low salt recipes for single guy trying to manage a health issue
May 17, 2017 1:05 PM Subscribe
what it says on the tin. i'm supposed to transition to a 2000mg/day or less diet, but i'm having a very difficult time finding decent resources for this. i have the sodium girl's low salt cookbook on order from the library. most everything i can find on the web is in gallery form, with comments always starting with 'bland recipe, i added a lot more of (salty ingredients) to make it better.' willing to cook in bulk and raw veggies/salad to be my sides.
I can't say enough good things about Dr. Fuhrman's nutritarian diet and website, drfuhrman.com. He has more than one cookbook, too. I lost my taste for salt and for sugar following it, and you will love what it does for your health issue too. And the recipes are DELICIOUS.
posted by bearwife at 1:21 PM on May 17, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by bearwife at 1:21 PM on May 17, 2017 [2 favorites]
I am not on a strict low salt diet, but try to keep my intake low to moderate for blood pressure control. I keep a variety of salt-free spice mixes in the pantry.
Mrs. Dash Table Blend.
Chinese Five Spice.
Garlic powder and onion powder can also add flavor in place of salt.
Blandness can also be overcome with spiciness, if you like a little zing. Pepper, white pepper, chili powder and paprika are all good. In addition, lemon and lime juice can bring out flavors without salt.
Also look into some "seasoning salt" mixes that may contain salt, but in low amounts in relation to the other ingredients in the mix. This can lower your overall salt intake. Also consider Accent or some other form of MSG.
As AliceBlue says keeping salt intake low isn't that hard if you cook from basic ingredients and avoid pre-packaged stuff. Rather than look for low-salt recipes, just adapt things that sound good and substitute other spices or seasonings for all or some of the salt.
posted by The Deej at 1:30 PM on May 17, 2017 [3 favorites]
Mrs. Dash Table Blend.
Chinese Five Spice.
Garlic powder and onion powder can also add flavor in place of salt.
Blandness can also be overcome with spiciness, if you like a little zing. Pepper, white pepper, chili powder and paprika are all good. In addition, lemon and lime juice can bring out flavors without salt.
Also look into some "seasoning salt" mixes that may contain salt, but in low amounts in relation to the other ingredients in the mix. This can lower your overall salt intake. Also consider Accent or some other form of MSG.
As AliceBlue says keeping salt intake low isn't that hard if you cook from basic ingredients and avoid pre-packaged stuff. Rather than look for low-salt recipes, just adapt things that sound good and substitute other spices or seasonings for all or some of the salt.
posted by The Deej at 1:30 PM on May 17, 2017 [3 favorites]
If you're just starting with less salt, be prepared for food to taste 'bland' initially, but as you get used to less salt other flavors will start to stand out, takes a little time.
Just wanted to second this; there's so much salt (or sugar for that matter) in so many things we eat that your sense of taste has to recalibrate in a major way when you take most of the salt out. It will, though, and the blandness won't last that long.
posted by griphus at 1:33 PM on May 17, 2017 [2 favorites]
Just wanted to second this; there's so much salt (or sugar for that matter) in so many things we eat that your sense of taste has to recalibrate in a major way when you take most of the salt out. It will, though, and the blandness won't last that long.
posted by griphus at 1:33 PM on May 17, 2017 [2 favorites]
I periodically have to go on very low sodium diets for a medical issue. AliceBlue's hit the nail on the head for a lot of our household's preferred strategies. It's next to impossible to rely on pre-prepared foods because salt is such a universal additive. The end result is that we eat a lot of whole-food vegetable dishes, like (as of the lunch I'm eating right now), asparagus that's been blanched then broiled then dusted with pepper and lemon. Lemon and other acids like cider vinegar can help confuse your palate a bit (acid and salt are both "sharp" flavors).
