flavor Salt % - I've been doing it wrong for years!

[Flamecycle]

from thoroughburro:​

There is also a somewhat unintuitive open secret hidden in their ingredients list and nutrition facts panel: by weight, there’s more salt in the recipe than there is vinegar. To a home cook, that sounds wild — it should be unpalatably salty. However, 75 mg of sodium (about 187.5 mg of salt) in 1 tsp (5 mL, about 5 g) of sauce indicates their salinity is about 3.8%. (Most hot sauces are 2-4%, so it’s salty but not outlandish.) How can there be less vinegar than that?

Source - Notes on Huy Fong Sriracha, or Forgive Me David Tran


Reading the salt related part of this post from thoroughburro, at first I missed his parentheses and thought he sucked at math since .075/5 is ~ 1.5% - then I reread and realized I'm the idiot and he's dead right. Sodium % is NOT the same thing as salt %, since salt contains both sodium AND chloride. You have to convert backwards from a given sodium amount to arrive at the actual salt amount.

So this has some crazy implications I am realizing now - for eg Franks Red Hot sauce which I've always *thought* was ~3.8% salt - contains 190mg sodium per 5ml... 190mg works out to 475mg salt. 0.475g salt/5g hot sauce means that Franks is ...9.5% salt!!! Thats almost 1/10th of the entire recipe by weight is just salt. I would never have dared make a recipe with anything that high. Its like 3x saltier than ocean water!

...


So still in semi-disbelief that these Louisiana style sauces could require that much salt to reproduce - I tried a quick experiment and whipped up 2 extremely minimalistic "sauces" in a salinity range near Franks (~8% salt here) for a feasibility taste test:

Sauce A: 1g salt, 9 g water, 2g chile powder.
- Tastes too salty to me. No thanks, but not as bad as I expected.

Sauce B: 1g salt, 9 g vinegar, 2g chile powder
- Tastes... pretty good actually. WOW

So, I guess I'm a believer now, many hot sauces really are in the 5-10% salt by weight category and this is probably a top reason my homemade sauces often don't seem quite as flavorful/concentrated as the sauces I've taken my inspiration from - I'm just using way too little salt to recreate them accurately because I've been calculating it wrong from sauce labels for ages. I think vinegar seems to hide or overpower salt somehow which is how some recipes are operating with so much salt without being offensively bad tasting. Really surprising stuff for me.

 

[Ashen]

just a different tack on ingredient addition to a new sauce.


weight the bulk container amount of each ingredient you intend to use and build your new sauce to taste

once you have something you are happy with re-weigh and subtract from starting weights.


you have now created to taste with repeatability.

 

[Flamecycle]

build your new sauce to taste

Thanks Ashen. I think thats my problem. I've always had a mental block stopping me from adding/taste-testing additions that would put me anywhere in the 3+ % range. In my mind that was way at the top of the range of saltiness levels used in familiar sauces - so even if I thought a sauce could use more salt I'd usually back off anyway out of fear of over-salting (especially because I'm a salt addict and I assume most people who try my sauces will prefer less than I do).

Little did I realize 3% salt is child's play compared to some very popular sauces.

Maybe I should just trust my tongue more.

As a side note - it turns out its a well known scientific fact that acid hides saltiness from our taste receptors https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2229563/

 

[The Hot Pepper]

Great post @MentalinosLastMeal! And I love @thoroughburro's experiments.

Glad you made this discovery. Salt is one of those things when underused can make a "blah" anything. Some people never realize what they need is salt. They have a masterpiece waiting and try adding all kinds of this and that. Once you discover it's the salt you can create even simpler recipes. Like LA-style hot sauce! I'm the one buying low sodium soups and yeah I have to add it back so what's the point? Good luck!

 

[MarFar]

Can we pin this?

 

[FGpepperguy]

No wonder my $%#^ has been all *&@%#$ up when trying to back calculate commercial recipes. Please pin.