Food – Page 2 – Luctor et Emergo

Sodium in Bread

Sodium

Health

Bread has some sodium without salt, but the main source of sodium is salt. Humans can taste salt but cannot know how, by taste, much salt is in their food, or how much sodium they are consuming. The reasons that too much salt makes food taste bad but a small amount improves flavour have not been explained by anatomical research on the human sensory organs. (“salt … enhances the taste of other foods … making them more palatable and relatively sweeter”, Salt enhances flavour by suppressing bitterness, Nature, Vol. 387, Issue 6633, pp. 563 (1997)).

Salt contains 39.3% sodium by mass. 1 tsp. of table salt weighs 5.7 grams, and contains 2,240 mg. of sodium.

Sodium is a micro-nutrient. It is necessary to metabolism, in small amounts. The minimum physiological requirement for sodium is between 115 and 500 milligrams per day depending on sweating due to physical activity, and whether the person is adapted to the climate” according to the papers cited in the Wikipedia article Sodium in Biology.

1,200 to 1,500 milligrams per day intake for sodium is adequate. On average, people in the USA consume 3,400 milligrams of sodium per day, an amount that promotes hypertension. The American government has advised that the average adult person should not consume more that 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day. The American Heart Association recommends the USDA recommendation should be 1,500 mg. per day. The World Health Organization sets the level of 1,500 mg. per day.

Bread baked with salt or a high sodium chemical leavening agent cannot be purchased in a grocery store or even a small bakery. Commercial bakers may have departed from the industrial standard of adding salt to dough in the amount of 1.8 to 2 % of the flour, by weight, but will not explain the process to wholesale buyers or retail consumers. The amount of sodium in a “serving” may be on a Nutrition Facts label if the bread is packaged for retail sale.

The BC chain Thrifty’s (a branch of the Canadian national chain Sobeys) had a sodium free whole wheat loaf before 2019, but it disappeared from the stores.

Sodium Sources – Bread Ingredients

Minor

Wheat flour, yeast, vital wheat gluten and cider vinegar contain small amounts of sodium, according to samples in the USDA FoodData Central database:

Wheat flour has 3 mg. sodium per 100 grams – 3 cups of flour in a typical medium loaf weighs over 400 g. and has 10-12 mg. sodium;
Instant Yeast has 75 mg. sodium per 100 grams – 3 grams of instant yeast has 2 mg. sodium;
Vital Wheat gluten has 8 mg. in 1 Tbsp. (8 grams);
Cider Vinegar has .77 mg. sodium per tablespoon.

Milk, buttermilk, cheese, eggs and other ingredients used in baking bread have sodium. The yeast used to leaven bread (or the coatings used to preserve yeast) has sodium.

Food consumed with bread contributes sodium – e.g. butter, margerine, mayonnaise, mustard, prepared meat, pickles, mustard, spreads, jams etc. Nutrition Facts labels, required to be accurate to nearest gram, will claim 0 sodium. USDA FoodData Central tables may show as little as 1 mg. in 100 gram units.

Salt

Salt is an element of most bread leavened with yeast (including leaven made from a sourdough or other starter). Salt is often used in recipes made with chemical leavening agents which include sodium. Dough made with a chemical leavening agent are mixed but not kneaded.

Salt is the major source of sodium in bread. The accepted standard for yeasted bread, in industrial baking and for recipe writers in the late 19th century, the 20th century, and the early 21st century has been salt in the ratio of 1-2% of the flour by weight. The reasons for this ratio may have been explained somewhere. The ratio was established as industrial and home baking evolved, before scientific experiments on the role of sodium were performed, and scientific theories were published. The ratio was established when salt become an affordable commodity, at a time when the health effects of sodium were not known.

Bread recipes for home bakers can be assumed to be refer to table salt with standard crystal size and to refer to manufactured marked measuring spoons, leveled off.

Salt in a bread recipe for home bakers is frequently (almost always):

1½ tsp. – i.e. 8.6 g. in a 3 cup recipe for a 1½ lb. medium loaf. Few medium loaf recipes exceed 8.6 grams of salt per loaf;
2 tsp. in a 4 cup recipe for a 2 lb. large loaf.

This ratio became established when industrially produced bread became the standard by which people recognized palatable bread.

For volume measurement for small batches, ½ tsp. (2.85 grams) of table salt for 1 cup of wheat flour – whether bread flour, all-purpose flour or whole wheat flour is standard. Converting to weight, this matches the commercial practice.

The sodium in a loaf, or a slice, can estimated, assuming 1 loaf yields 18 slices. The daily sodium intake by eating 8 slices (4 sandwiches) a day, made with bread made with salt in the ratio of salt in amount stated in a medium loaf, without taking other sodium sources into account:

Salt tsp.	Salt grams	Sodium per medium loaf milligrams (mg.)	Sodium per slice, mg.	Sodium mg. 8 slices daily
½	2.9	1,120	62.2	498
¾	4.3	1,680	93.3	746
1	5.7	2,240	124.4	996
1¼	7.1	2,800	155.6	1,245
1½	8.6	3,360	186.7	1,493
1¾	10	3,920	217.8	1,742
2	11.4	4,480	248.8	1,992

Baking Soda & Baking Powder

Baking soda, also known as sodium bicarbonate, is used in baking as a chemical leaving agent. Baking soda has some other uses in cooking, and several other uses. It is also used as an ingredient in manufacturing baking powder. Some nonyeasted baking recipes use both baking powder and baking soda. 1 tsp. of baking soda has 1,246 mg. of sodium. A medium loaf of a typical soda bread will have at least 1 tsp. of baking soda.

Baking powder is a chemical leavening agent used in baking. It has less sodium than baking soda, but is still a significant source.

There are sodium-free substitutes for the chemical leavening agents, available for sale online through outlets such as Healthy Heart Market:

a baking soda substitute called Energ-G, manufactured by Energ-G Foods Inc., Seattle, Washington, USA. It is made with calcium carbonate. It is
a baking powder substitute called Featherweight manufactured by Hain Pure Foods, Boulder, Colorado, USA. It is made with calcium carbonate.

Avoiding sodium means eating less bread or eating bread made with less sodium. Low sodium yeast bread involves using less salt.

Calculating sodium in bread

The sodium in a loaf of bread can be determined by measurement and calculation. Weigh salt, baking soda, baking powder, milk, milk powder, eggs and other ingredients that contain sodium – even consider flour and yeast – and apply standard factors to get sodium content. I have been adding notes on the amount of sodium in baking ingredients to my baking ingredient table, appended at the end of this post. I refer to those notes and calculate the amount of sodium in the ingredients of a loaf of bread.

A loaf baked in a pan 9 inches long high can be sliced into 18 slices, each ½ inch thick. The amount of bread in a slice will depend on the area of the slice, which is dependent on its dimensions in the plane at a right angle to the length of the loaf. A large (2 lb.) loaf baked in a large pan (oven or long horizontal bread machine pan) will be 9 inches long, but differ in its other dimensions. A medium (1.5 lb.) loaf baked a large pan will weigh less, and have less salt, than a large loaf.

It is possible to estimate the amount of sodium in a slice of bread by dividing a loaf 9 inches long into 18 slices and counting slices. A person might eat 8 slices cut from a medium loaf 9 inches long per day, but less slices cut from a large loaf 9 inches long.

I have columns in spreadsheets for my regular bread recipes, with columns for the ingredients for medium loaves, for quantities, and for calculation (e.g. B%).

I have a column of cells for:

the Na mg. (sodium, in milligrams) in each ingredient in a medium loaf, and
calculation cells for
- total Na mg. per medium loaf,
- Na mg. per slice (loaf ∕18) and
- daily consumption (slice x8).

Bread

Flour & water

Flour, water, salt and yeast are normal ingredients in bread, regardless of how it is mixed, kneaded and baked. Once yeast or salt has been mixed with water, a baker cannot go back. When dough is worked in bakery, the baker can add water or flour during kneading to get the dough wetter or drier and affect texture. A baker has some control of time and and the conditions where the dough is held as it ferments and rises.

Yeast

Breads (except some flatbreads and crackers) require flour, water and a leavening agent – usually bakers yeast. Yeast affects rising time, loaf shape and size, crumb structure (regular with small spaces or large irregular spaces), flavor, loaf spring, and the amount of time it takes to prepare and bake a loaf. Yeast can be controlled by measurement and choice of yeast, and by taking time. Dough rises faster with more yeast. The additional yeast costs more and affects the taste of the bread. The right amount of yeast is vital knowledge for any baker.

During the 20th century, wet yeast cakes were manufactured, but superceded by dry yeasts. First, there were active dry yeasts. Then active dry yeast became more active, and the coating changed. Late in the 20th century dry yeast was improved and evolved into instant yeast and other very similar products with new names – Rapid-Rise, Quick Rise, Bread Machine. It is all dried, coated, bakers’ yeast. Active Dry yeast measurement for recipes that call for active dry yeast have to be converted for instant yeast if a user wants to substitute an instant yeast.

Salt

Zero Salt

Leaving salt out can reduce some of the expense, time and effort of making bread. Flavour can be ignored if the bread simply provides bulk and starch. This can depend. The absence of salt it less noticed in the context of a highly flavoured meal.

Salt is not required in roti or equivalent unyeasted flatbreads in South Asia, many other flatbreads.

Salt has been observed to affect dough and bread for centuries. Bakers, millers and other industrial actors involved in bread making developed recipes and processes, and developed industrial science. In the 19th and 20th centuries industrial baking scientists and academic food scientists pursued questions that concerned them. Some of their research has been published publicly, and become known. Bakers used salt to improve their products when salt mines began to produce inexpensive salt for the markets in Europe.

Salt is an ingredient in most recipes for leavened bread. Italian Pane Toscano (Tuscan Bread). Pane Toscano is a rare exception. It is known by a nickname that translates to “tasteless bread”.

Food Writing

Food writing for bakers and for the general public has tended to focus on cooking methods, recipes and taste. This informationcan be vague about scientific detail.

Some academic science affected baking and food processing – the modern science of microbiology was started by Louis Pasteur’s 19th century work. The science explaining the chemistry and biochemistry of baking did exist until the 19th and 20th centuries, and has changed.

The cooking/baking writer Beth Hensperger wrote, explaining the role of salt in bread baking for home bakers and bread machine users at the end of the 20th century:

Salt is a flavor enhancer and plays a role in controlling the activity of yeast. … salt is optional in bread but a lack is very noticeable in the finished flavor. Too much salt, on the other hand, leaves a bitter taste and can inhibit yeast activity. Too little salt leaves a flat taste and can cause the dough to feel slightly slack in the kneading. …
Beth Hensperger, The Bread Bible, 1999

… the little bit [of salt] that most recipes call for acts as a stabiliser so that the yeast does not overferment. It helps to condition and toughen the protein strands so that they do not break easily during the rising process and the dough expands smoothly.

….

