Ready-salted restaurant meals – a pinch too far?

In some way I would prefer to order what I fancy without being given the salty (or cal-horrific details) because I don’t think that I go to the restaurant often enough for it to affect my health, and I want to take time off from time to time, be free of the nutritional obsession that seems to possess most of us at times.

I must admit, however, that knowing the salt content of the sauce on an otherwise delicious steak I had recently could perhaps have given me a clue about just how salty it was going to be, and I would have order something else. The sauce was so salty it ruined the dish, really. (Before you ask, I was a wimp and I didn’t complain…)

I hate salted vegetables – generally it ruins their flavour. If this is what we feed children I’m not surprised they so often don’t like vegetables. Without salt many vegetables are sweet. Steamed they have even more flavour.

I like unsalted butter too.

I’m not saying I don’t like salt. I do. I will add it to the new potatoes on my plate with the butter.

Please don’t put it in because as someone else has already said YOU CAN’T TAKE IT OUT.

I agree with both Kat and lessismore above – it just doesn’t make any sense to sprinkle salt on top of something – a diner can always sprinkle it themselves when it comes to the table, but try picking salt off the top of a plate of chips!

I’m often quite surprised to see other people adding salt to water before they cook vegetables in it, or adding lots of salt to a soup or a sauce. Admittedly I’m not the best cook in the world, but I very rarely add salt to anything I cook, and it tastes fine to me.

I remember buying a Marks & Spencer’s primavera pasta sauce some years ago. I then added more peas and more peas and more peas until the whole pack was in there and it didn’t taste salty any more. I wonder how salty I’d find it now, several years on.

I also find that some pies eg chicken and vegetable are really only edible because of all the unsalted vegetables that we eat with them. I suspect it is the gravy that is oversalted.

We have a local carvery which has the most wonderful local Devon beef. It was completely ruined by the gravy, I think they had cooked it using salt water. Even more amazing are the number of customers who liberally sprinkle their meals with salt without even tasting the food first.

On a positive note, we were in the restaurant of the Lakeland flagship store in Windemere last week and they offered a bowl of crispy French fries without any salt. Simples

Smiths crisps were good with the little blue bags – at first just twists – of salt.

I guess some marketing person then realised that if you salt everything people are likely to drink more.

I miss the little blue Smiths bags too. I don’t use sugar in drinks or salt on food and you simply adapt to the taste over time, so that when it is added gratuitously eg. in hotels in packets of drinking chocolate or occasionally packets of dried coffee with milk, the drink tastes horrendous. Back to restaurants, the celebrity chefs appearing in the media have a huge amount to answer for. They seem to throw handfuls of unmeasured salt over food at times. A good reason to save my money from their expensive restaurant prices. Another hobbyhorse concerns the miserly portions of vegetables at often ludicrous additional cost, though if they’ve been cooked in concentrated saline not eating them might be a good thing. How could anyone get a decent amount of 5 a day eating in posh restaurants? (That includes you, Heston.)

I have worked as a food taster on a panel for a well-known ingredients company who would concoct the ingredients for sausage flavouring, crisps, mayonnaise etc.

My initial reaction to the thread is one of slight annoyance as it seems we are seeking to add a further layer of complexity to restaurants to suit a minority of people. Perhaps the case against salt is overstated as outlined in this article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2174511/Could-using-LESS-salt-bad-health.html

I always avoided taking my children to chain restaurants in case they got addicted to the pap offered and also because of poor value for money. If you learn to cook properly you can provide your children with good food. And cooking good food need be neither expensive or time consuming. It does require thought.

That some people salt their food before trying it is of course an abomination.

The UK’s track record on scaremongering and then retracting is illustrated by the guidance on exposure to sunshine which, with the increase in rickets in the UK, has been substantially changed from what was drummed into us by the Health bodies when they adopted the Australian guidance on exposure.

It seems that nobody fully appreciated that Australia if positioned in the Northern Hemisphere would be where Spain is and the sun in Spain is more potent that the watered down British version.

Anyway reverting to salt. If you sweat a lot you need more salt. And some people sweat more than others regardless. The idea that an average figure is suitable for all is obviously false from the outset and a range of figures should be allowed. This about endurance racing but you can see what happens with too little salt:
http://www.rice.edu/~jenky/sports/salt.html