Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (35 page)

Jessica Goldman was forced to learn about this and a lot more than she ever wanted to about sodium intake when she was in her twenties and a series of health crises led her to eliminate salt from her diet. She was raised in Palo Alto, California, in a family where dinner meant take-out much more often than home-cooked food.

“No one cooked. Everything came from a take-out box. Chinese food, pizza, Japanese, those were our favorites,” says Goldman about the food behaviors in her childhood home. The family members loved to eat; they just didn’t love to cook. They were food-and flavor-focused to the exclusion of health.

“We were the family that took out the salt shaker and dumped it on our food before we had even tasted it,” she said. Her favorites were fried chicken, french fries, and macaroni and cheese. Salt, salty, and saltier.

During her junior year abroad in Italy, she was diagnosed with celiac disease, a genetic disorder also known as gluten intolerance. Gluten is one of the main components in wheat and wheat flour. As a result, she had to severely limit what she ate, in a country renowned for its (wheat) pasta, (wheat) bread, and (wheat-crusted) pizza.

“It was horrible,” she says about subsisting on
salumi
and cheese. Even more horribly, when she returned home she found out that she didn’t even have celiac disease and that she had missed out on
pizza bianca
and pasta
primi
for nothing. Yet that period was early training for how to eat a severely restricted diet, which she would eventually need to do.

When she got back to California to start her senior year at Stanford, she arrived with an extra 40 pounds of weight on her normal 105-pound frame. She didn’t even look like herself. This wasn’t Parmesan and prosciutto weight, but excess fluid in her body. A week later she was also having seizures. Her bone marrow wasn’t working. Her kidneys were failing. Her body systems were shutting down. She was told to put herself on a kidney organ transplant list and start life-sustaining dialysis. Eventually Goldman found out that she had a type of lupus that had attacked her kidneys and brain.

While she credits Western medicine with saving her life, she looked into the benefits of going on a renal-failure, or low-salt, diet to minimize her need for medications and dialysis. Was it possible, she wondered, to control her kidney disease by controlling the food she ate? She asked her health-care givers for advice and got a pamphlet from one doctor that made her laugh out loud with its basic but vague suggestions, such as “Don’t eat soup.” It didn’t tell her what she
should
eat, so she decided to educate herself.

“I really made it my ultimate job to figure out how to keep myself healthy and off medications and treatments by regulating my diet, making it as strict as possible and giving my body as much room as possible to do as little as work as possible,” she said. She wanted to relieve her kidneys from the job of keeping her sodium level within the necessary narrow range.

Goldman had to go on a really, really low-salt diet, because her kidneys didn’t work when she ate a normal diet. When she first removed every bit of added salt from her diet, she said, “It was definitely bland. When you don’t taste salt, you think,
Oh God there’s no flavor in this.
” But then things began to change for her.

“As soon as my taste buds adjusted to not needing salt anymore or not expecting it, all of a sudden eating a red bell pepper was the most extraordinary thing. You really taste the natural flavors of food. It’s been an unreal experience. I get to enjoy produce and protein for what they actually are.”

Keep in mind that Goldman came from a family that didn’t cook, even though she eventually had to learn how. Even more of a challenge was sustaining this diet when she was eating out—her default way of procuring a meal. The first type of restaurant she felt safe trying was a steak house, because she knew that she could find at least one type of meat on the menu that hadn’t been marinated or seasoned. And there were lots of yummy side dishes that a steak house could do without adding salt, like baked potatoes and salad without the dressing. One night at a steak house she spoke with her waiter in excruciating detail about her dietary needs. He assured her that everything would be taken care of by the chef. When her steak was placed in front of her, she carved off a bite, and the very instant she chewed into it, she said, “Oh my god, it is sooooooo salty.” She figured the chef had salted the steak and she was going to have to send it back.