Without the right amount of salt, the dough will rise too fast. This especially true in the environment of the bread machine, which is warm and very hospitable to the yeast.
Beth Hensperger, The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook, 2000

Daniel DiMuzio, discussing artisanal baking, said:

Salt … strengthens the gluten bonds, … extending the amount of time necessary to develop gluten in dough. It also functions as an antioxidant, effectively reducing reducing the loss of caroten pigments and … flavor components during mixing.
Daniel T. DiMuzio, Bread Baking (2010), p. 51

Bakers, baking teachers and cookbooks warn that reducing salt changes bread, and downplay the health effects:

Salt is added to bread dough at approximately 1.8 to 2% of the weight of flour. Sticking to this percentage ensures there is enough salt present in the dough to do its very important job. Once you start to decrease that amount, the quality of your bread starts to decline as well.

Generally, we advise bakers to not leave out salt entirely when making bread. Not only will your dough be slack and difficult to work with (the worst!), but the baked loaf will turn out bland and flavorless. The good news is, the amount of salt in the average slice of bread is actually very small, so it’s generally worth it to stick to the measurement called for in a recipe. …

….

Salt has four important functions in bread, all the way from kneading to eating. Most crucially, it:

Controls the rate of yeast fermentation,

Strengthens gluten,

Improves crust color, and

Modifies flavor.

King Arthur Flour, Blog, Tips & Techniques, July 2020, Why is salt important in yeast bread?

Another source lists the attributes and effects of salt:

Inhibit fermentation – slow it down;

Control overly enzymatic activity of mashes and sprouted flour dough;

Superior flavor and enhanced aroma;

Crust color;

Salt is hygroscopic and draws moisture to itself;

Tighten and strengthen gluten;

Protects gluten from enzyme action;

Crumb and crust moisture;

Can slow down staling of bread;

Can absorb moisture in a humid environment.

Teresa L. Greenway, The Baking Network, July 2018, Salt and its effects in Bread Baking

Some bakers’ folk knowledge is contradictory. Does salt kill mold and opportunistic micro-organisms and make bread last longer? Does salt keep bread moist? Does salt promote the conditions under which mold and opportunisitic micro-organisms will infest and spoil bread?

Science

Dough

Emily Buhler addressed science and the hands-on experience of kneading dough in her practical and concise book in Bread Baking (2006, revised 2021). She explained what happens to wheat flour and water when they are mixed, with yeast (and salt) kneaded and baked.

Wheat flour, milled from ripe seed kernels, is mainly starch, containing complex sugar molecules and protein molecules. When flour is mixed with water, yeast and salt, the water molecules do not bond with the flour. Water, a polar solvent, surrounds and suspends rather than dissolving protein molecules. Bread dough is a colloid of proteins in water (this kind of colloid is a “sol”). Electrical attraction between positive charged atoms in the proteins and negatively charged oxygen atoms in water molecules holds the water molecules in a polar orientation.

Fermentation

Bakers have known for centuries that salt inhibits the rising of the dough (the fermention of the glucose by the yeast and the release of gas by the yeast). In the last couple of centuries, when industrial yeast was cultivated and processed into wet yeast cakes, the effect of salt was seen in a problem in handling wet yeast cakes; when a wet yeast cake is exposed to salt for enough time, the salt (salt is hygroscopic) can suck water molecules from the wet yeast. The yeast cake breaks down and many cells die; the diminished cake is too small to mix and ferment the dough effectively. The traditional view (in the 19th and 20th century sense of tradition) was that:

Dry (active or instant) yeast cells are invisibly tiny living single-celled fungi, dormant after being grown in a factory, processed and dried, A visible “grain” of dry yeast is a clump of dormant cells, mixed with nutrient and coating. The water in dough dissolves the clumps of instant yeast (also active dry yeast. The practice of putting active dry yeast in warm water before adding it to dough is still followed and recommended by many for home baking and bread machines).

The yeast releases enzymes that break down complex sugars in the starch to glucose, a simple sugar, which the yeast consume. The proteins bond to each other in water and form gluten. In anerobic fermentation the yeast produces alcohol and CO₂ (carbon dioxide), a gas. The gas is trapped in gluten,which makes the dough inflate and rise.

salt kills yeast, and
should be kept separate from yeast.

Salt kills yeast when there is an error in storage of ingredients of the timing of the mixing process. When dough is mixed, the salt is distributed and diluted in water.

Emily Buhler in Bread Baking (2006, revised 2021) addressed:

Yeast and Bacteria in sub-chapter 2.2 of the Bread Chemistry Basics chapter;
Fermentation in sub-chapter 2.3 of the Bread Chemistry Basics chapter;
Taste and Colour in sub-chapter 2.4 of the Bread Chemistry Basics chapter; and
What Happens to Bread in the Oven in sub-chapter 7.2 of the Proofing and Baking chapter.

The strains of bakers’ yeast grown by the corporate employees of the companies that make processed dry yeast – active or instant – break down enough of the starch in the flour to a simple sugar that yeast consumes. When yeast consumes simple sugar, it produces CO₂ gas that is trapped in the gluten, causing the dough to rise. The yeast, in anaerobic fermentation, also produces alcohol – the flavour effects of the alcohol produced by industrial bakers’ yeast are minor. Some other microorganisms break down alchohol and produce flavours but this often doesn’t happen within the time dough is kneaded and baked.

Salt inhibits yeast, wet or dry, according to several studies. Emily Buhler addressed Salt and fermentation in sub-chapter 2.9 of the bread science chapter of Bread Baking (2006, revised 2021). Salt dissolved in water releases ions (charged atoms) that affect the movement of water molecules through yeast cellular walls so that the net osmosis is that the cells shrink, crenating the yeast cell walls.

Gluten

When salt is left out, the bread will develop gluten “naturally” from the biochemical actions of the proteins in the flour in water (autolyze). Without salt, the gluten does not stretch as much.

Emily Buhler addressed Salt and Gluten in sub-chapter 2.10 of the bread science chapter of Bread Baking (2006, revised 2021) . She cites:

early 20th century work correlating salt to measured and observed characteristics of gluten,
mid 20th century work on the polarity (electrical charges) of amino acids,
work in the ’60s on proteins in solution, and
a 1977 paper on the effect of salt in proteins in solution.

Emily Buhler did not discuss vinegar, as such, in Bread Baking (2006, revised 2021).

A neutral, as opposed to a low pH (high acidity), or high pH (high basicity) solution affects “conformation” – unfolds or unpacks a twisted string of the molecules – of the gluten proteins. Pure water, pH 7, is neutral. Sea water, pH 7.5, is mildly basic. Salt in solution changes the conformation – a charged solution (with salt ions) shields charged sites on the protein and “tightens” the gluten. The salt affects the way the proteins respond to the mechanics of mixing and kneading.

Vinegar, with pH as low as 2.5, is acidic.

Crust Colour

The heat of the oven affects the production of gas by the yeast, and the escape of gas. In the first 10 minutes, the expansion of the heated gas, before the gas escapes, makes the loaf springs. Then the heat diffuses in the gas inside the loaf and bakes the interior of the loaf – the crumb. The yeast dies when the bread is baked, which does not harm the flavour of bread. Most of the starch in the flour becomes the crumb of the loaf.

The heat of the oven or bread machine dries the crust into the chewier or crisper crust. The colour is created by Maillard reactions which typically proceed rapidly from around 140 to 165 °C (280 to 330 °F). Many recipes call for a temperature high enough to ensure that a Maillard reaction occurs. At the crust, sugars and amino acids also react in the heat of the oven to form flavour molecules. The crust is not airtight. It lets C0₂ escape as the loaf bakes, and eventually lets water vapour escape from a baked loaf.

Reducing Salt

Baking

General

Dough needs to be leavened lift to rise. A zero-salt bread needs as much yeast as a loaf with the normal amount of salt. For instance: Beth Hensperger’s bread machine recipes for Tuscan Peasant Bread (or Pane Toscana) mix and knead a sponge. It seems to be a workable method of baking a rustic no-salt loaf. Her yeast measurement for this loaf is lower than her many conventionally salted bread machine loaves. This should be checked and and tested, depending on the machine used.

AHA & other

Some cookbooks and web sites offer bread recipes for persons with hypertension or health concerns. Some are by survivors or family. Some are sponsored by health care reformers. Some of these recipes are truly zero salt. Some have a pinch or as much as ½ teaspoon ( 2.8 grams) of salt.

The American Heart Association’s Low Salt Cookbook (4th ed.) has a zero salt recipe for a Whole Wheat bread, mixed and baked in a bread machine. It is a multigrain loaf (for a medium loaf, 1½ cups whole wheat flour, 1½ cups bread flour), milk and yeast. For a medium loaf, it prescribes 2½ tsp. (7 grams) active dry yeast. (It may take less yeast. Bread machines and programs very.) The crumb of this loaf is a bit irregular, and the absence of salt affects the taste

Tuscan Bread

Salt is not required in Italian Pane Toscano (Tuscan Bread), a lean bread made with flour, water, and yeast. It is mainly a white flour recipe (bread flour, high protein All-purpose, or All-purpose). There a recipes in different sizes with various methods and loaf sizes. Example: King Arthur Tuscan Bread. Beth Hensperger included a recipe for this bread in her baking cookbooks:

Tuscan Peasant Bread, The Bread Bible (1999) both
- mixed with a mixer or by hand, and oven baked, and
- a bread machine version;
Pane Toscana, The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook (2000).

Beth Hensperger’s recipes have this bread made with a sponge to delay fermentation. She makes it more rustic by using some whole wheat flour, and enriches it slightly with a pinch of sugar.

Vinegar

Vinegar, like salt, inhibits microorganisms – such as yeast! It makes a solution acidic, which affects the “conformation” of the proteins that form the gluten. Vinegar is a mildly acetic aqueous solution of acetic acid. Adding vinegar to pure water dilutes the acid and produce a slightly acidic fluid. I don’t understand what happens when a small amount of mild acid is added to water containing salt. Salt dissolves in water. Salt water is a high pH fluid. It is “basic’.

Vinegar is produced by fermentation of fluids:

produced by crushing the fruits of grape vines, apple trees and other fruiting plants, or by soaking barley malt and other products of the grain of grasses;
wines and ciders that have been produced by fermentation of plants; and
fluids produced with alchohol distilled from fermented plants.

Slow methods are used in traditional vinegars; fermentation proceeds over a few months to a year. Slow fermentation allows for the accumulation of a nontoxic slime composed of acetic acid bacteria and their cellulose biofilm, known as mother of vinegar. Fast methods add mother of vinegar as a bacterial culture to the source liquid before adding air to oxygenate and promote the fastest fermentation. In fast production processes, vinegar may be produced in 1-3 days.

Fruit vinegars are made from fruit wines, usually without any additional flavoring. Apple cider vinegar is made from cider or apple must.

Wine vinegar is made from red or white wine, and is the most commonly used vinegar in Southern and Central Europe

Distilled vinegar (spirit vinegar in the UK, white vinegar in Canada) is produced by fermentation of distilled alcohol. The fermentate is diluted to produce a colorless solution of 5 to 8% acetic acid in water, with a pH of about 2.6. This is known as distilled spirit, “virgin” vinegar, or white vinegar, and is used in cooking, baking, meat preservation, and pickling, as well as for medicinal, laboratory, and cleaning purposes.