But hear this: as bearwife hints at, you still have to 'lose your taste' for salt, and that's only achieved through eating low-salt foods over time. Don't look so much for ways to get the salty flavor experience, when instead you can switch your palate toward recognizing flavors that have been there all along, hiding underneath all that salt. After you've been eating low salt for a couple weeks, you'll have, like, a Dorito, and you'll think, jesus h. christ why is this so fucking salty?!
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 1:34 PM on May 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
But hear this: as bearwife hints at, you still have to 'lose your taste' for salt, and that's only achieved through eating low-salt foods over time. Don't look so much for ways to get the salty flavor experience, when instead you can switch your palate toward recognizing flavors that have been there all along, hiding underneath all that salt. After you've been eating low salt for a couple weeks, you'll have, like, a Dorito, and you'll think, jesus h. christ why is this so fucking salty?!
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 1:34 PM on May 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
Your taste will adjust to lower salt content after consistently eating less of it over time. I did this accidentally by moving to a place next to a fancy co-op grocery store and suddenly eating a lot more fresh produce and home cooked meals - two months in I got a Wendy's chicken sandwich at an airport and almost spit it out it was so salty tasting. Anyway that was years ago and I've fluctuated in salt consumption since then, but my blood pressure is high and I've had to be deliberate about it for about half a year now.
I cook a lot and love to, so ymmv. So far the key for me has been to find flavors and combinations that I find satisfying and ramping them up in anything that is supposed to have a lot of salt. Also, paradoxically, I find that very lightly salting raw vegetables makes them so much more delicious that I'll happily eat a whole mess of them without much of anything else so I end up having less salt and a better diet overall.
Acid is a key component to cooking with low salt while maintaining deliciousness. Find your favorites. I love lime, plain white vinegar and malt vinegar. You might love chinese black vinegar or apple cider vinegar or lemon. Cooking with alcohol and spirits can also help with this, but it can be a lot more expensive especially when cooking for one to keep a lot of it on hand, unlike citrus and vinegars. Most of the time I have sake, white wine, and a bottle of some kind of stout lying around.
Take into consideration the originating region of a dish you're making and make an acidic dressing, relish, or dipping sauce to accompany it. For example if you're doing tacos, toss some shredded cabbage and onion in lime juice and let it marinate while you cook everything else. This will make the low-salt protein you're using taste way yummier, and have a lot of crunch. Use red wine vinegar for mediterranean dishes, malt and apple cider vinegar for germanic and british things, rice vinegar for east asian things. Doing a final brush of acidic sauce will make any cut of meat yummy without adding extra salt. Deglazing a pan with wine or beer is effective and make a liquid that will flavor anything you put in the pan afterward to simmer.
One thing I absolutely love that usually has a secretly large amount of salt in it is tomato sauce. I've learned to take no-sodium canned tomatoes or fresh tomatoes in summer and simmer them for a long long time with a little white vinegar, a little sugar, and a small amount of salt. Then I add whatever else I want for tweaking it into the kind of tomato sauce I need, like herbs and extra aromatics or ground meat or wine, and simmering further. That first cook (which you could do in a slow cooker of course) brings out the rich umami flavor in the tomatoes without the pile of salt typically needed. It takes a lot of time but I eat tomato sauce based things so often that it's worth it to me.
Don't give up! There's a whole world of incredible tastes out there and only a little salt is needed to bring them out if you cook them right.
posted by Mizu at 1:45 PM on May 17, 2017 [4 favorites]
I cook a lot and love to, so ymmv. So far the key for me has been to find flavors and combinations that I find satisfying and ramping them up in anything that is supposed to have a lot of salt. Also, paradoxically, I find that very lightly salting raw vegetables makes them so much more delicious that I'll happily eat a whole mess of them without much of anything else so I end up having less salt and a better diet overall.
Acid is a key component to cooking with low salt while maintaining deliciousness. Find your favorites. I love lime, plain white vinegar and malt vinegar. You might love chinese black vinegar or apple cider vinegar or lemon. Cooking with alcohol and spirits can also help with this, but it can be a lot more expensive especially when cooking for one to keep a lot of it on hand, unlike citrus and vinegars. Most of the time I have sake, white wine, and a bottle of some kind of stout lying around.