The chef came out of the kitchen to talk to her. He looked her straight in the eye and said that he had cooked the steak himself, and he could assure her that there was no salt added. Then she realized what had happened. She had just tasted a piece of premium, aged beef—grilled perfectly over high heat—without salt for the first time in her life. What she had experienced was the pure, unadulterated flavor of the meat, not the seasoning that was applied to it. The meat, which naturally contained sodium,
¹⁷
didn’t need any added salt. It was that good.

“That was a real moment for me,” she said. She had crossed over from mindlessly seasoning her food—an act that can obscure flavor in a frumpy muumuu of salt—to discovering the sexy, sensual, erotic flavor that’s locked inside it.

These days Goldman is bolder in dining out. Her latest restaurant meal was at Frances, an acclaimed restaurant in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. She has perfected her method for dining out by calling ahead to tell the restaurant staff about her condition, and instead of focusing on what she can’t eat, she focuses on what she can. She asks to speak with the chef who
will be cooking the night she’ll be dining. She says that the chef can use unsalted butter, oils, herbs, vinegars, garlic, and anything else that doesn’t contain salt. Frances served Goldman a piece of perfectly seared unsalted tuna in an unsalted tomato broth with cucumbers and jalapeños. Goldman said the dish’s lack of salt “actually allowed the rest of the flavors to stand out. It was fantastic.”

She has been on this extremely-low-sodium diet now for over six years and has learned a number of techniques to add flavor to food without adding sodium. She’s a big fan of the combination of acid and heat. A dash of cayenne with a squeeze of lime is one of her favorite ways of building flavor without salt. She reduces wines, juices, and tomatoes to make sauces, which end up thick and delicious with very little sodium.

The most important thing about reducing your use of salt doesn’t have to do with taste, though, says Goldman. It has to do with your brain. She advises people on a low-sodium diet to focus on surprising their palates with new foods they’ve never had before, or with unexpected textures. By giving the mouth novel experiences, you distract the brain, and Goldman thinks you can retrain your brain to expect a surprise instead of salt.

“It shoots you past the salt problem and into the experience of enjoying your food and trying to figure out what you’re eating. The element of surprise gets lost in salt.”

There’s another thing at work here, too: the concept of tolerance. Just as alcohol drinkers and drug users build up a tolerance for their substance of choice, normal, healthy eaters build up a tolerance for the level of salt they consume. It’s very hard to try to back down from this tolerance abruptly, as Goldman had to do. It’s much easier to ease yourself off salt one pinch at a time, which is what I should have done with my fresh heirloom tomatoes instead of abandoning salt altogether.

Campbell’s and Frito-Lay have both made efforts to reduce the sodium content of their foods, though Campbell’s fired the first shot. Since Campbell’s is known for their soups, and soup tastes best when it’s salted liberally, they had a lot to lose. Yet they have done a respectable job reducing the sodium in many of their soups as well as launching new flavors with less sodium. In advertising, they tout
the use of natural sea salt in their reduced-sodium recipes, not so subtly communicating to us that sea salt can be used to lower sodium.

Frito-Lay has marketed their use of Alberger salt in reducing sodium. This salt has a unique shape and more surface area than regular salt, so it dissolves more readily on the tongue, resulting in a quick, strong hit of saltiness. Using it, Frito-Lay claims, will allow them to reduce the level of sodium across their line of snacks, which include Lay’s, Tostitos, and Doritos.

I have no doubt that the use of natural sea salt did help Campbell’s reduce sodium in their soup. And I’m sure Alberger salt played a role in Frito-Lay’s sodium reduction success. But I can almost assuredly tell you that neither ingredient on its own was responsible for all of the sodium reduction in the products in which they’re used. Whereas you can use about a dozen ingredients to replace sugar, including stevia, when it comes to reducing sodium without reducing saltiness, you have to employ more than just one secret ingredient.

When it comes to salt—like fat—there simply is nothing like the real thing.

