Low Salt Indian Food

indian-cuisine

Indian recipes tastes awful with reduced salt. Can anything be done to make them more palatable? Are there dishes that taste OK even with low salt?

Best Answer

One (helpfully, authentiacally Indian) practice that might prove useful to you is, cook the food with even more reduced salt, or no salt at all - then, when serving, add just the amount of salt you want to eat in the meal to your plate in a separate little heap. The practice is used to adjust the salt you need by taste, by dish, or even by bite (since it was easier than trying to salt food made in large quantities to everyone, everyone's taste).

In any case, having a few grains of salt sprinkled directly over the food as you take a bite (or nabbed by a damp finger or spoon edge and set on the tongue) can flavor the bite as boldly as a full pinch mixed into the same bite. It hits the tongue directly, it gets all the salt immediately available to your taste buds, instead of spreading the salt through the food so whatever surface hits the tongue has enough salt for the bite, and you may not miss the extra salt as you're chewing because your tongue is convinced there's enough salt already. Think about food where flakes of sea salt are sprinkled on top - because it is immediately available, it tastes much saltier than the same amount of salt mixed cleanly into the food (I'm thinking slated chocolates or caramels).

As a side note, you may miss the salt less in milder dishes, since you won't need the salt as much to balance out the heat and other flavors. But that's a question of personal taste.

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