Last August, I wrote about how good a single vine ripened tomato tastes when sliced and served with olive oil and some salt. And I used the same picture of some local Hudson Valley tomatoes
The post prompted a caustic comment. A prominent member from the academic activist community who favors legal action again industrial food manufacturers questioned the amount of salt I used. So I backed off and committed to re-checking my calculation. As a result of that comment, I’ve spent the last year honing my salt metrics skills.
I had to wait until August to republish because I needed the complex flavors of a local vine ripened seasonal tomatoes to test what I’ve learned and tomatoes here in the Hudson Valley are only in season during August and September.
Good cooks salt to taste. It’s a tactile sensory skill that develops over time. A vine ripened seasonal tomato needs just enough salt to enhance the complex flavors of the tomato but never so much that those delicate flavors are overwhelmed. Nothing could be easier or simpler or more delicious.
I ran the numbers for a second time and my salt calculation was exactly the same as last year.
That activist academic didn’t believe a plate of tomatoes would need as much salt as my calculations suggested. That’s probably because academics don’t usually cook and if they do cook they don’t usually run numbers on their own recipes. But that’s a discussion for another day.
THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW
The next question now is how much salt did I actually use? And is that amount “healthy”?
As noted above, I spent many hours over the last year improving my salt metric skills. To standardized my technique, I decided to use MALDON salt. Why Maldon? Because it’s a flake salt that is easy to distribute with my fingers. Several times over the last hear, I weighed out 10 grams of Maldon salt. Then I counted out how many 2-finger pinches I got from each 10 gram weight. Over the course of the year, a pattern emerged. The result? Each of my 2-finger pinches weighs about 250 mg and puts about 100 mg sodium on the plate.
Now let’s take a look at the label posted above. The value listed for sodium is 280 mg. In other words, for each serving of sliced tomato, I used 280 mg sodium / 700 mg salt. That’s a smidgen under three of my 2-finger pinches.
So now we move on to the more challenging question. How “healthy” Is that amount of salt? The current Daily Value for sodium is 2,300 mg and reflects Chronic Disease Risk Reduction (CDRR).
In other words, if everyone stopped adding salt to food, fewer folks would develop high blood pressure and the population would experience fewer cardiovascular events.
We humans do need a small amount of sodium every day. It’s estimated that need would be met with about 500 mg. But maintaining metabolic function is not why we humans use salt. Like me, most of my fellow Americans use salt because we want to eat food that tastes good. There’s no getting around the cold, hard fact that there’s often a tradeoff between tasty and healthy.
My choice is tasty so I use salt when I cook. But not a lot more. That academic’s caustic comment made me angry at the time but now I’m thankful. Without the motivation, I would not have had the patience for the tedious and time consuming task of counting out 2-finger pinches and weighing out salt batches. Because of his comment, I now feel more confident in my ability to track my own use of salt when I cook.
I’ve also improved my ability to put how I use salt in context. That way the next time the food police comes after me for non-compliance, I can at least put my use of salt in context with other recipes or other packaged food products.