go out and just salt everything until it tastes salty, because then you've just defeated the purpose of using salt to enhance your food.  And if you're put on a low-sodium diet, I feel real sorry for you.  There just isn't a viable alternative for salt.  All those herbs and spices won't have any real flavors until you throw on the salt.  Turns out Margaret Visser was right.  Salt is the policeman of taste.

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Breslin, P.A.S. (1999) Interactions among salty, sour and bitter compounds.  Trends in Food Sci & Tech. 7:390-399.

Breslin, P.A.S. and Beauchamp, G.K. (1995) Suppression of bitterness by sodium: variation among bitter taste stimuli.  Chem. Sens. 20:609-623.

Breslin, P.A.S. and Beauchamp, G.K. (1997) Salt enhances flavour by suppressing bitterness.  Nature. 387:563.

DeGraaf, C. and Frijters, J.E.R. (1987) Assessment of the taste interaction between two qualitatively similar-tasting substances: a comparison between comparison rules.  J. of Exp. Psych.  14:526-538.

DeGraaf, C. and Frijters, J.E.R. (1988) Interrelationships among sweetness, saltiness and total taste intensity of sucrose, NaCl and sucrose/NaCl mixtures.  Chem. Senses. 14:81-102.