A cup (US volume unit) of vinegar weighs 240 grams. (A cup of pure water weighs 237 grams.) Vinegar is 5% acid and over 90% water. Cider vinegar and distilled (white) vinegar have little sodium according to USDA.

Type	Weight 1 Tbsp.	Water, 1 Tbsp.	Sodium mg.
Distilled	14.9 g.	14.1 g.	.298
Cider	14.9 g.	14 g.	.745

Web sites about baking have comments on vinegar, as of late 2022:

Michelle at bakinghow.com, What Does Vinegar on Bread Do?:
- “Vinegar breaks down the proteins in bread dough, causing the gluten to tenderize. .. new – and … stronger – gluten networks form. This results in … a … rise in a shorter amount of time.
- “Vinegar cuts down on flour oxidation, resulting in … moist crumb and a lightweight texture. …
- “Vinegar is an organic acid … by adding vinegar to your dough, you can create impressive flavors in a shorter amount of time.
- Vinegar reduces the pH level in your bread dough. … this fends off mold formation…”
testfoodkitchen.com (NOT America’s Test Kitchen). What happens when adding vinegar to bread dough?
- “… it can make the dough more elastic, which can help it rise better and create a more consistent texture. It can also help to retard the growth of yeast, meaning that the bread will take a bit longer to rise but will be less likely to collapse after it’s been baked. Finally, the vinegar can help to create a slightly crisper crust.”

There is no history of hydrating dough with vinegar (using vinegar instead of water or other fluids). Some web material, published to pages, or posted to forums, attributes some effects, actions and results to the addition of a small amount of vinegar to the other ingredients of bread.

Someone started using vinegar to make the water acidic, and leaving out salt. I have not found material on the web to explain when this started or whether it was tested at scale in industrial bakeries.

The bread machine maker Zojirushi started to sell a bread machine with a “no-salt” program in 2018. Zojirushi uses cider vinegar in a recipe for a white sandwich bread for use in a “No Salt” program on its current Virtuoso Plus (a large loaf (2 lb. pan) model and its BB-SSC10 (small, 1 lb.) model.

A tablespoon (14.7 ml.) of cider vinegar has the same effect as 2 tsp. of salt in white sandwich bread on gluten, crumb and crust, in my Zojirushi Virtuoso BB-PAC20. 2¼ tsp. (11.1 ml.) of cider vinegar has the same effect as 1½ tsp. salt.

A tablespoon of vinegar adds only 1 Tbsp of water to a dough, and only adds tiny amount of acetic acid and biochemically significant elements, but it affects gluten and fermentation. It is powerful.

It is possible to measure with enough accuracy with measuring spoons. It is possible to measure vinegar by weight. Scales may go to the nearest gram; some go to the nearest .1 gram. Conversions:

Vinegar, Volume	1 cup	1 Tbsp.	2¼ tsp.	1 tsp.
Vinegar, Weight	239 g.	14.9 g.	11.2 g.	5 g.

Cider vinegar does not impart a bitter taste to bread. Vinegar lacks the flavour impact of salt.

Adjustments

Salt

A leading blog for home bakers observes:

… If you’re still looking to reduce the salt in your bread, however, it’s possible to do so successfully (to an extent).

Generally, you can reduce the salt by half without having any very noticeable changes to texture and browning.

If your bread tastes a bit bland, you can use herbs or spices to increase the flavor. Fresh chopped rosemary or caraway seeds are both very traditional ways to add flavor, but the options are really endless! Try experimenting with blends like Herbes De Provence or even Pizza Seasoning to jazz things up.
King Arthur Flour, Blog, Tips & Techniques, July 2020, Why is salt important in yeast bread?

A 50% reduction of salt works when the recipe, following the conventions of home baking, specifies 2 tsp. of salt for a large loaf or 1½ tsp. for a medium loaf. A medium loaf, baked with 1½ tsp. of salt, has at least 3,360 mg. of sodium. Reducing the salt by 50% reduces the sodium in a loaf to about 1,680 mg. of sodium. This is tolerable in terms of the gluten and the taste of the bread. If the recipe said 8.6 g. (1½ tsp.), I will reduce salt by 50% by weight. I aim to reduce salt to 4.3 grams.(¾ tsp.) for a medium loaf, or less. 4.3 grams.(¾ tsp.) gets good gluten development to bake a medium loaf in a Zojirushi bread machine. It should be enough salt for a medium loaf under any other baking method if the dough is mixed and kneaded

It is necessary to consider how much sodium is being avoided when salt is taken out of a recipe. Where a recipe uses 1 tsp. (5.7 g.) of salt for 3 cups of flour, I can reduce use 75% of the recipe amount of salt to get the same amount of sodium per loaf/slice/serving as by reducing 1½ tsp. of salt by 50%. If a recipe required less salt than 1½ tsp. for a medium loaf, I may reduce salt by a low amount. I have tried reduction from 1 tsp. (5.7 g.) to ¾ tsp. (4.3 g.) or ⅝ tsp. (3.6 g.). Many medium loaves made with ⅝ tsp. (3.6 g.) salt and a suitable adjusted amount of instant yeast knead and bake well in a Zojirushi Virtuoso using the Basic Bake and Bake whole wheat programs, and in the Home made program for European bread

Yeast

Salt slows fermentation in dough. Salt also makes gluten strands longer and assists a dough to rise. The reduction in gas production is outweighed by more extensible gluten. Reductions of yeast affect the production of the gas which stretches the dough. Yeast is required to leaven any yeasted bread. Yeast can be reduced in from the levels stated in recipes when salt is reduced. The right amount of yeast varies according to the recipe and other factors:

The machine;
The program;
The salt and other sodium in the dough.

Dough needs to be hydrated and leavened to rise and flow.

Bread Machines

Machines

While many bread machine recipes seem to be for “any” bread machine, there are no generic recipes. Machines have significant differences in

pan size,
pan shape, mixing action,
programs, and
features.

Features, such as heating the baking chamber and pan while a mixed dough is rising (i.e. fermenting), are not found in all machines, and affect the amount of yeast a user should use.

Bread machines run in fixed time intervals set in the programs written by the manufacturer’s engineers. A closed device is not subject to interventions when the program is running. Techniques used in conventional baking are not easily used with bread machines. Bread machines are convenience appliances. They make palatable bread. A machine user can make some kinds of changes in attempting to make a recipe again: setting the device to use a different program, or adjust the recipe.

Beth Hensperger’s book The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook said:

… In the presence of salt the dough rises at a slower rate and the salt strengthens the gluten. Loaves with no salt collapse easily.

If you are on a salt-restricted diet and wish to reduce the salt in a recipe, be sure to reduce the yeast proportionately, or use the recipe amount of lite salt. Without the right amount of salt, the dough will rise too fast. This is especially true in the environment of the bread machine …
Beth Hensperger, The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook, 2000, p. 15, p. 290

The suggestion of using “lite” is unclear. She may be referring to the branded product by that names made by Morton, a blend of table salt and potassium chloride. There are salt substitutes made with calcium chloride or potassium chloride sold as “NoSalt” or “Salt-Free” that can be added to some foods. These can to leave soups or stews tasting ok to human senses. There is no basis for saying that salt substitutes affect the activity of yeast or gluten formation in bread dough, or the taste of baked bread. I have not located published test results or evidence.

The suggestion of reducing salt and yeast proportionately (by weight) is a rule of thumb that works, to a point. This rule seems to be reflected by some product offerings. Morton’s lite salt product has 290 mg of sodium per ¼ teaspoon serving while its regular table salt has 590 mg of sodium per ¼ teaspoon serving

Beth Hensperger introduced the topic of “What Can Go Wrong, and How to Fix It” at pp. 38-40 of The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook. Many things can go wrong; the answers are not obvious.

Salt & Yeast

Salt

Salt can be reduced in bread machine recipes for 1½ lb. loaves that specify 1½ tsp. of salt to 4.3 g. (¾ tsp.), 3.6 g. (⅝ tsp.) or as little as 2.8 g. (½ tsp). This reduction has an effect on gluten which affects the texture of the crumb. It affects taste. The change is less noticeable in multigrain loaves, and loaves flavoured in some way. Salt in recipes with 3 cups of flour (for 1½ lb. loaves) can be reduced with little or no effect on gluten and the final baked crumb and crust.

Yeast

Yeast choice and measurement are important in bread machines. The yeast specified in any given generic recipe may be too much for some bread machines. A dough or loaf that balloons is messy, and can endanger the machine, the kitchen and the cook. Bread machine recipes are also determined by whether they can produce acceptable bread in a time frame that consumers/machine buyers will tolerate. If a recipe requires active dry yeast and a user wants to substitute an instant yeast, the yeast measurement should be converted for instant yeast.

If a recipe for a medium loaf says 8.6 g. (1½ tsp.) salt, and if the proportionate reduction rule was an exact rule, I would expect to reduce yeast by 50% by weight, but it isn’t that simple. Yeast can be reduced with low salt loaves. The rule of proportional reduction leads to bad results if the amount of yeast is not calculated correctly and measured correctly. That leaves a problem – how much more should yeast be reduced if salt it reduced.

Yeast measurement has to be adjusted for a machine’s mix/knead and rise phases. These vary. Some machines have a proofing box function – the pan is heated during rise phases. The length of the rise phases varies between machines and programs.

Recipes should have enough yeast to leaven the dough and rise in a specific machine without ballooning or overflowing a bread pan. For some machines or programs more than 1 tsp. of instant yeast for a 1½ lb. loaf is too much, regardless of salt and regardless of other ingredients that may inhibit fermentation. For any machine, set to a “Quick-Rise” program, more yeast is required that for a Regular or Basic Program. Too much yeast for a machine and a program will result in the dough or loaf ballooning or collapsing. Those problems can be fixed by adjusting yeast in a recipe leaving flour, water, salt and other ingredients unchanged.

The relevant features affecting hydration, gluten formation, yeast activity, fermentation, and rise are:

the protein in wheat flour,
the protein in other flour, such as rye flour,
the amount of high protein wheat flour and any vital wheat gluten,
the length of the mix/knead phase,
the mix/knead action,
the length of the Rise phases, and
warmed pan proofing box action in the Rise phases.

Vinegar

Zojirushi’s recipe for No-Salt bread (large loaf and small loaf), is nearly identical to Zojirushi’s Basic White Bread (large loaf or small loaf). It has no salt, and has some cider vinegar – ½ to 1 tablespoon, depending on the recipe size. Zojirushi’s recipe for No-Salt bread works in a basic or regular baking program – the program used for enriched sandwich bread, made with bread flour, sugar, milk or milk powder and butter. In 2021, Marsha Perry, writing as the Bread Machine Diva said that the large (2 lb.) loaf version turned out well in a Zojirushi Virtuoso BB-PAC20 machine using the Basic Program (the BB-PAC20 does not have a No Salt program). The photos at the Bread Machine Diva site suggest the crumb is slightly different when the recipe is baked in two different Zojirushi machines.