Take into consideration the originating region of a dish you're making and make an acidic dressing, relish, or dipping sauce to accompany it. For example if you're doing tacos, toss some shredded cabbage and onion in lime juice and let it marinate while you cook everything else. This will make the low-salt protein you're using taste way yummier, and have a lot of crunch. Use red wine vinegar for mediterranean dishes, malt and apple cider vinegar for germanic and british things, rice vinegar for east asian things. Doing a final brush of acidic sauce will make any cut of meat yummy without adding extra salt. Deglazing a pan with wine or beer is effective and make a liquid that will flavor anything you put in the pan afterward to simmer.
One thing I absolutely love that usually has a secretly large amount of salt in it is tomato sauce. I've learned to take no-sodium canned tomatoes or fresh tomatoes in summer and simmer them for a long long time with a little white vinegar, a little sugar, and a small amount of salt. Then I add whatever else I want for tweaking it into the kind of tomato sauce I need, like herbs and extra aromatics or ground meat or wine, and simmering further. That first cook (which you could do in a slow cooker of course) brings out the rich umami flavor in the tomatoes without the pile of salt typically needed. It takes a lot of time but I eat tomato sauce based things so often that it's worth it to me.
Don't give up! There's a whole world of incredible tastes out there and only a little salt is needed to bring them out if you cook them right.
posted by Mizu at 1:45 PM on May 17, 2017 [4 favorites]
You also may like using potassium salts. A lot of us are deficient in potassium intake anyway, and it has very similar flavor effect to sodium chloride. Morton has a "lite salt" product that is 1/2 NaCl and 1/2 KCl, and if you use only that starting tomorrow, all your from-scratch recipes will have about 1/2 the sodium as they did before, without any change in flavor.
posted by SaltySalticid at 2:12 PM on May 17, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by SaltySalticid at 2:12 PM on May 17, 2017 [2 favorites]
keep a variety of interesting vinegars around, and fresh lemons and limes. Fresh citrus especially goes a long way to wake up bland food.
posted by fingersandtoes at 2:49 PM on May 17, 2017
posted by fingersandtoes at 2:49 PM on May 17, 2017
I've been doing some reduction in this area myself after a lifetime of delicious salty foods and, honestly, I've been surprised at how quickly my palate has adjusted, to the point that foods that are saltier but definitely within the normal range have begun to taste quite salty to me. If your health permits, try to do this in stages and give yourself time to adjust.
Cooking for yourself and avoiding processed foods is really the key. Most of the sodium in our diet is added during processing--watch out especially for baked goods, which can conceal a startling amount. I agree that vinegar and similar acids are vital.
posted by praemunire at 3:22 PM on May 17, 2017
Cooking for yourself and avoiding processed foods is really the key. Most of the sodium in our diet is added during processing--watch out especially for baked goods, which can conceal a startling amount. I agree that vinegar and similar acids are vital.
posted by praemunire at 3:22 PM on May 17, 2017
Low sodium cooking is a hoax. It should just be Whole Foods cooking. Here are some of the things I make routinely that just happen to be low sodium.
* Boil new potatoes. Throw some chopped carrots in for the last 5 minutes. Drain, and chuck them in a roasting pan with some olive oil and roll them around. Shove them to the edges and plop a whole chicken in the middle. Tent it in foil; remove foil for the last 25 minutes. Rich and tasty.
* What are you going to do with all of this leftover chicken? Make soup! With no-sodium stock cubes. And chicken salad! So delicious.
* Scrambled eggs. Sourdough toast. Unsalted butter. Amazing.
* Oatmeal. You can slice up bananas. Or fruit! (Bagged frozen fruit, just take out a handful the night before.)
