Salt is a necessary part of life. All life depends on it. So how can I talk about recipes without salt. Isn’t that harmful? And more importantly, won’t they taste bad?
Let’s start with how this came about. Some years ago, my father was diagnosed with high blood pressure, the kind that was sensitive to salt. He couldn’t tolerate any of the commonly prescribed drugs, so he switched to a no-salt diet.
Of course, it’s nearly impossible to buy prepared food that doesn’t contain salt. Similarly, food served in restaurants always has a lot of added salt. Which means that all his meals must be prepared at home. When he became too old to look after himself, I took on the cooking role, learning as I went along.
The first approach was, of course, to simply leave out salt from any recipe. For some meals, like oatmeal and salad, there’s not much difference. But for others, this made a significant change in taste. Bland, dull, flavorless… those were some of the responses I had to this approach.
To complicate matters, he also suffers from GERD — gastroesophageal reflux disease. This rules out a lot of foods that normally provide flavor. Onions. Garlic. Tomatoes. Celery. Oh, and he’s an organic lacto-ovo-vegetarian, so no beef, pork or chicken.
Reduced salt diets are nothing new. Perhaps the most famous of them is the DASH diet, which stands for “Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension.” The standard DASH diet limits salt intake to 2300 mg of sodium a day, which is around 1 tsp of table salt. And there’s a lower sodium version of the diet that maxes out sodium at 1500 mg per day. But even that was too much for my father, so he opted for a no-salt diet.
Over the years I have found a number of approaches and strategies that overcome the apparent taste limitations of this diet, and that go beyond simply leaving out the salt. You’ll see in the list of supplies that there are now a large number of prepared foods that are reduced salt or have no added salt.
I’ve also found ways to make the food tastier. The star is balsamic vinegar. There are also Italian herbs like oregano, basil and rosemary, as well as mustard and olive oil. Using raisins or other dried fruit provides a nice “sweet-and-sour” flavor when combined with the vinegar. And of course, when you buy fresh, locally grown vegetables, they themselves are quite flavorful.
So take your time, peruse the recipes I list in the following posts. And please feel free to share your ideas as well.
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