EXTREME CUISINE: It is time that we ended this mindless consumption and learned to cook without salt, writes Haydn Shaughnessy
Irish adults consume about twice the amount of salt they should, according to a 2005 Food Safety Authority study. More than half the population aged over 50 suffers from hypertension. Salt causes hypertension. No need to go figure. Using less salt can save lives.
Worse, where light is shone on the amount of salt children consume, it shows that relative to their needs, they consume about twice as much as adults.
Salt is a great taste manipulator. It's a real lazy way of improving bland tastes. If something is by nature bland (like grains that have been sitting around for months), add salt.
Research shows that the use of salt is a mechanical habit. Some 50 per cent of people just pour it on to, or into, their food without first tasting the food to check if it needs salt.
Then there are the rest of us who overdose on salt because we eat breakfast cereals and convenience food.
Most salt consumption therefore is mindless. I thought it might be worth looking into how salt affects our relationship with food and how it operates on our taste buds, to see if there is an enjoyable way of living with less of it, "living" being the operative word.
The controversy a few years back over the use of salt in breakfast cereals highlighted one of the main reasons people enjoy salted food. Salt appears to make foods taste sweeter.
It's a reasonable assumption that the salt-sweet connection works as it does because the salt and sweet taste buds are close together in the mouth, towards the front and edge of the tongue.
This is the "confusion theory" of salt's importance. Our tongues confuse it with sweetness.
French researchers have refined their analysis of salt a good deal further. Hervé This, a French scientist whose work inspired molecular gastronomy, or the science of cooking, says that salt has two important effects.
The first is not on taste but on aroma. Salt enhances the aroma of food. As any wine drinker knows, smell is vital to the taste of anything we consume.
The second trick that salt performs, says This, is to suppress bitter tastes in the mouth. So with any of those vegetables that might have a hint of bitterness, well, you're less likely to taste them if the cook has added salt.
SALT HAS THIS DUAL impact, suppressing what might upset us, and enhancing what pleases us. Of course it also contributes to hypertension and heart attacks, which is a neat way of closing the circle around modern eating habits.
This's work has been influential with chefs such as Heston Blumenthal, whose Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, England was recently voted the best in the world.
What is important surely, in what he reports, is that as much as salt enhances the aroma of a meal, it also prevents us from tasting some ingredients.
I say "important" because if we understand how it works in practice, we can liberate ourselves from salt. If we compensate with the use of more aromatic ingredients, then low-sodium cooking might even be an improvement.
There are a couple of additional clues from molecular gastronomy that will help anybody seeking non-salt nirvana.
First, it's worth examining your cooking habits. Most TV chefs will tell you, for example, that meat should always be "sealed" and seasoned before cooking.
This ritual of browning meat on all sides and then adding salt and pepper is wholly irrational. It makes no difference to the quality of your cooked meat.
If you want to seal meat, use a salt-free marinade, particularly one that includes red wine. Yes, steep it in red wine, onions and one or two other goodies. It does a better job than salting and browning.
Second, if you have one dominant ingredient in a meal, say lemongrass, it will cause other tastes to become bland. In other words, the relationship between tastes on the plate is potentially more important than whether or not the dish is salted.
And finally, tastes need awakening. If what you're cooking tends towards sweetness, as most dishes do, then it needs a sour or bitter taste to help realise its potential. That's why sweet-and- sour combinations are a dominant force in Indian and Chinese cookery.
Once you eliminate salt, sour and bitter tastes will be more effective in creating contrast in a dish.
Western chefs now regularly combine sweet and sour - but usually in desserts. They have some way to go to catch up with tradition and with science.