I want my salt back
It all started a couple of months ago, on a Sunday morning. I’d nipped into one of my cafés for a quiet bacon and egg roll. A harmless indulgence that I justify easily as “quality control” and entirely unrelated to greed or hangover. The grill cook passed over my usual — a fluffy white roll and four spectacularly crisp rashers lined up just so, topped with a fried egg, winking at me with its cyclopean yellow eye. I took it to a table where we could be alone.
At first bite, I spotted that something was amiss and called the cook over.
“This is going to sound daft, but can we put some salt on this bacon?”
It turned out that the cook, too, had been sprinkling extra salt on her own bacon roll. “I don’t know what’s going on,” she said, “but it tastes better that way, doesn’t it?”
Bacon is salt pork. Before refrigeration, we used to salt it so it could be hung somewhere dry and cool where it would remain good to eat through most of the winter. Today, we refrigerate bacon, so it doesn’t actually need the salt for preservation. But bacon without salt is just joyless slices of wet pork. I got straight onto the phone with my wholesale butcher. “What the hell’s going on with the bacon?”
“Weird, isn’t it?” he said. “We buy it in, from a specialised processor. But it seems to have changed recently. Y’know, I sometimes sprinkle a bit of extra salt on mine when I’m cooking.”
A fortnight and hours of phone time later, I’m talking to a man in Denmark who’s explaining that, yes, they’ve radically reduced the amount of salt in the cure because their customers, the supermarkets, are demanding reductions in salt. It’s still the best-quality pork, he reassured me. “It’s just not as salty… which is better.”
That’s an interesting position and one on which you’ll find most people agreeing, though most are not sure why. There’s a great deal of government advice about salt reduction for producers, retailers and consumers. There are regularly updated schemes, plans and targets. Salt reduction has become firmly part of the public discourse as a general, if non-specific, good. But the medical evidence is nuanced. I’m personally intrigued by a 2013 study that indicates as few as 25 per cent of the population have any sensitivity to sodium when it comes to their blood pressure. Other studies suggest that low-salt diets are as risky for our health as high-salt ones.
According to perceived wisdom, it is an appalling solecism to add salt to a meal in a restaurant. The chef, we are told, has used skill and judgment to season the food and we should accept this. We believe it’s rude to ask for salt, or that it marks a diner as some kind of artless rube, “drenching” his meal with salt because he lacks the refinement of palate to do without. Nico Ladenis, Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay are all reported to have thrown customers out of their restaurants when they asked for salt and, if that’s a myth, it’s one they’re all perfectly proud to stand by.
This has taught us that salt isn’t just a deadly poison but worse, inexcusably naff. If a restaurant puts salt cellars on the table, it might as well hang a sign outside saying “Greasy Spoon”. Here’s where the problems overlap. We know that chefs and food producers are reducing their use of salt across the board — likely catering to that significant proportion of worried consumers who have been convinced that if food tastes perceptibly salty, they will surely die. Yet we also know that, for most of us, food that is less salted simply won’t taste as good.
This puts me in a variety of interesting positions. As a restaurateur, what the hell am I supposed to do? I’m not going to tell my grill cook to salt the bacon. It’s an open kitchen. Can you imagine what would happen if a customer caught sight of a cook strewing salt over a griddle full of hot pork? They’d be happier to see her sprinkling rat poison. I’ve tried my best with the butchers and their suppliers but nobody is going to be the first to put a load of salt back at their stage of the process either.
As a consumer, I’m incandescent with impotent fury that everything I buy that’s been cooked or prepared by someone else is increasingly gutless. I’m worried that there’s a generation out there that will grow up unaware of how damn good salt makes things taste.
I know that salt is one of the principal weapons in the armoury of evil “ultra-processed food” producers and should be stopped, but I also know the ultimate secret of restaurant cooking — the reason restaurant food tastes better than yours — has always been that they use more butter than you can believe and more salt than you’d dare.
The simple answer, of course, is to remove the stigma and bring back the salt cellar. But until that lucky day, I carry a small vial of salt in the bottom of my bag. I discreetly whip it out in restaurants, so I can correct the seasoning of a chain of confused, misguided and neurotic people without embarrassing anyone. Well, I say “anyone”. Just before Christmas last year, a maître d’ saw it and thought I was using cocaine at the table. I had to explain it wasn’t a Class A drug. It was more enjoyable than that. And far less socially acceptable.
Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Tim Hayward
