Before the days of refrigeration, people relied on salt to preserve many foods. Salt and sodium containing ingredients preserve food by inhibiting the growth of bacteria, yeast and molds and so prevent food spoilage and food borne illness.
What is salt? Salt is used as a condiment or ingredient. It brightens food flavors and facilitates a balance between sweetness and acidity by decreasing the sourness of acid and increasing the sweetness of sugar.
Salt makes foods taste better by selectively filtering out the taste of bitterness, resulting in the other primary tastes and flavors coming through more strongly.
Salt best known function is to enhance the flavor of foods. People like salt because human bodies need sodium chloride.
Salt is also act as a natural preservative which inhibits the growth of molds and bacteria. It literally pulls the life-sustaining moisture from those harmful bodies, making them unable to grow or reproduce.
In food industry food manufacturers use salt to help form a gel in sausage and other smoked meat products.
Salt of sodium chloride has desirable characteristics form a culinary perspective. Added salt improves the sensory properties of foods that humans consume and is inexpensive. The addition of a small quality of salt enhances other foods bringing a ‘fullness’ to foods that might otherwise is describe as a ‘flat flavor’.
Salt has another crucial property that made it important for the development of human society. By 2000 BC, people knew that adding salt to food stopped it going off. Salt was used to preserve meat, fish and vegetables, and to create delicacies such as salted olives, which added variety to the diet.
Salt as food ingredient