* Chicken breasts, pork chops, every kind of fish, just grill or bake them in the oven with chopped onions and olive oil and a ton of pepper and mixed herbs. Lemon butter sauce is amazing on fish. Capers are brilliant on fish and chicken. Microwave some broccoli and some potatoes, boom done.
My point is that cooking from whole foods is simple if you already like to cook and naturally low salt.
posted by DarlingBri at 4:10 PM on May 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
* Boil new potatoes. Throw some chopped carrots in for the last 5 minutes. Drain, and chuck them in a roasting pan with some olive oil and roll them around. Shove them to the edges and plop a whole chicken in the middle. Tent it in foil; remove foil for the last 25 minutes. Rich and tasty.
* What are you going to do with all of this leftover chicken? Make soup! With no-sodium stock cubes. And chicken salad! So delicious.
* Scrambled eggs. Sourdough toast. Unsalted butter. Amazing.
* Oatmeal. You can slice up bananas. Or fruit! (Bagged frozen fruit, just take out a handful the night before.)
* Chicken breasts, pork chops, every kind of fish, just grill or bake them in the oven with chopped onions and olive oil and a ton of pepper and mixed herbs. Lemon butter sauce is amazing on fish. Capers are brilliant on fish and chicken. Microwave some broccoli and some potatoes, boom done.
My point is that cooking from whole foods is simple if you already like to cook and naturally low salt.
posted by DarlingBri at 4:10 PM on May 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
" If you're just starting with less salt, be prepared for food to taste 'bland' initially, but as you get used to less salt other flavors will start to stand out, takes a little time."
100% this. My mom went on an anti-salt crusade a while back and virtually everything can be made with 1/2 or 1/4 of the salt in the recipe, even if it's a very precise recipe. (Soup is the one area where I notice the lack, but even that can be overcome with spice.) You can definitely make up for a lot of the blandness with other herbs and spices.
School cafeteria recipes in the US are now relatively low sodium and have kicked up the spice as a result -- you can find a lot of good recipes that meet low-sodium guidelines through school food services. There was a comment a while back on MeFi that linked to the new UK school food standards which, similarly, are pretty low-salt, and there's a recipe hub that has a bunch of recipes that fit the standards and are generally fairly low sodium. (They're proportioned for like 3 dozen servings, but you can adjust!) I often take a glance through for recipes that involve less added sugar or salt, even just to get an idea how to adjust an old favorite with too much salt.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:45 PM on May 17, 2017
100% this. My mom went on an anti-salt crusade a while back and virtually everything can be made with 1/2 or 1/4 of the salt in the recipe, even if it's a very precise recipe. (Soup is the one area where I notice the lack, but even that can be overcome with spice.) You can definitely make up for a lot of the blandness with other herbs and spices.
School cafeteria recipes in the US are now relatively low sodium and have kicked up the spice as a result -- you can find a lot of good recipes that meet low-sodium guidelines through school food services. There was a comment a while back on MeFi that linked to the new UK school food standards which, similarly, are pretty low-salt, and there's a recipe hub that has a bunch of recipes that fit the standards and are generally fairly low sodium. (They're proportioned for like 3 dozen servings, but you can adjust!) I often take a glance through for recipes that involve less added sugar or salt, even just to get an idea how to adjust an old favorite with too much salt.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:45 PM on May 17, 2017
Agreeing with a lot of what has been said above. Cooking from scratch with whole foods will go a long way towards reducing your sodium intake. You might also check out the 30 Day Heart Tune-Up by Steven Masley. My dad had heart surgery last year, and I got this book for him to have some ideas about how to eat/cook to support cardiovascular health. The book focuses on all aspects of cardiovascular health which might not be of interest to you, but the sections on food/cooking/recipes provide a great intro to cooking heart-healthy foods that are low-sodium. So far everything we've made from it has been delicious too!
posted by ezrainch at 8:38 PM on May 17, 2017
posted by ezrainch at 8:38 PM on May 17, 2017
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posted by AliceBlue at 1:20 PM on May 17, 2017 [6 favorites]