I tried the recipe, scaled for a medium loaf; the medium loaf works in a Zojirushi Virtuoso BB-PAC20. This recipe should work in any Zojirushi model with a large pan – Supreme, Virtuoso, etc. The recipe will work in other machines in a regular or basic baking program, but may require a little less or more yeast than a Zojirushi machine. The recipe is sensitive to measurement of the ingredients, including the vinegar.

Zojirushi Bread Machines

General

In working out a recipe that will not balloon or collapse pay attention to : the type of flour, the amount of salt, the bread machine course (program) and the amount of yeast.

It is often necessary to try out some variations, changing some quantities by small measured amounts to see if a change makes the bread better by some parameter.

Many recipes for medium loaves baked in bread machines may require 1½ tsp. of salt for 3 cups of wheat flour, but recipes vary. Some of Zojirushi’s recipes for medium loaves baked in the BB-PAC20, in its machine manual and on the web accept that ratio. Generic recipes for similar breads may use 2 tsp. (6.2 grams) of instant yeast for a medium loaf. Other Zojirushi recipes use less salt – noted in the table below. The yeast in recipes in the manual for the salt stated in the recipe. (The web links lead to large loaves. I am using the medium loaf recipe in the printed manual.) I am converting yeast from Active Dry, used by Zojirushi in it recipes for the BB-PAC20 to instant yeast:

Name	Manual	Link	Course	Salt	Active dry yeast	Instant Yeast
Basic White	p. 15	Web	Regular Basic	8.4 g. (1½ tsp.)	1½ tsp. (4.2 g.)	4.1 g.
100% Whole Wheat	p. 18	Web	Regular Wheat	5.7 g. (1 tsp.)	1½ tsp. (4.2 g.)	3.1
Crusty French	p. 44	Web	Home made*	1 tsp.	1½ tsp. (4.2 g.)	3.1

*The “home made” course, given in the recipe in the Zojirushi BB-PAC20 Virtuoso manual, is identical to the European course (i.e. program) of the Zojirushi BB-CDC20 Viruoso Plus. It has 2 rise phases, like a Quick course but the rises are long – 35 minutes and 50 minutes. The Crusty French recipe involves programming a “Home-made” program in a BB-PAC-20 Virtuoso or a BB-CEC20 Home Bakery.

Zojirushi also publishes recipes for 2 lb. “large” loaves with 1½ tsp of salt. These scale to 1⅛ tsp. (6.4 g.) salt for 1.5 lb. loaves.

In working out a recipe that will not balloon or collapse pay attention to:

the type of flour,
the amount of salt,
the bread machine course (program) and
the amount of yeast.

It is often necessary to try out some variations, changing some quantities by small measured amounts to see if a change makes the bread better by some parameter.

Yeast

Initial General Rule

The Zojirushi BB-PAC20 requires less yeast for a recipe that uses a regular yeasted baking program, (i.e. the Regular Basic course or the Regular Wheat course) than is used in a recipe from Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook, or most generic bread machine recipes. These courses have a Rise period (programmed as 3 consecutive periods) in a heated pan. A Zojirushi BB-PAC20 needs about 65% of the instant yeast in a generic recipe used in these courses. This is a target for the amount of yeast to raise a fully salted loaf. I make this initial adjustment for all recipes in those categories except recipes from Zojirushi for my Zojirushi BB-PAC20.

Zero Salt and/or Vinegar

For the Zojirushi Virtuoso BB-PAC20:

3.8 grams of instant yeast, used to make a sponge for Tuscan Bread, will raise a zero salt dough for a 1.5 lb. medium loaf;
4.0 grams of instant yeast will raise a no-salt dough for a 1.5 lb. medium loaf, in the American Heart Association whole wheat recipe.

The Zojirushi “No Salt” bread, made with vinegar, sugar and milk powder is a soft sweet sandwich bread. The crumb is fluffy. It is similiar to other sandwich breads – a bit softer.

The yeast requirement for this sandwich loaf, made with vinegar instead of salt, is about 3.1 grams of instant yeast (1 tsp.)

The recipe is sensitive to measurement of the ingredients, including the vinegar.

I will try to bake other recipes with vinegar instead of salt. I will check this method with other enriched sandwich breads, experimenting with changing the enrichments – sugar, milk powder etc. It will take time.

Lean Breads – 50% Salt

A Zojirushi BB-PAC20 will bake a crusty French style white loaf – a lean bread – a “home made” (custom) program for that style of bread. A medium loaf requires 3 cups of bread flour.

Ingredient	Factory	My test 1
Salt	5.7 g. (1 tsp)	4.3 g. (¾ tsp)
Instant Yeast	3.1 g (4.2 g. (1½ tsp) active dry)	2.2 g.

I have used the Zojirushi BB-PAC20 to bake medium loaves of Beth Hensperger’s (of the BLBMC) recipe for Chuck Williams Country French Bread, a lean bread. The BLBMC recipe (full salt) uses 8.6 g. I make it with 3.6 g. of salt in the Regular Bake program. Yeast depends on what course/program I use:

Regular Basic course, with 2.0 g. of instant yeast;
Home made course for crusty lean bread. This bread, in the shorter Home made program, needs about 3.1 g. or 3.2 g. of instant yeast for a loaf with 50% salt (4.3 g.). It develops a dimple (which might be called a crater) with 3.6 g. of instant yeast, but not with 3.2 g. of instant yeast.

50% Salt – Regular Basic and Regular Wheat

I will reduce yeast below the Zojirushi target when I make a salt reduction for a generic recipe. It may be 50% of the yeast that remains after the initial adjustment (not the yeast in the recipe), but it depends on the amount of salt.

Where a recipe recipes only ½ tsp. of salt for a medium loaf (e.g. the AHA low salt recipe for a medium size light rye loaf) I use the recipe amount of salt and 2.7 or 2.8 g. of instant yeast.

When salt has been reduced to 4.3 grams (¾ tsp.) for a medium loaf, 2.1 to 2.4 grams of instant yeast will leaven the dough to get good rise and flow without collapse or “crater” in the Regular Basic and Basic Wheat programs. Using less yeast can produce collapse or “crater”, or issues of size and shape. Using more yeast may produce a loaf that ruptures.

A Zojirushi BB-PAC20 (or another modern Zojirushi model with a 2 lb. pan) can make an acceptable medium loaf of bread with 4.3 g. of salt and 30-35% of the instant yeast in a generic recipe with bread flour and with bread flour and whole wheat flour.

100% whole wheat flour bread is close, but not exactly the same.

Putting rye flour in the mix changes the yeast requirements.

Other Adjustments

Some generic (e.g. BLBMC) bread machine recipes have problems that show up with a Zojirushi machine. It may be as little as a few tablespoons of water. These problems can be fixed by comparing a problem recipe with successful recipes.

Baking Ingredients

I find it convenient to have baking ingredients in a spreadsheet saved on a device in my possession – a desktop in a room near the kitchen. I have access when the device is on, without relying on Internet connections and the cloud.

Spoon-Fed

The book Spoon-Fed by British physician and writer Tim Spector discusses the diets of people in developed countries. Spoon-Fed puts a great deal of information into a short book. It discusses a number of “myths” about food and nutrition. A myth is a story that many people have learned to believe, but not a scientifically proved factual story. The myths are the foundation of public health rules, dietary recommendations and beliefs about food. The myths are the foundation of public health rules, dietary recommendations and beliefs about food. Spoon-Fed treats eating and digestion as complex biological processes that cannot be explained by instinct, culture, culinary tradition, common sense or known science. It fails to reconcile some inconsistencies.

There is a chapter pointing out that there is no component in the education of medical doctors addressing nutrition, implying that medical doctors, unless they work on the problems, are not experts on nutrition, food and diets. There is a chapter which reviews some of the arguments of The Diet Myth, points out that digestion, and weight gain are individual, and cautions against believing that there are rules that apply to all people and all foods. In The Diet Myth, Dr. Spector explained why weight loss through calorie restriction and exercise is difficult by the data of weight loss in twin studies, and to the science of calories, based on the 1944-1945 Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Like The Diet Myth, Spoon-Fed suggests that food science has not absorbed the presence of an active microbiome in the human digestive tract.

Some chapters talk about how food is collected, processed, and sold.

The chapter on the myths of fish addresses the marketing of fish raised in fish farms, the standards for farmed fish, the marketing of wild fish harvested recklessly, and outright fraud in the way fish is misdescribed in some restaurants.

There are chapters on the myths of avoiding animal fat, reducing calory consumption or exercising to reduce weight, avoiding gluten, avoiding nuts, sports drinks, fruit flavoured drinks, and the quality, safety and convenience of bottled water. Some involve the factors affecting purchasing and processing food, including sports drinks, flavoured water, bottled water, candy, snacks and fast food.

Spoon-fed notes that the food industry, dominated by financial interests, and focussed on reducing foods into packaged commodities, fabricated with processed ingredients, and processed to taste good, package well, and sell. The food industry has convinced people try to make up for “missing” ingredients by taking supplements and seeking following diet fads, to combat obesity by restricting calories and by exercise. This has made the food industry financially successful in selling flavoured junk. Dr. Spector suggests that individuals might eat more vegetables, recommend diversity of diet, endorses Michael Pollan’s advice in his books In Defence of Food (2008) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), and suggests avoiding consuming highly processed foods. He also endorses the public health advocacy of Marion Nestle and others on measures against sugary, artificially sweetened and carbonated beverages and disposable containers.

Other chapters discuss the rise and fall of beliefs about fat, calories, weight loss theories, supplements and diets. These are generally informative. Some chapters invite readers to consider changing what they eat, and are more controversial.

Spoon-Fed favours eating fermented foods because they contain nutrients produced by microorganisms and may contain beneficial and viable microorgamisms (unless the microorganisms have been killed off in the processing). Spoon-Fed favours food with some microflora or microfauna, although Dr. Spector is largely dismissive of the probiotic yogurt and the marketing claims made by the manufacturers of other highly processed food products. He is in favour of consuming fermented foods, including saurkraut and kimchi on the basis that fermentation can introduce health probiotic microorganisms. His views on probiotics may be more controversial than he implies. Fermented food with microorganisms is prepared in salted water (brine) as opposed to pickled in acidic vinegar. It is therefore salty.

Dr. Spector states that public health measures involving salt have not prevented the wide use of salt in food processing. The food industries have increased the consumption of salt, while concealing the amount of salt in processed food. He refers to studies suggesting that studies have failed to demonstrate adverse effects of high sodium levels in food on health. He explains that industrialized countries favour treating people with high blood pressure with medication to reducing salt use. He disagrees with the low sodium approach of the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet, without a discussion of the issue.

Spoon-Fed refers to the modern NOVA food classification system suggested by Carlos Monteiro, with his team at the Center for Epidemiological Research in Nutrition and Health at the University,of São Paulo, Brazil in the journal Public Health Nutrition in the 2009 paper, “Nutrition and health. The issue is not food, nor nutrients, so much as processing”, and agrees with some reservations.

