Salt in bread

[murphymom]

Got a question for you bread bakers. I've started to bake my own bread again and I've been using a cookbook called Beard on Bread (which I've probably had for 20 years), and one thing I've noticed is that all his recipes seem to call for an awful lot of salt. One recipe for oatmeal bread (which makes 3 loaves) calls for 2 tablespoons of salt and most of the other recipes in the book have similar amounts proportional to the number of loaves they make. In contrast, I've been looking at recipes at the King Arthur flour site and most of those seem to average around 1-1/4 teaspoons of salt per loaf.

Is salt just a matter of taste preference, or does the quantity of salt seriously affect the rise, texture, etc? I've cut the salt in that oatmeal bread recipe in half and the dough seems to behave ok and the finished bread tastes fine to me. I made a whole wheat bread yesterday from that book and used the specified amount of salt and now wish I'd cut it back - tastes too salty to me. I remember reading somewhere that salt inhibits yeast action - if I cut the salt down, should I also reduce slightly the amount of yeast I use?

[NMDemDist2]

1. i have done both (as mistakes lol) if you cut back the salt it will just

rise faster

i use the Beard on Bread "everyday" bread recipe and i love it

hopefully housewolf or H2S will chime in with more technical info, but the more salt the slower it rises

it still rises just slower, so i'd think if you decrease the salt, your rising times will be faster is all.

[wryter2000]

6. I love the Beard homestyle bread recipe

The one with some butter and milk. It's really yummy.

[housewolf]

2. Salt in bread

AzDem is correct - the amount of salt controls the rise of the bread, and it also affects the taste. Bread without salt is quite "flat" tasting so some salt is needed.

In Beard on Bread, James Beard said that, in his opinion, 1 tbls of salt to 1 lb of flour (3 1/4 cups or so) is the correct seasoning. However, he also says the the quantity of salt is adjustable to your taste. (Remember that James Beard was a gourmand from an earlier era (my copy is copyrighted 1973) and tastes have changed about some things, like the amount of salt we consume.

You might want to cut the quantity down to what AzDem uses and see how the bread turns out for you. If it rises too fast or tastes a bit flat, increase the amount of salt the next time. I'm not sure what the quantity of flour used or what size loaves the King Arthur Flour recipes make (most recipes make either 1 lb loaves, 1.5 lb loaves or 2 lb loaves) so I can't comment on their salt requirements.

In general, bread recipes call for a quantity of salt equal to 2% of the total amount of flour and grains. That's kinda hard to calculate out into teaspoonfuls, though, so I'm not sure how useful that info is to you. Professional bread bakers use "formulas" based on weights rather than volume measures, so it's pretty easy for them to calculate it out.

Try cutting the salt down and see how the recipe turns out, I'm guessing that it will be just fine.

[NMDemDist2]

3. i use the recipe you posted here last spring and I have to tell you what

i did to my poor bread this weekend

usually i taste the dough before the first rise, but didn't this time and when i tasted it during the first punch down, i realized i had forgotten to add salt in the mixing process

:banghead:

so i salted it with my salt shaker and kneaded in before the 2nd rise and again before i put it in the pans for the final rise

I didn't get quite enough in it, but it was OK and the bread came out with speckles on it, i told hubby it was "spotted bread" :rofl:

here's the link, but the recipe calls for 1 tbsp for 5-6 cups flour (2 loaves) and it's about right IMO


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=236&topic_id=6007

[housewolf]

4. Don't you hate it when you do that????

Pretty innovative, though, adding it in later rather than dumping the whole bowlfull of dough.

What you might have done was dissolve the salt in a little water and then knead that in. It might have then needed a little extra flour but it probably would have mixed in a litte better. The speckles were probably because the salt didn't dissolve into the bread dough.

I'm so glad the recipe works out well for you, I think it's great too!

[kestrel91316]

5. I have had a hard time getting my breads to rise properly for years.......

so when I baked some whole wheat bread this weekend I decided to cut the salt in half, both to decrease salt in my diet and to experiment with the yeast, and BOY, it made a HUGE difference. The bread rose really nice and within a reasonable period of time. So that recipe is going to be modified permanently!

Edit: My BIL has high blood pressure and he cuts the salt in all his recipes down to 1/4 of what it calls for, and everything works fine, even his baking.

[wryter2000]

7. What do you know?

It takes bread forever to rise at my house. I don't mind, actually. I just let it take it's time. I wonder if I cut down on the salt if it'll rise faster.

I forgot the salt once, and the bread tasted really flat. I could still use it by adding other flavors (jams, etc.) But it wasn't the way I want my bread to taste.

[kestrel91316]

12. Don't leave the salt out entirely, just cut by 50-75%

[bettyellen]

8. as far as salt and high blood pressure goes, some very smart

and healty friends of mine insist their is a huge difference between table salt and the natural sea salts. something about the missing minerals, i'm not sure, actuallly... but they are usually right about things, and will not touch table salt. they regard it as pure poison. your BIL has probably heard this too.

