It’s good you should try it!
Slight hijack - a bit of tomato juice in a draft beer is nice as well!
James Lee Bourke’s character Clete Purcell does this in all of the Dave Robechoux novels.
My father used to do this. I always thought the habit was a hold-over from the crappy beer he had available while growing up poor in Pennsylvania. Never asked him about it, but the “get a beer bucket from the local bar” idea fits in well with his background.
the only place I’ve lived where it was common to salt the beer was Duluth, MN. Made the draft taste a little better, I think.
Slat makes things taste less bitter- which is why pastry chefs say to always add a pinch of salt to Chocolate- it cancels out some of the bitterness from the cocoa and makes the sugar-sweetness shine more brightly.
Beer is flavored with a bittering agent- Hops. Adding salt detracts from the bitterness and can make an overly bitter beer more palatable.
I recommend Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, a scientific expolration of all things food, literally down to the molecular level. It is a comprehensive encylopediac tome of food science.
Yes, I am a nerd, thank you. Nerds rule the world!
It’s interesting that the rationales behind salting beer are somewhat disparate and not entirely compatible. As for making the beer taste better, I seem to recall reading that the deal with salt was that it made food taste more like itself somehow. Around here (Texas) they sell packages of lemon-lime salt wherever they sell beer. I didn’t care for it much.
I once knew someone who salted her coffee, which was supposed to improve its flavor or something, which maybe if salt does somehow temper bitterness would make sense, but I’m not clear why that is.
I have also read two theories about why salt is added when baking bread – one answer is that it just tastes funny without a little salt. Another is that the salt retards the growth of yeast, which makes the leavening more even.
My recollection is that while the boss and staff wanted a glass of draft with their lunch, they didn’t want to go back to work with it on their breath where the hourly could smell it, so they didn’t want to belch, and, thus, salted their beer to get rid of the bubbles.
This article references food scientist Shirley Corriher and how salt is well-known to food scientist to cancel bitterness, although the exact method by which it does so is unknown (I’d guess that salt fills, blocks or otherwise interferes with the ‘bitter’ receptors on the tongue, but I am a Historian, not a biologist / physician)
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/salt-trumps-bitter/
Johnny Angel, coffee is bitter, adding salt does improve its flavor by reducing bitterness. I am a constant baker, and salt DOES improve flavor, even in chemically leavened breads (biscuits) that do not have a long rise. In yeasted breads, you get even more flavor development by slowing the yeast, so salt helps here too (and bread w/o salt just tastes, well HORRIBLE) by allowing more time for the yeast’s enzymes to break starches down into other flavor compounds. I recommend The Bread Baker’s Apprentice that discusses the role of salt and long, slow fermentation, as well as Corriher’s own Bakewise
As to it makes beer go flat- in my experience you’d have to add an awful lot of salt to do that- to the point of being undrinkable. As to flat beer- it’s disgusting and why would anyone want to do that.
Suddenly I want to get a 6-pack and see how much carbonation is in a beer, then add varying amounts of salt to them to see at what point it becomes too salty, and capturing the CO2 lost… maybe in a balloon? But I hate to waste beer…
A more technical study of salt supressing bitterness:
I was coming in here to say this.
Salt + bitter = (Mostly) sweet.
This is very easy to test. Get two glasses of tonic water, and sprinkle just a dash of salt in one, then taste.
One will taste bitter and nasty, and can only be improved by the rapid addition of good gin and a lime.
The other will taste not entirely unlike Sprite. (Gin wouldn’t hurt it, either.)
Sooo - would it make more sense to put a little salt in the coffee instead of sugar? Off to experiment…
My parents were the first people I ever saw do it. Don’t see it often.
I don’t know about adding it to a cup, but if you are using crappy mass market coffee, putting a very small amount of salt in with the grounds when you brew a put makes it more palatable.
I have not intentionally tried it without salt, though one time I had a loaf go nuts with the rising, which I first attributed to the sugar in the grilled onions I had thrown in. But then why doesn’t honey bread do the same? I’m pretty sure I forgot the salt. I started baking bread by the prescriptions of the book Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, which was recommended by somebody here on the 'Dope. What I like about it is that it presents the fundamental principles underlying the recipe, which is much more powerful for developing your own recipes than simply repeating other people’s recipes. But for the issue of salt, it just has that inadequate explanation that bread without salt doesn’t taste right, and I have seen the same claimed elsewhere. The Bread Bible, which is the only other book I’ve got on the subject, makes the case for salt as an inhibitor of fermentation. I buy that, but so far I’m not convinced that giving the yeast more time means better flavor. My attempts to use dough that I’ve left in the fridge overnight (as Ratio recommends, to give the yeast time to add flavor) have resulted in bread that impressed me less. But… still, fresh baked bread still manages to amaze me however I screw it up…
Huh. I need to get myself a bottle of tonic water to try this out. Cool trick if it works.
My mother said she used to do this.
Note that in removing carbonation, you are also reducing the bitterness caused by the carbolic acid. So I think this another reason people who don’t like the bitterness of beer do it. They should probably order a hop-less ale instead.
Salt doesn’t create sweetness, it just suppresses the sensation of bitterness to the point where other flavors can be perceived more easily. Remember, tonic water is already sweetened.
-
Carbon dioxide dissolved in water reacts to form carbonic acid, not carbolic acid. You don’t want to ingest carbolic acid, trust me.
-
Carbonic acid is sour, not bitter.
-
Even if you nix the carbonation, you’ll still have carbonic acid left in the drink. This is why seltzer tastes tangy even after it goes flat.
A pinch of cinnamon will do this as well.
As far as beer, has anyone heard of putting sugar in beer? Heard it mentioned in a Taj Mahal song, St. Kitts Woman.