Spoon-Fed carefully precise in supporting restrictions on alcohol consumption, while defending moderate alcohol consumption.

While it is dismissive of diet fads, it tends to be speculative about the benefits of some foods. It dismisses some public health information based on poor sampling and other statistical errors, and appears to encourage disrespect for all public health recommendations.

The Diet Myth

The title of Tim Spector’s 2015 book The Diet Myth refers to one “myth”. The book begans with an Introduction that discusses the author’s midlife health crisis when his blood pressure rose suddenly, and present an overview of his research into the modern diet. The Introduction identifies the problems of deciding “what is good or bad for us in our diets” and several misconceptions about food that impair discussion of food and diet, and sensible decisions by consumers. In his later book Spoon-Fed, he discusses many other misconceptions or myths about food science, appetite, differences between individual metabolism, diet and health.

The Diet Myth‘s first chapter introduces discusses some of the gut microbiota (part of the human microbiome) that process food consumed by humans by breaking it down, releasing nutrients that the human gut absorbs and metabolizes. In reviewing Dr. Spector’s, 2020 book Spoon-Fed, the English writer Bee Wilson said it contains an overview of many medical and scientific studies of genetics, microbiology, biochemistry and food:

The book’s main argument is that to find the best way of eating we need to ignore much of what we are told. … Spoon-Fed is a worthy successor to Spector’s earlier bestselling book, The Diet Myth, which focused on the powerful role that the microbes in our guts play in determining our health. This new book is broader, but he manages to distil a huge amount of research into a clear and practical summary that leaves you with knowledge that will actually help you decide what to add to your next grocery shop.
Bee Wilson, the Guardian, August 5, 2020, review of Spoon-Fed

The Diet Myth suggests that

food science and popular writing has not absorbed the fact of the presence of an active microbiome in the human digestive tract,
the importance of a healthy and diverse gut microbiome,
the overuse of antibiotics and other medical errors that have harmed humans by affecting their microbiome,
medical and cultural practices that have contributed to the increasing incidence of food allergies. The book suggests that food science and popular writing has been inattentive to genetic variations of humans as affecting metabolism and interactions with food and microorganism.

The remaining 18 chapters discuss the topics addressed by the “Food Facts” labels used to disclose information about food: calories, fats, nutrients, and warnings, with reference to genetics and the microbiome.

The science of calories is based on the 1944-1945 Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Calorie-based thinking suggests that diets aimed at reducing weight or “curing” obesity should reduce the intake of calories. This has evolved into a proliferation of diet advice: avoiding all fats (or bad fats), avoiding carbohydrates. eating “paleo”, eating protein, eating “Mediterannean”, not eating cheese or nuts. The food industry dominated by corporate interests, is focussed on reducing foods into packaged commodities, processed to taste good, package well and sell. The food industry reduces food to “ingredients”. People try to make up for “missing” ingredients by taking supplements.

The book discussed the scientific “discovery” of “vitamins” with a brief reference to the illness known as beri-beri, caused by thiamine (vitaman B1) deficiency. One of the principal causes where the food supply is primarily “white” (milled or polished) rice is processing the rice:

Beriberi was known for millennia in Asia, but was not described by a European until the 17th century when Brontius in the Dutch East Indies reported the progressive sensorimotor polyneuropathy. The prevalence of beriberi increased greatly in Asia with a change in the milling process for rice in the late 19th century. In the 1880s, Takaki demonstrated the benefits of dietary modification in sailors, and later instituted dietary reforms in the Japanese Navy, which largely eradicated beriberi from the Japanese Navy by 1887. In 1889 Eijkman in Java serendipitously identified dietary factors as a major contributor to “chicken polyneuritis,” which he took to be an animal model for beriberi; the polyneuritis could be cured or prevented by feeding the chickens either unpolished rice or rice polishings. By 1901, Grijns, while continuing studies of beriberi in Java, suggested a dietary deficiency explanation for beriberi after systematically eliminating deficiencies of known dietary components and excluding a toxic effect.

….

By the 1950s synthetic forms of the vitamin were produced cheaply, allowing both therapeutic administration and prevention with food enrichment.
Abstract of Douglas J. Lanska “Historical aspects of the major neurological vitamin deficency disorders …” in Volume 95 of Handbook Clinical Neurology, Elsevier (2009), ScienceDirect portal.

The use of polished rice was culturally and economically embedded – it was easier to cook and digest, and conserved the fuel needed to cook rice. This problem was not an exclusively pre-modern or Asian problem American and European scientists criticized the use of bleached white wheat flour to bake bread and other cereal products. The public policy response was to require that white flour be “enriched” with nutrients. The book also mentions studies demonstrating that agricultural products harvested in modern times contain less nutrients than the products harvested several decades earlier. The book does not refer to studies about the causes and consequences of this fact. One consequence is that vitamin products are marketed as necessary to supplement foods available to consumers in markets – and that supplements have become a huge industry

The idea of enrichming some processed food is embedded in public health policy, and supplements are embedded in culture. The book touches the issues with criticism of the scientific and industrial idea of “reducing” food to a mixture of ingredients, and with criticism of fad diets. Food science in the 19th century and the 20th century failed to addressed dangerous unknowns, and failed to warn against risky agricultural and food processing practices. Science is now not exploring the known unknowns, and public policy remains uninformed. This area can be developed further – although it was beyond the scope of Dr. Spector’s book.

The Diet Myth

suggests that food science, as discussed in the popular media, has been static,
suggests that individuals might eat more vegetables,
recommends diversity of diet and expressly and implcitly endorsies Michael Pollan’s advice to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” and much of what Michael Pollan wrote in his books In Defence of Food (2008) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), and
suggests avoiding consuming processed foods,

The Diet Myth does not refer to the NOVA food classification system suggested by Carlos Monteiro, with his team at the Center for Epidemiological Research in Nutrition and Health at the University of São Paulo, Brazil in the 2009 paper “Nutrition and health. The issue is not food, nor nutrients, so much as processing” in the journal Public Health Nutrition. The NOVA system classifies many foods as ultra-processed.

Bread, Pizza & Salt

Pizza is a leavened flatbread, usually leavened with yeast. Like other bread, it is made with salt. A pizza made from scratch at a restaurant or at home can have more salt, processed cheese and processed meats than a person should eat.

Making pizza dough is similiar to making bread. A pizza crust can be made with flour, water, salt and yeast, and a little sugar or olive oil to enrich the dough. The dough will be a dough ball which will ferment (“rise”) and be flattened for baking. A dough ball to make a 10 inch thin crust pizza will be small, and have to be tenacious to stand up to rolling into a thin crust.

A pizza can be baked in a home oven, although no home ovens achieve the temperatures and conditions of the ovens used in restaurants.

Mark Bittman’s pizza dough recipe involves flour, water, salt, instant yeast and olive oil. His recipe uses 2 tsp. (11.4 grams) of salt, 1 cup of water (237 g.) & 3 cups of flour (408 g.) (B% hydration 58%). This recipe calls for 11.4 grams of salt in 650 g. of wet dough. The calculation of sodium per serving is not straightforward. 11.4 g of salt contains 4.56 g. of sodium (= 4,560 mg.) 650 g. of wet dough makes enough crust for 3 or 4 servings. Each serving would have 1,110 to 1,500 mg. of sodium. The RDA is 2,000 mg.

Mark Bittman recommends mixing and kneading in a food processor, which takes about half a minute, with some extra pulses. In a stand mixer, a yeasted dough can be mixed and kneaded in less than 10 minutes. He recommends letting it rise at room temperature, or more slowly in a refrigerator, before dividing, shaping a dough ball, wrapping and freezing. He suggests using a frozen ball within about a month.

Peter Reinhart has dough recipes in his pizza book, American Pie. His recipes use 1¾ cups of water (415 g.) & 5 cups of flour (680 g.) (B% hydration 61%) His recipes call for stand mixer or hand kneading – not in a food processor. He favours cold fermentation in a refrigerator. He says his doughs can be divided, shaped as dough balls, wrapped and frozen for up to 3 months.

Peter Reinhart, in American Pie, has a recipe to make 4 x 10 inch pre-baked crusts that can be kept frozen for 3 months. These are not thin crust pizzas.

Beth Hensperger has pizza dough recipes in The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook for doughs for 2 x 12 inch thin crust pizzas, or 1 x 14 inch deep dish pizza. A pizza cannot be baked in a bread machine; bread machines mix and knead dough in a Dough program or cycle. Her basic recipe calls for US All purpose flour which is has less gluten than Bread flour (or Canadian All purpose flour) and makes a less tenacious dough. This is a recipe for a chewy regular or deep crust.

Recipe	Flour (Volume)	Flour (US oz.)	Flour g.	Water (Vol.)	Water g.	B%	Salt g.	Instant yeast g.
Basic	3.5 cups	16.625	471	1.33 cups	315	67%	8.6 (1.5 tsp.)	5.6 (2 tsp.)

A home cook can mix dough, divide it into balls and refrigerate or freeze dough balls for future use. A recipe that uses 3 cups of flour will make enough dough for a large pizza or 2 smaller pizzas, or 4 small or thin pizzas.

Some grocery stores sell pizza dough balls. These are warmed or thawed, shaped, topped and baked at home. The Holy Napoli brand distributed by a firm in Port Coquitlam is available in local stores, occasionally. The dough ball is 300 g., and contains 1.3 g. sodium, 72% of the RDA. Salt is crystallized sodium chloride, not pure sodium. A recipe for 300 g. of wet dough will, normally, require 3.3 g. salt (a little more than half a teaspoon of table salt). The other ingredients are flour, water and yeast. I am not sure how to compare frozen dough to wet dough at room temperature. 300 g. of wet dough is a little less than 200 g. (1.5 cups) of flour and a letter more than 100 g. (less than half a cup) of water. That seems to be a normal ratio of salt to flour, consistent with other dough recipes.

Any of the dough recipes above would have to be adjusted to reduce sodium. for users with hypertension or salt sensitivity, or concerned to limit consumption of sodium. A pre-mixed dough, or course, cannot be adjusted. A pizza made from scatch can be heathier than a frozen, pre-made pizza, or pizza made with pre-mixed dough.

Frozen pizza is a dressed pizza on a partially baked crust. It is kept frozen and is baked in an oven in about 15-20 minutes in a 400-425 degree (F) oven to finish the crust and heat the pizza to serving temperature. Frozen pizzas are easily heated and baked. They are not healthier than other pizzas. A short survey of some 10 inch (25 cm.) frozen pizzas in the freezer cases of local grocery stores follows. For some of these pizzas, the calories, sodium and other food facts label ingredients are stated for a 1/4 pizza serving. The numbers here are for the whole pizza. The processed frozen pizzas are not more salty than some pizza dough recipes, but that is not saying much. I include the % of USDA RDA (which is 2,300 mg.):

Brand	Line	Style	Crust	Topping	Specialty	Mass	Calories	Sodium
Dr. Oetker	Ristorante	Thin Crust	plain	Margherita		330 g.	840	1260 mg., 55% RDA
Dr. Oetker	Ristorante	Thin Crust	plain	Spinach		390 g.	910	1420 mg., 62% RDA
Dr. Oetker	Ristorante	Thin Crust	plain	Vegetable		385 g.	760	1560 mg., 64% RDA
Dr. Oetker	Good Baker Feel-Good		Multigrain Stonebaked	Spinach & Pumpkin Seeds	Vegan	350 g.	720 g.	1340 mg., 58% RDA

Much of the sodium found in the industrially processed frozen pizza is in the dough. On industrially processed frozen pizza, the processed cheese is abundant, and salty. They contain wheat flour unless the product is a gluten free fake pizza. There is soy bean oil, and there are mystery additives. These products are convenient, but not particularly tasty.

