Monday, January 18, 2010

Salt: Do you love it too much? How to appease your taste buds if you have to cut back?


Back to salt! (I’ll stop soon, I promise.) We need it, crave it, love it—but we can love it too much. This is, alas, true of many good things: we can love them too much for our good.

If the doctor says you must cut back on your salt intake, what to do? You can’t really fool your taste buds—salt has a sharpness that nothing else can match—but you can stimulate them with other good tastes and delicious aromas. Look carefully at the ingredients in “salt-free seasonings” that are on the market. Among the key ingredients are dried onion and garlic, lemon and orange rind, paprika--sometimes red pepper--and parsley. To that, add basil, oregano, rosemary and thyme, depending on your tastes. You can include some or all of these seasonings in your cooking—and add more, to taste, at the end.

2 comments:

  1. Am I wrong or do I detect a deeper meaning to your posts about salt, Evelyn? Because there are many things our souls or minds desire, but that are not good for us if enjoyed too much... Yet the search for replacing spiritual "ingredients" we got used to is so much harder than finding salt-free seasonings. It is a long and spasmodic journey.

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  2. Your advice is sound, yet I doubt if any flavor can take the place of salt in food. An interesting detail: in Dubrovnik (southern Croatia) the expression for food with too litlle salt is "ludo", i.e. mad, crazy!

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