When NASA nutritionists decided that they wanted to reduce the sodium in astronauts’ food for its health benefit, they hired Mattson. Our assignment was not just to reduce the sodium, but to cut it in half for every item on the astronauts’ menu in order to compensate for typical human behavior in outer space. Most of the condiments the astronauts use to enhance the flavor of their foods are loaded with sodium. They have access to pure liquid salt, but not the crystalline kind. Apparently, if you were to sprinkle salt crystals on food in zero gravity, they would float around and potentially damage some of the precious equipment that accomplishes many things—one of them being getting you home to Earth. The nutritionists figured that if they reduced the sodium of the meals available on board, then a few extra squirts of salt or hot sauce would put the sodium level in the meals right about where they wanted it to be.

Because astronauts travel for extended periods of time, the food that goes with them is sterilized in a process that’s similar to canning, so we at Mattson didn’t have to rely on salt as a preservative. But we were dealt a blow when the nutritionists told us they were also trying to limit potassium, so we could not use potassium chloride in lieu of sodium chloride. Usually a food developer’s first
weapon for lowering sodium, potassium chloride tastes salty but has less sodium than salt.

Doug Berg, one of our best and most senior food technologists (also a trained chef) and Samson Hsia, our Executive Vice President of [Food] Technology, told me they had twenty-nine items to optimize, and each one required a unique approach. The baked beans were fairly easy, for example, “because there’s a lot of acid, there’s a lot of sweetness from the tomato, molasses. There’s savory flavor from the garlic and onion. There’s a little mustard, so you get a teeny bit of pungency, a teeny bit of bitter,” said Berg. “If you have all five of those tastes, you have a lot more leverage to play around with.”

He continued to talk about different entrees, such as the crawfish etouffé and an Indian curry chicken and rice.

“You take the salt out and flavor starts spiking in ways that would not be evident without that salt. You lose the balance. All of a sudden you’re tasting acidity, then a sharp herb. Single notes of ingredients. They’re kind of competing with each other. When you had the salt in there, you had a nice balance of flavors.”

“Salt homogenizes the flavor,” said Hsia, meaning this in a good way.

So Berg and Hsia used umami flavor enhancers; they pushed acidity higher to compensate for having less sodium; and they enhanced the odor of the salty items by adding appropriate herbs and spices that increase the perception of saltiness. Alberger salt wasn’t relevant for the astronauts’ meals because everything was premixed, as in a curried chicken and rice dish. This is why Alberger works in Frito-Lay’s seasoning mixes, because it sits on the outside of the chips, but not in Campbell’s soups because the salt is already dissolved in liquid food.

Reducing sodium is never simple. In fact, it’s one of the most challenging things a chef or food technologist has to do.

Would we all be better off eating the way Jessica Goldman does? The good news is that we don’t have to go so far. We can find a happy medium between her diet and the way most Americans eat today. After I had my naked-tomato epiphany and experienced a tomato for what it was supposed to be, I chose not to keep experiencing it that way. I found the temptation of salting my tomato simply too great to resist.

Many people in the food industry believe that taking the salt out of processed foods will simply result in people adding it back at the table, via the shaker. But this notion doesn’t hold water (salt pun intended). We don’t reach for the salt shaker when we’re near to dying from salt depletion, yet we do eat so much more salt than we actually need to sustain life.

Paul Breslin describes what happens when you put salt on a fresh tomato essentially summing up the superheroism of salt:

For one thing, you’ve got volatiles that will come off the tomato. You can smell the tomato and its juices, in liquid form. So you may be salting out some of the volatiles. It might smell more strongly after salting it. You’ll also make it salty-tasting, which is, of course, desirable. Tomatoes are very rich in free glutamates, MSG, naturally. All of that umami-ness that comes out of a tomato, particularly in the middle mucky part—the gelatinous part of the tomato—the salt will complement the umami-ness and vice versa. And you may be suppressing any bitter notes that are inherent in the tomato so you’ll be altering the overall profile. And the degree that bitterness was previously suppressing other flavors in the tomato, like tartness or sweetness, you’ll be releasing them from suppression.

He concludes, “That’s why salted tomatoes are so good.”