Zambri’s, a restaurant in Victoria sells a proprietary “Pantry” line of frozen restaurant dishes, including pizza. The pizzas are not labelled with retail nutrition/food facts labels. The pizza are larger, thicker and heavier than those above – about 580-600 g.

Some stores have Pillsbury pizza dough in a tube. The ingredient lists indicate that the dough has been mixed to bake to some thing like a frozen pizza. The oil is soy oil, and there are mystery additives.

The Way We Eat Now

The Way We Eat Now, a 2019 book by British writer Bee Wilson discusses paradoxes of food in the modern world: the success of farmers in growing enough food to feed the world, the inequalities of access to food, and the prevalence of unhealthy eating. Ms. Wilson does not identify herself as a chef, biologist, ecomomist or food scientist. She approaches food as a consumer, cook, parent and journalist.

The book suggests that individuals might spend more time cooking and eat more vegetables, apparently endorsing Michael Pollan’s advice to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” and much of what Michael Pollan wrote in his books In Defence of Food (2008) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006). The book makes a stronger argument about the problems of modern food.

The prevalance of unhealthy food was discussed in this excerpt or digest from the book:

What we eat now is a greater cause of disease and death in the world than either tobacco or alcohol. In 2015 around 7 million people died from tobacco smoke, and 2.75 million from causes related to alcohol, but 12m deaths could be attributed to “dietary risks” such as diets low in vegetables, nuts and seafood or diets high in processed meats and sugary drinks. This is paradoxical and sad, because good food – good in every sense, from flavour to nutrition – used to be the test by which we judged the quality of life. A good life without good food should be a logical impossibility.

….

Almost every country in the world has experienced radical changes to its patterns of eating over the past five, 10 and 50 years. For a long time, nutritionists have held up the “Mediterranean diet” as a healthy model for people in all countries to follow. But recent reports from the World Health Organisation suggest that even in Spain, Italy and Crete, most children no longer eat anything like a “Mediterranean diet” rich in olive oil and fish and tomatoes. These Mediterranean children, who are, as of 2017, among the most overweight in Europe, now drink sugary colas and eat packaged snack foods and have lost the taste for fish and olive oil. In every continent, there has been a common set of changes from savoury foods to sweet ones, from meals to snacks, dinners cooked at home to meals eaten out, or takeaways.

….

For most people across the world, life is getting better but diets are getting worse. This is the bittersweet dilemma of eating in our times. Unhealthy food, eaten in a hurry, seems to be the price we pay for living in liberated modern societies.
Bee Wilson, March 16, 2019, Good Enough to Eat, the Guardian

The author appears to agree that Green Revolution succeeded in breeding growing plants that put calories in mouths, but observes that agriculture failed to add to the quality of diet of most humans. She appears to agree with the United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security that food security means that “all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life”, and that the Green Revolution did not provide humans with food security. She does not attempt to explain how the Green Revolution changed the way that food is purchased by food processing companies and sold in markets of the world or discuss the issue in terms of agricultural economics.

The Way We Eat Now refers to the NOVA food classification system suggested by Carlos Monteiro, with his team at the Center for Epidemiological Research in Nutrition and Health at the University of São Paulo, Brazil in the 2009 paper “Nutrition and health. The issue is not food, nor nutrients, so much as processing” in the journal Public Health Nutrition. The NOVA system classifies many foods as ultra-processed.

In a 2015 article, Ms. Wilson discussed her thoughts on the way food is discussed:

It’s easy to be negative about this: much easier to criticise the overweight two thirds of the country than observe the smaller proportion who are in, well, proportion. “What they should be telling us,” she insists, “is that one third of the population, assuming they are not anorexic, bulimic or compulsive exercisers, have positive eating habits which means that eating well is a pleasurable thing.” We’ve become moralistic about food and size, waging war with words. “It’s not ‘naughty’ or ‘virtuous’. It’s food,” Bee fumes. “Painting chocolate as naughty and salad as virtuous just enforces the dualism in which salad is unpleasant and sweet things, frankly, sound like way more fun.”

Changing the lingo is just one part of the battle; changing attitudes is the objective. A good starting point, Bee suggests, is to remind ourselves that as omnivores, eating has long been a complex thing. “We don’t have an instinct that tells us what to eat,” she says. “We have to educate ourselves. It’s not a moral thing. It’s a skill we learn.” When people say it’s easy to lose weight—move more and eat less—it is not just insensitive, but patronising. “It’s not about intelligence. It’s about education.”

In Scandinavia they’ve tried diet interventions at various ages: using cooking workshops and meal planning, they’ve introduced both young and old to new tastes. Projects carried out in Finland proved that children’s tastebuds can be broadened considerably, and in Sweden even 70-year-olds were taught to like vegetables eventually. “It’s not hopeless at any age.” On the other hand, she reminds me “there are plenty of highly intelligent people who haven’t worked out how to stop when they’re full.”
Clare Finney, June 29, 2015, “It’s not ‘naughty’. It’s not ‘virtuous’. It’s food.” in the Market Life section of online magazine of the Southwark Borough Market, archived at the Wayback Machine

Ms. Wilson critiicizes sweetened soft drinks – ultra-processed compounds of water, dissolved sweetener, and flavourings. The majority are sweetened with sugar. The brain registers that the liquid quenches thirst, but does not register that the person has consumed enough sugars to provide energy for hours of activity. In the absence of activity, the body converts the glucose to fat. She also says:

The occasional bowl of instant ramen noodles or frosted cereal is no cause for panic. But when ultra-processed foods start to form the bulk of what whole populations eat on any given day, we are in new and disturbing territory for human nutrition. More than half of the calorie intake in the US – 57.9% – now consists of ultra-processed food, and the UK is not far behind, with a diet that is around 50.4% ultra-processed. The fastest growing ingredient in global diets is not sugar, as I’d always presumed, but refined vegetable oils such as soybean oil, which are a common ingredient in many fast and processed foods, and which have added more calories to what we eat over the past 50 years than any other food group, by a wide margin.
Bee Wilson, March 16, 2019, Good Enough to Eat, the Guardian

Ms. Wilson criticizes fad diets including food promoted by the inventors and supporters of “clean eating”, meal replacement fluids and powders (e.g. Soylent, Huel,). She thinks many energy bars and gels are largely candy snacks (ultra-processed), dressed up as special foods with benefits for some people (e.g. athletes competing in endurance sports). Her view of protein bars is similiar. She discusses the growth of prepared food – whether prepared in haute cuisine restraurants or fast food shops. The food is appealing and plentiful but not nutritious.

She also refers to psychological issues influencing how humans make decisions about buying and consuming food.

Cooking has been socially deprecated. Cooking skills and home economics are not part of the education of children. Nutritious foods are hard to identify, inconvenient, or not available in grocery stores. At the same time ultra processed food is cheap, convenient, strongly flavoured and available anywhere in the world. The book supports the campaigns to regulate the marketing and sale of soft drinks (e.g. the campaigns discussed in the writing of Marion Nestle). In part, this reinforces comments of Michael Moss, the author of Salt Sugar, Fat (2013) about modern food, poor public health policy and advice on diet, the biases and failures of so-called food science in America, calories and obesity.

Another of Ms. Wilson’s criticisms of the food supply and processing industries is that they buy and sell ony a few varietals of several fruits and vegetables, usually based on durability, size and availability in bulk rather than nutrition or taste. The Cavendish banana is ubiquitous, often used to sweeten ultra-processed grain “breakfast”cereals. It is not a nutritious fruit. Some vegetables – e.g. most winter squashes (or all squashes) – are water in a plant fibre shell, and are not palatable. She discusses the efforts of Dan Barber to breed a better tasting squash, which have been covered in articles including Tom Philpott’s Squash Is a Mediocre Vegetable. It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way in Mother Jones in 2018.

In part, Ms. Wilson describes the the world food markets as a giant mess that cannot be solved without political action affecting farmers, processers and consumers:

A smart and effective food policy would seek to create an environment in which a love of healthy food was easier to adopt, and it would also reduce the barriers to people actually buying and eating that food. None of this looks easy at present, but nor is such change impossible. If the transformations we are living through now teach us anything, it is that humans are capable of altering almost everything about our eating in a single generation.
Bee Wilson, March 16, 2019, Good Enough to Eat, the Guardian

The goal of creating an environment of a love of healthy food is vague, and involves changing the role and power of food companies in the markets of the world and altering the present climate of respecting the perceived preference of consumers for fast food which can be harvested, processed and brought to market with the least expense to producers and processers.

Much of this book discusses ideas first discussed in Ms. Wilson’s column in the Daily Telegraph, interviews with other writers, and articles in publications such as the Guardian. Her material at the Guardian is indexed under her profile.

Curry in England

The London Review of Books (“LRB”) published “Too Specific and Too Vague“, a review by the English culinary writer Bee Wilson of two recent books that refer to the ways that Asian cooking encountered English tastes in England in the 20th century. One book is about the work of 7 women presenting immigrant dishes in British and American restaurants and cook books. The other was about the history of the English word curry. The article appears to be accessible, LRB has had a paywall. I am not sure if the paywall is taken off selected articles, or has been removed, or if a bypass plugin is necessary.

The story is complicated and nuanced. English adventurers encountered Indian cooking as early as the 16th century. Manufactured curry powders – blends of ground dry spices -became popular in the 19th century. The English labelled several other spicy dishes encountered in Asia as curry. In the 20th century, immigrants to Britain cooked and sold spicy food. The English liked the food. The English found it simpler to call anything made by immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangla Desh and other parts of Southeast Asia “curry”. English lexicographers concluded that the English decided that anything like anything cooked with manufactured condiment curry powder was curry. As the history of the term involved English colonialism and empire, and the reaction of the English to South Asians immigrants, the lexicographers’ decision was controversial.

Ms. Wilson mentioned Madhur Jaffrey, an Asian immigrant writer:

As a teenager, I started cooking from Madhur Jaffrey’s books and saw with a jolt that, for Indian cooks, hearing British people declaring they loved curry could come across as a crass postcolonial misrepresentation. Jaffrey arrived in London from Delhi in 1955 to study at Rada, and taught herself to cook using her mother’s recipes because she disliked English food (except fish and chips). In England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder …

‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term “chop suey” was to China’s,’ Jaffrey wrote in An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973). ‘“Curry” is just a vague, inaccurate word which the world has picked up from the British, who, in turn, got it mistakenly from us … If “curry” is an oversimplified name for an ancient cuisine, then “curry powder” attempts to oversimplify (and destroy) the cuisine itself.’

