The food in restaurants seems to always be extremely high in sodium. This is because restaurants are using way more salt than what the average person uses at home. Salt is the main ingredient along side sugar, that actually makes most foods taste so good. However, there is a limit to how much salt is too much salt when it comes to the taste. The restaurant’s focus is most of the time on taste when it comes to salt, not health.
Some restaurants can go overboard sometimes on how much salt they are using, which definitely shows up in the sodium levels on the food labels.
So why do restaurants use so much salt in their foods?
Restaurants want everything served on their menu to taste good to the point that customers remember the taste and return again. This is why restaurants use so much salt in their foods. One of a restaurant’s worst nightmares is for a customer to tell them that their food tastes bad. In this case, bland.
Telling a restaurant their food is bland is like telling them that they can’t cook. Basically, it is telling them that they just threw the food in the oven and put it on their plate. Well, anyone could have done that right? So it is easier to deal with the possibility of their food being too salty than to have the food experience the guests are having, ruined by tasteless food.
Using more salt also helps to conceal the other ingredients that restaurants might want to otherwise keep secret in their recipes.
Fact is, the most memorable most terrible food I have ever had was not food that was too salty, but food that was tasteless. The mind can grasp why food is so bad because there is too much salt, but not so easily when the food is bland.
There is nothing like receiving food that looks like it is full of flavor, but upon tasting it, it is bland. It is quite the let down.
The simple solution in the mind to fix salty food is to use less salt, “it is just too salty”, but the solution isn’t so simple when the food is tasteless. There are many solutions to how the food can be improved with more flavor, so it sticks with the person longer.
Salt is just the common simplest answer to fix tasteless food. It is even used in desserts. Any good restaurant knows that this is the secret recipe in many great dishes. Most restaurants will use as much salt as they can on all of their foods as long as they don’t cross the line of their food tasting too salty (which is easily fixed by making it less salty).
Finding the point where the food becomes salty enough that it isn’t too salty, but adding a little more could possibly make it taste too salty, is how restaurants can make their foods so salty without it being too salty in flavor.
This was proven to me once when someone accidentally double seasoned all the chicken that a restaurant prepared for the day for their guests. The chicken was already seasoned with a lot of salt, which was way too much, but it made the chicken so good that you wanted to eat it all day after tasting it.
After the chicken was accidentally seasoned twice, there were complaints all day long about how salty the chicken was; but the same customers showed up the next day after the problem was fixed. It is not like the mistake killed the restaurant completely or anything. They still wanted that addictive chicken, just without the extra overbearing kick of salt.
Had this been done with food that is just salted with extra salt for more taste, it would have gotten away with double the amount most likely. However, this restaurant did not because they already had measured out, and were using the optimal amount of salt for the chicken, without making it taste too salty.
If you don’t really think it is like this, then check your local grocery store for those great tasting frozen meals. Most of them are packed with high levels of sodium. Even the sweets found there will sometimes have large amounts of sodium. This is because the chefs have already tested the boundaries of the limits of an overbearing salty taste.
Making foods in general that taste good without salt is really hard to do. Restaurants know this, so they use more salt.
Why do fast food restaurants use so much sodium?
Fast food restaurants already know that it is common knowledge to the general public that eating fast foods everyday isn’t a healthy choice. Since they know that they know that already, they pack their foods with salt because the salt makes their foods taste better. They know that the main reason that people keep buying their food is because they prefer their appetite and taste buds satisfied over health.
They know the reputation of their food is of it being unhealthy, so more sodium can really be added without receiving heavy criticism for doing so, since they are a fast food restairant after all. The fast food restaurant’s goal is to create great tasting food, which is the reason why they keep attracting more customers that regularly return.
When they salt their fries, they are going to use a lot of salt, or either no salt at all. Truth is, that is normally the only two choices available. It isn’t really as simple as requesting great tasting food without a lot of salt. Doing so is like asking the restaurant to remake their entire recipe.
How much salt do restaurants use compared to cooks at home?
Restaurants use four to five times more salt on their food when compared to the average amount that home cooks use on their food. The question that is often asked by a lot of individuals is, “why does restaurant food taste so much better than mine?”.
No one ever thinks that the simple answer most of the time is to just use more salt. On top of that, being told to use more salt isn’t going to equate to the average home cook thinking that this means to use four or fives times more than you would normally use. They are most likely just going to sprinkle a little extra on their food and be done with it.
