I wish I could give them up, but I’m a FIEND for soup!
Cookin again
I'm inclined to expect that if you make your own, you're likely to add less salt than a restaurant, which might add less than a cannery. Sorta like regular cooking--most of the salt you eat isn't the salt you add when you cook.
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing
Store-bought soup and broth are almost always oversalted. (Salt is a preservative, after all, so salty foods stay fresher longer. And, they can pack it with salt and then print something misleading on the label like 'No Preservatives Added!")
If you like soup but the salt content is holding you back, you can make your own soups and stews at home (they're super-easy). Then you can make them completely salt-free if you really need to. Just watch out for salty ingredients: cured meats, canned vegetables, and salted butter are the big offenders.
Zardnaar
Legend
I still don't really lije it that much. Home made chicken noodles for example I like that one.
Generally same category as pasta. I'll eat it but don't believe in making it or paying for it.
Opportunity cost calories aren't worth it
I absolutely do make soups & stews at home! But even if I start with zero or low-sodium broths, I find that salt must almost inevitably be added.
Certainly, ingredients like vinegars, dry wines, and citric acid can do some of the heavy lifting, sometimes only salt (in some amount) will get you the flavor and/or chemical reactions you need for a dish to come out tasting right.
I’ve my now 2 decades (!) on a low sodium diet, I’ve found that for CERTAIN dishes, the only salt you REALLY need is at the dinner table. And in those cases, the magic of coarse ground or flake salt really shines. It’s a cooking secret you’ve seen applied but might not realize what’s going on.
How you chop something; how you add something to a dish can strongly affect the final dining experience. One episode of Bourdain’s shoe made it obvious: if you chop something up finely, it diffuses throughout the dish, diminishing its individual impact, and allowing you to use more of it and letting you evoke different flavors. In contrast, more coarsely prepped ingredient will have a bigger flavor impact when eaten, but won’t season the whole dish as much.
Classic example in cuisine: creole cuisine seasoning technique is very much like European (especially French) cuisine- finely chopped, ground or puréed in order to present a uniformity of flavors. Indian cuisine, OTOH, uses grossly chopped or even WHOLE ingredients that maximize the flavor impact of each bit of it- you KNOW when you’ve bitten into a whole black pepper kernel, for instance.
On the steak, those big flakes or coarse grinds absolutely hit your mouth with an intense saltiness that you won’t get from the finely processed table salt you find in most places.
Now, I can’t tell you with any certainty that I’m taking in less sodium using coarse ground/flake salt as opposed to traditional table salt, but I know I’m not repeatedly reaching for the shaker.
Sepulchrave II
Legend
To be fair, the uniform flavours offered by the trinity (Creole), mirepoix (French), soffritto (Italian/Spanish) or the other sofrito (Latin/Caribbean) have their functional analogue in curry sauce (fenugreek-turmeric-chili-cumin-coriander-garlic-onion-ginger + whatever carrier - tomato, yogurt or coconut). It is the superimposition of large pieces of "other stuff" - say peppercorns, cardamom pods or star anise - upon the base sauce which give Indian food its special magic power.
But you could probably argue the same about au poivre sauce (green peppercorns) or piccata (capers) or puttanesca sauce (olives/capers/anchovies), so I'm not sure.
I'll shut up now. God, I love food.
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Nah, we’re just on different parts of the same track!
Sauces like au poivre or piccata are great examples, but they’re exceptions in western cuisine. The vast majority of the others are all very uniform and homogeneous in nature. The only other European/American sauces I can easily think of that aren’t are things like rustica versions of Italian sauces and some of the South American salsas.
I’ve been into Indian food since I was introduced to it by a HS classmate in the mid-80s. The rest of my family is just starting to get their feet wet, with Mom being the next most experienced…which isn’t saying much.
A year+ pre-COVID, I took her and one of my cousins to a new, high-end Indian place, and one of the dishes we got was a simple Chicken Biryani. Everyone enjoyed it, and we took the leftovers home. A day or so later, we were trying to finish off the leftovers in the fridge, whic included a serving of turnip greens, which mom claimed immediately.* But the only rice we had was the biryani.
Mom mixed the two, and stopped eating after taking her first bite of the melange, and just looked at me.
“Son, you have to try this.”
I did…and was stupified. So few of the spices in each dish overlapped. And yet, the meticulously blended creole seasonings in the greens and the discrete flavor bombs from the biryani had combined into a true flavor experience!
FWIW, Mom did NOT offer me another taste, and practically squee-geed her bowl.
* my greens kick ass
Zardnaar
Legend
Indian also goes fine with Arabic/Turkish meals.
Curry sauce dip your fries in it. One thing the Poms got right. Just a pity about the mushy peas.
Old Fezziwig
Well, that was a real trip for biscuits.
I had some fantastic mushy peas (surprisingly) at a pub in Boston, Lincolnshire. Everything since then has been utterly mediocre. I have wondered if my enjoyment of the peas was influenced by (1) the fact that I was on my first full day of vacation, (2) the novelty of visiting my hometown's namesake, and (3) the pure joy I brought to an older fella at the pub when I tried and failed to put a pound in my jeans pocket three times in a row in less than a minute (fair play to him; there was no malice there — I would have laughed at me, too). His laugh was kind of magical. If only he were in Bath last November when I bumped a table in a pub three times in less than a minute, spilling most of my pint. He would have loved that, too, as long as he was far enough away to avoid the spill.