….

For all its flaws, we seem to be stuck with the word because there are many occasions when there is no satisfactory synonym in the English language. Look at what a hash the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] makes of trying to pin it down. Curry, it says, is ‘a preparation of meat, fish, fruit or vegetables, cooked with a quantity of bruised spices and turmeric, and used as a relish or flavouring, esp. for dishes composed of or served with rice. Hence, a curry = a dish or stew (of rice, meat, etc) flavoured with this preparation (or with curry powder).’ This definition is both far too specific and too vague.

….

Some of the curry deniers have softened their stance. … in the years since Jaffrey’s diatribe against curry in 1973, she has written a series of curry-themed books including Curry Easy, Curry Easy Vegetarian, 100 Essential Curries, 100 Weeknight Curries, Madhur Jaffrey’s Ultimate Curry Bible and Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Nation. Presumably, this was partly a way of luring as many readers as possible by seeming to offer something familiar. In Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Nation she wrote: ‘If Britain once colonised India, India has now returned the favour by watching spellbound as its food completely colonised Britain.’ That book was dedicated to Britain, ‘the Curry Nation that welcomed me all those many years ago’.

Last week I found a recipe in the American writer Anupy Singla’s Indian Slow Cooker for a dish titled “Chickpea Flour Yogurt Curry” which explained that this curry is a kadhi, a northern dish made with dairy and chickpea flour. I used the slow cooker recipe, (that book had options for full size crockpots and 3.5 quart pots), in a 6 quart Instant Pot, in a slow cooker program. I used buttermilk for the dairy, intead of yogurt. See Anupy Singla’s online Instant Pot recipe for a pressure cooker/multicooker method of cooking this dish. Ms. Singla also describes stir fried vegetable – e.g. Aloo Gobi – by the word sabji.

Breadboxes

Most bread is made of grain that has been harvested and milled, to be hydrated, kneaded, and baked. Agricultural, industrial and culinary art have extended the usefulness of grain, but have not created a product to compare to the lembas bread of the elves in The Lord of the Rings. Bread is edible and palatable for a few days.

Bread is … an intermediate-moisture food product that is prone to mould spoilage. Normally bread is eaten fresh or preserved using additives or modified atmosphere packaging.
Stanley P. Cauvain, Breadmaking, 2nd ed. 2012

There are some breads that are baked hard and last longer – crackers and hardtack. Commercial bakers use additives and packaging – plastic – to extend the period of time that ordinary soft bread remains safe and palatable; there are some uses for stale bread.

Bread is porous and moist; it is vulnerable to mould (mold in the American spelling). Moulds reproduce by releasing microscopic spores. There are hundreds or thousands of spores in every cubic meter of household air. Most household filtration devices do not trap or control these spores. Mould spores will get on bread. Not all moulds thrive on bread, but several do. A mould, like a mushroom, has a mycelium of thread-like “roots”. Mould has health effects. Many moulds produce toxins. The antibiotic penicillin was derived from a common mould, that is popularly said to have been a bread mould. That is not a reason to eat mouldy bread.

Breadboxes are a convenient way of storing bread, and largely effective at protecting bread from most household animal and insect pests. Most people have a storage system for bread. Some kitchens have bread drawers in counters and cabinets. Modern breadboxes are often vented or have loose doors and lids or some mechanism to allow air flow that lets bread dry a bit – which delays mould, although it exposes the bread to some risks. Packaging can keep loaves from drying out for a few days. A consumer can combine a ventilated bread box with paper or bread bags or other wrapping. Many modern breadboxes use plastic or silicon seals to maintain the bread in an airtight chamber. This retains moisure and creates a humid storage space for bread. This delays bread drying out, and protects against some pests. This kind of box needs to be washed and disinfected regularly.

Refrigeration does not delay drying and staling. Some moulds grow in/on refrigerated foods. Some people use the refrigerator to store sandwich breads. Bread can be frozen and thawed. There is the practice, said to popular among the Dutch, of freezing and thawing bread.

Home bakers, bread machine bakers and internet advice sites have suggestions on inhibiting mould:

How to Keep Homemade Bread From Molding at Knead Bake Rise is a careful and worthwhile discussion;
An article published at thespruceeats.com makes some sensible suggestions, unfortunately tending toward making over the kitchen.

I have tried storage options:

Vented breadboxes;
A Tupperware 23 cup (5.5 liter) plastic box with a hinged sealed lid. It is large enough to hold large (2 lb.) bread machine loaves. It seems to be airtight. Bread picks up mould spores which grow into mould on anything in the box, even crumbs. After a week or so it starts to become a petrie dish;
Metal tins with lids. Old cookie tins are too small, I have a manufacturer’s container for potato chips as sold in the 1950s and early 1960s. My mother had a few, used to store flour, rolled oats and sugar. This can hold a loaf or two. It may not do well with humid contents – I don’t want to see if the interior metal rusts, or find out what rust does for bread.

There are plastic food storage boxes on the market that will hold a loaf of bread. These keep a loaf from drying out, but are humid. These. like my Tupperware, have to be regularly washed to remove crumbs and prevent mould. I don’t want a new ceramic bread storage container, an accessory suggested on some sites, or another airtight container.

My answer is a ventilated bread box, with some packaging, in a clean kitchen. Housework, more housework.

Chiles and Chillies

Chile (Chili) Peppers

The chile is the fruit of a plant in the genus capsicum, cultivars of capsicum annuum, a South American plant that travelled to Mexico before the common era. The plant grew in Mexico, Central America, and northern South America and was introduced to Europe and Asia in the 16th century in the Columbian “exchange”. It is used in cuisine that is considered, in modern terms, to be traditional or indigenous to those areas.

Fresh and dried capsicum cultivars were used in the indigenous cooking of Mexico and Central America for centuries before the Spanish conquest. Mexican cooking uses chiles in moles and other sauces, chiles rellenos (chiles stuffed with a filling and cooked), and other dishes.

Most cultivars produce the alkaloid capsaicin. Most capsicums, including jalapenos, serranos, cayennes and Thai (Bird’s Eye) peppers are “hot”; new spicier cultivars have been developed. Capsaicin is an irritant which makes some peppers “red hot”. Capsaicin is not found in the seeds; little is found in the flesh of the capsicum fruit. It is in the white pith of the seed pod and the ribs of the fruit. The 1912 Scoville scale, based on detection of the diluted substance by tasters, is still used to assess the concentration of capsaicin although chemical analysis has superceded the 1912 method.

Many sources write chile for the capsicum fruit, and chili for stews made with chile. The English speaking inhabitants of South Asia (India) and Southeast Asia spelled the name as chillies. That spelling is still used.

Sweet or bell peppers are chiles. The bell pepper cultivar was developed in Europe early in 20th century and is widely grown and sold. The gene for production of capsaicin is recessive – bell peppers are not “hot” or spicy. Banana peppers and pimentos are mild too. Mild chiles add a sweet fruity flavour.

In pre-industrial practice, chiles could be used fresh, or dried. In the 18th and 19th centuries, processsors established methods of grinding dried chiles and storing and using chile powders and sauces made from dried chiles or chile powder. Ground spice powders made food safer and food preparation in kitchens more efficient. Powders of ground single cultivar chiles – e.g. ancho (dried ripe poblano) are available in some markets in the 21st century. In Mexican traditional cooking, a cook needed a supply of fresh or dried chiles, onions, garlic, tomatoes, and Mexican oregano (as opposed to the Mediterranean Origanum vulgare).

Black, green and white peppercorns are the fruit of the Asian piper negrum. The East Asian Sichuan pepper is neither capsicum or piper.

Allergies to bell peppers and other capsicum chiles are common, yet not well known or understood by the public. Many websites offer or share advice based on theories, some of which are or appear medical. The medical foundation of such theories is that allergies are immune responses to toxic glyco-alkaloids, or other alkaloids or proteins that may contact the skin or internal organs of humans. The theories blame substances in capsicum plants or in related plants in the nightshade family.

Con Carne

Chile con carne is a popular American stew:

Chili con carne (also spelled chilli con carne or chile con carne and shortened to chili or chilli; … meaning “chili with meat”, is a spicy stew containing chili peppers (sometimes in the form of chili powder), meat (usually beef), tomatoes and optionally kidney beans. Other seasonings may include garlic, onions, and cumin. The dish originated in northern Mexico or southern Texas.
Wikipedia (November 2021) Chili con carne

Amercan Chili is based on meat. Pork and beef are traditional choices. The meat can be ground or cut to bit sized stewing pieces. There are recipes with other meats. It is customary to brown the meat to flavour the dish. Some make chili without beans. Many use beans. The beans used in chili (pinto, black turtle, red kidney, cranberry) are the dry seeds of cultivars or varietals of the central American wild bean, phaseolus vulgaris. The beans dry naturally and are harvested as a dry grain. The dry beans are hard and have to be cooked until they are tender and “creamy”. Dry beans can vary by age and other factors, making cooking times a matter of judgment or luck. Beans can be booked in boiling water or simmered in water near the boiling point. The slow cooker was developed to simmer beans, but is losing popularity.

Meat cooked in a chile sauce – carne con chile – is/was a north Mexican dish. Rick Bayless has established restaurants offering Mexican cooking, as an advance on American regional cooking, including “Tex-Mex” Western and Southwestern cooking. Bayless provided a recipe for carne con chile colorado from the state of Chihuahua in his first book, Authentic Mexican (1987). He has chile con carne on the menu in Frontera, a restraurant chain, and has published a version of the Frontera Uptown Texas Chili. By mentioning the question about whether chili con carne was invented in Texas and ny publishing the following comment he suggested that chili con carne is not an authentic Mexican dish.

Chile con carne: detestable food that under the false Mexican title is sold in the United States from Texas to New York
Rick Bayless, in Authentic Mexican (1987), quoting and translating Diccionario de Mejicanismos

Carne con chile was adopted by non Hispanic/indigenous consumers in the southwest US as American settlers migrated into the land annexed by the US from Mexico in the wars of annexation in the 1840s. It can be prepared and presented in thousands of way. It is often served with cornbread, a baked “cake” associated with the Southern states of the US. A “Tamale pie” is chili with a cornbread topping, baked in an oven.

In the early 20th century, food scientists at the New Mexico State University recovered “heritage” peppers from indigenous peoples and started the lines of New Mexico cultivars of capsicum annuum for agricultural use.

Proprietary chili powder spice blends and sauces became popular in the late 19th century. A few brand names endured; the idea of a blended powder became dominant in the American market. The chile in chili con carne is usually a blend of powdered dried chile with other dried ground spices including cumin, oregano (often not Mexican oregano), garlic powder, onion powder and coriander In modern (late 20th and 21st century) chili competitions, cooks may use multiple branded chili powders and sauces to get a unique and pleasing effect.

The origins and authenticity of chile con carne are, on the internet, a vast cavern. There are many web pages and videos of methods, recipes, festivals and competitions. In modern times it is a stew of meat and other ingredients in a tomato sauce flavour by onion, aromatics and spices including chile.