[Tab]

13. Hard to say

Places like Celtic Sea Salt claim their sea salt actually reduces blood pressure because it contains natural minerals and nutrients like magnesium and potassium.

Sea salt as a rule is more flavorful, and as a rule, I don't like processed anything (although I eat it, I recognize the more natural the better).

Sodium is sodium, of course. Sea Salt in a coarse grain may give you a stronger salty flavor while actually using less salt overall. For baking, I'm guessing you're using a fine grain sea salt which would negate that theory.

Most of the claims of being better for you are being pushed by, no surprise, the sea salt industry. Cost aside (because it is pricier), it doesn't at least seem to be any worse, and it tastes better, although in some applications (e.g.: salting your boiling water) it's probably a waste of a good salt, but for direct applications I often like to finish a dish by sprinkling a little sea salt on it.

You may also want to look into Kosher salt, a larger grain salt, and still less expensive than sea salt.

The Mayo clinic opines that Kosher salt and sea salts aren't nutritionally any different than table salt (iodine aside, which you can get elsewhere anyway), that although they're preferred in cooking for their grain size and flavor, it's still sodium chloride.

The only thing I've heard that marginally makes sense is that if regular salt leaches out your magnesium and potassium, and sea salt has some of that in it, then it would be a bit self-regulating, except I don't have any idea how much gets leached out and how much sea salt provides. Taking a one-a-day vitamin might secure the same result, for all I know.

There's way more sodium out there in the world than you probably care to know. Every frozen pizza is just laced with sodium (some, I swear, I can "smell" the sodium in the air. Same with ordering a pepperoni pizza from Domino's. It won't be the cheese or the fat that kills you, it'll be the sodium levels. And ham, and cured meats - it's in all that stuff.

[hvn_nbr_2]

14. "Sodium is sodium": good summary. Skeptical of health claims for sea salt.

Sodium is sodium, of course.
And sodium chloride is sodium chloride.

Sodium affects blood pressure by holding more liquid in the blood stream--more liquid in the same flexible-walled container (blood vessels) increases the pressure in the container. Potassium works in opposition to that tendency by drawing liquid into the cells and out of the blood stream (very simplified, probably oversimplified, explanation). So some people try to reduce b.p. by increasing potassium rather than decreasing sodium.

Sodium doesn't actually "leach out" other minerals. It's the balance that gets upset by adding salt.

A "natural" human diet, i.e., one similar to what we evolved with over a few million years, contains much more potassium than sodium because virtually all fruits and vegetables have a lot more potassium than sodium. Modern American diets usually have more sodium than potassium, often much more. As you mention, processed foods have a lot of added salt. Almost anything that comes in a can or contains more than one ingredient has insane amounts of salt added, unless the label says "no salt" or "reduced salt." ("Reduced salt" often means reduced from obscenely insane to enough to kill you a little more slowly.) Restaurant food is usually even worse because they don't have to tell you what's in it. The "healthy" main course salad at one fast food chain has 90% of the RDA for sodium in one meal. One "healthy" chicken breast has 80%.

I'm highly skeptical of health claims for sea salt (and I'm a certified "health nut" so it's not a "skeptic's" resistance to non-mainstream health claims). Any mineral difference that matters between sea salt and regular salt is going to be in the rare trace minerals, because if there was enough potassium or magnesium or other common minerals to matter, it would taste different (not in a better way) and wouldn't be labelled "salt" because it would be less than half salt. OTOH, unless they do some extra processing on it, it will also contain some trace minerals from sea water that you probably don't want, such as mercury. If it tastes better to you or if you want to get some trace minerals that way or if you just want to support small health-oriented businesses instead of the Morton mega-business, go for the sea salt; but don't have illusions about it.

[hvn_nbr_2]

11. I routinely use 1/2 the salt in a recipe for my bread machine

and the results are fine.

I'm not sure the weight of the loaf but the standard recipe uses 2 1/4 cups of flour and calls for 1 teaspoon of salt. I've used 1/2 teaspoon of salt without any negative effects that I noticed.

For whole wheat bread problems with slow or insufficient rising, you might also consider adding a little gluten.

[murphymom]

9. So much good information!

Appreciate the feedback. My immediate goal with bread is to get a couple of basic recipes down pat to my tastes - a white bread and some whole grain breads for general toast and sandwich use. Once I'm comfortable with those, I want to learn how to work with heavier rye breads, artisan breads and sourdough. Growing up, I remember my grandmother baking all kinds of breads totally from scratch, without recipes, just by "feel". Don't know if I'll ever get that good, but I'm hoping to get to the point where I can at least make most of my own bread instead of buying it.

[NMDemDist2]

10. thanks to housewolf (and others) i just had a dinner of

tuna salad with cream cheese and avacados on my home baked bread

not only is it tasty, it's satisfying to slice into that loaf knowing you did it your self