For several years I made stews, including chili, in a slow cooker with a ceramic insert (a crockpot). I used the methods suggested by cookbooks including the America’s Test Kitchen book Slow Cooker Revolution (2011). The ATK approach was to use canned beans, drained of the can fluid, which is not appealing and assumed to be unpalatable, Considering the use of salt in canning, salty broth is normally a health concern. I have been using an Instant Pot to prepare or cook beans for the last few years, and have given up using a crockpot.

Potassium

I had been taking prescribed hydrochlorothiazide (HCTZ) 12.5 mg per day, a diuretic – to control (reduce) blood pressure, since 2011. It was not effective to counteract edema, a side effect of another medication. It has side effects that interfere with digestion and absorbing potassium. I was hospitalized for 2 days in June 2021 as a result of falling. Someone on the hospital team thought I had a potassium deficiency (this was not suggested to have been a cause of the accident). Someone changed my medications to eliminate the diuretic, and prescibed a potassium supplement, for the days I was in hospital. This 2 day intervention did not affect my blood pressure, as far as I was told.

Potassium is an element; the chemical symbol is K. It is measured in milligrams (1/1000 of a gram, abbreviated as mg.) in nutrition. It is an electrolyte, and can also be called a mineral or a nutrient. The US Department of Health, National Institute of Health (NIH), Office of Dietary Supplements, publishes an online Fact sheet for Health Professionals which recommends an adult male person weighing about 80 kg. should consume 3,400 milligrams of potassium per day. The fact sheet, which has been varied 2018-2021, lists some foods high in potassium. The putative source data is found in the US Department of Agriculture’s database, available onlinein 2021 by an application program interface called FoodData Central. The database includes

SR (Standard Reference) data, in the USDA “National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Legacy (2018)”;
Branded data about foods presented as branded commodities “generated by industry through a public-private partnership” with LabelInsight, a data firm.

The data is not easy to search. A food source may be spelled differently than expected – moong beans may be moong or mung (the latter is a more popular version of spelling in on product packages in the USA). Many dry beans are listed both raw and cooked (boiled), but not all.

The information in the NIH fact sheet generally aligns to the database, but do not always align on product or serving,. The fact sheet seems confused on how much a consumer will consume as a serving. The NIH fact sheet does not list all the foods high in potassium. I transposed some foods from the fact sheet in a table below, and interpolated some foods – mainly legumes – not in the fact sheet. Comments on the fact sheet, the list, and the table:

A calorie is a unit of heat. Literally, food scientists burned food to see how much energy the food contained;
The Calorie on a food package is 1,000 times larger than the calorie used in chemistry and physics. A Calorie is a kilocalorie (kcal,), the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water 1 degree Celsius.(), abbreviated mg.

Food	Amount	Size	K (mg)	Mass (g)	Water (g)	Calories	Total carbs (g)	Starch (g)	Sugars (g)	lipids (fat) g.	protein (g)
Dried apricots	½ cup		1101	80	24.7	193	50		42.7
Cooked lentils	1 cup		731	198	138	230	39.8				17.9
Boiled mature White beans: Navy, Great Northern Cannellini	1 cup		1000	179	113	249	44.9		.6		17.4
Boiled mature black turtle beans	1 cup		801	185	122	240	45.1		.6		15.1
Boiled mature red kidney beans	1 cup		713	177	118	225	40.4		.6		15.1
Boiled mature Cranberry (Roman) beans	1 cup		685	177	114	241	43.3				16.5
Wheat bran	1 cup		684	58	5.7	125	37.4		.2		9.1
Boiled mature chickpeas: Garbanzo, Bengal gram	1 cup		477	164	98.7	269	44.9		7.9		14.5
Boiled mung beans	1 cup		457	185
Raisins	1/2 cup		618	80	12.4	239	57		52
Potato, baked, flesh	1	medium	610	156	118	145	33.7		2.7		3.1
Cauliflower, raw	1 head	medium	1760	588	544	147	29.2		11.2		11.3
Eggplant	1	medium	1250	548	506	137	32.2		19.3		5.4
Banana	1	med. 7 to 7⅞ “	422	120	88	105	26.9	6.3	14.4		1.3
1% milk*	1 cup		366	246	221	106	12.7		12.2
Spinach, raw	2 cups		334	60	54.8	13.8	2.1		.2		1.7
Tomato, raw	1	medium	292
Apple, with skin	1	medium	195
Cashews	1 oz.		187	28.4	1.5	157	8.6	6.7	1.7	12.4	5.2
Brown rice, cooked	1 cup	long grain	174	202	142	248	51.7	50.1	.5		5.5
Brown rice, cooked	1 cup	med. grain	154	195	142	218	45.8				4.5

Sources: Fact sheet for Health Professionals and Food Data Central. In Food Data Central, a food may be listed as “Foundation”. “Legacy” or “Survey”.

*The mg. K number for 1% milk. The fact sheet says 366 mg; the database says 391 mg.

The NIH fact sheet states 1 cup of cooked lentils contains 731 mg K. It aligns with lentils cooked by boiling in water, without salt, in the database. This is a large “serving”. 1 cup of dry lentils braised in 2 cups of water yields what consumers would regard as 4 servings. The USDA data search returns on specific lentils and legumes in the branded product data are incomplete. Some show raw red lentils as containing significant potassium. US and Canadian farmers have been growing mainly large green and brown lentils. Red lentils are split, hulled, brown lentils. But hulled whole brown lentils are red or pink in appearance and marketed by farmers and distributors as red lentils. Brown lentils became scarce in grocery stores near me during the Covid-19 pandemic; red lentils (hulled split brown lentils) remained plentiful. French green lentils and black lentils are available some times in some stores.

Dried apricots and raisins, and banana and apples contains sugars, which are metabolized differently than the carbohydrates in vegetables including legumes such as beans and lentils. Sugar metabolizes into body fat if the body does not need the energy within hours of consumption. Some of the foods listed as high in K provide a rationale for eating high sugar fruits and dried fruits.

Spinach is bulky when raw but wilts. Folding a few cups of chopped raw spinach into a hot dish is easy and fast.

I have recipes for Aloo Palak (potato/spinach stir fry), Aloo Gobi (potato/cauliflower stir fry), Aloo Baingain (potato/eggplant stir fry), braised lentils with spinach, dal (split hulled moong beans) with spinach and other dishes. The potato/vegetable recipes, like lentils, will make several servings but are high in potassium. The grocery stores have been able to provide potatoes, spinach, cauliflower, eggplants and several kind of dry lentils and beans in 2020 and 2021.

A cup of wheat bran has 684 mg. of K. I have recipes for a dozen bran muffins made with 1.5 cups of bran and a half cup of raisins has 1642 mg. of K. 1 muffin has 137 mg. of K.

Recipe error – Potatoes

The recipe book is Anupi Singla’s Indian for Everyone, published in 2014 by the Surrey Books imprint of Agate Publishing; also a quality paperback 2016, and an ebook in the Amazon Kindle store.

The problem in the recipes for Aloo Mattar at p. 95, Panak Aloo at p. 97, and Aloo Gobi at p. 98, in the printed editions, is the cooking time for the potatoes (aloo). In these recipes, the raw chopped potatoes are added to lightly fried onions and spices and stir fried for a couple of minutes and then cooked on low after other vegetables are added, for about 20 minutes. These are all sabji or stir fried dishes, in this author’s presentation. The result was crunchy and barely cooked potatoes.

The author prefers to use peeled Russet potatoes. Russets is the collective term of a few cultivars, including Idaho – the brown, thick skinned starchy potatoes chosen as baking potatoes and potatoes for deep frying as “French fries. This does not explain the outcome.

The error is a missed or unstated step. The missing step adds to the time to prepare this meal, and involves additional vessels and resources – another pot on the stove or an Instant Pot or other pressure cooker to cook or parcook the potatoes. Madhur Jaffrey has similiar vegetable stir fry recipes for potatoes in At Home with Madhur Jaffrrey but she has boiled the potatoes before using them.

It is not necessary to cook the potatoes until they crumble, but the potatoes need some cooking time before putting them a stir fry.

The technique to cook potatoes on in a vessel on a stove is to scrub the potatoes and cut out eyes and other visible surface defects,cover the potatoes in water, bring the pot to a boil and simmer. Thick skinned starchy potatoes should be better peeled. Peeling thinner skinned potatoes (i.e. white or yellow or many varieties of red) is a matter of taste and purpose. Salting the cooking water is an option. The cooking time depends on the kind of potatoes and size of the pieces. Baby waxy potatoes may take less than 15 minutes. Small potatoes and quarters of medium and larger potatoes may take 20-25 minutes.

The cooking time for potatoes at high pressure (11-12 psi; ie. at 242-244 degrees F.) in an Instant Pot or other electric pressure multi-cooker is 8 minutes. To parcook, I use 3 minutes on high or 4-5 minutes on low. I use a bain marie method – the potatoes in a ceramic vessel on a rack in the pressure pot. (There is water in the pressure pot of course, put the potatoes are cooked by steam water that being boiled in water). For pressure cookers, some fluid is needed but it is not necessary to cover the potatoes; the potatoes can be kept out of the fluid by using a rack or steamer basket, or a bain marie vessel. The cooking time (on high) and release method vary:

Potato	Fluid (per JN)	Time \| release Stovetop 15 psi		Electric or Instant Pot 12 psi
		JN	LP	LP
Whole large or medium	.5-1 cup	10-14 min. \| Natural	10-13 min. \| Either	13-15 min. \| Either
Quarters Large chunks	.25-.5 cups More fluid for mashed	4-5 min. \| Manual	5 min. \| Either	8 min. \| Either
Small whole	.5 cups	8-10 min. \| Natural	5 min. \| Either	7 min. \| Either
Baby, fingerling	.25-.5 cups	1-2 min. \| Manual	5 min. \| Natural	8 min. \| Natural
Sliced or diced	.25-.5 cups	3 min. \| Manual

Jill Nussinow, Vegan Under Pressure; Laura Pazzaglia, Hip Pressure Cooking

It is possible to add a little water and leave the dish simmering and steaming for an extra hour. This works with peas (Aloo Mattar) but less well with cauliflower.

Table of Contents

Sodium

Health

Sodium Sources – Bread Ingredients

Minor

Salt

Baking Soda & Baking Powder

Calculating sodium in bread

Bread

Flour & water

Yeast

Salt

Zero Salt

Food Writing

Science

Dough

Fermentation

Gluten

Crust Colour

Reducing Salt

Baking

General

AHA & other

Tuscan Bread

Vinegar

Adjustments

Salt

Yeast

Bread Machines

Machines

Salt & Yeast

Salt

Yeast

Vinegar

Zojirushi Bread Machines

General

Yeast

Initial General Rule

Zero Salt and/or Vinegar

Lean Breads – 50% Salt

50% Salt – Regular Basic and Regular Wheat

Other Adjustments

Baking Ingredients

Chile (Chili) Peppers

Con Carne