Food Detectives

In my limited experience of high end (Michelin star) restaurants, you don't get enough to make much difference to your overall sugar/salt intake. most smoked fish also goes through the same brining technique. I use a dry brine consisting of salt/sugar/pepper/garlic plus any herbs in season. What i did find interesting was that the brine made the meat more moist. With fish it has the opposite effect, it draws the moisture out, leaving it dryer and firmer.

Unless you actually inject the brine into the meat it's not going to absorb much salt and sugar over night.

I have always believed that salt toughens meat. Read it in my Mrs Beetons.

Its a bit like cooking veg in water with salt in it. Most of the salt goes down the drain with the water.

We all need some salt in our diet. It is not a question of how salty,/sweet or otherwise any particular dish or even meal is, it is the overall consumption of any individual ingredient in your average food intake.measured over a week or month.

That bloke's pork might not absorb much of the salt in the brine, but it doesn't need to when there's 200g to start with. Prawns don't absorb all the salt in the sea, but a sprinkle of them doubled the salt in the paella I made last week.

The population is already getting too much salt without adding more of it. I try to avoid high salt products, and never add it to anything, but my salt intake comes in at 5.7g/day, only just under the 6g/day maximum. (The population average is 8g/day.) Bread is by far the biggest culprit in my diet, and that's eating the lowest salt loaf on the market.

But the point I was trying to get at is that when supermarkets have to publish their ingredients and home cooks don't, you end up with supermarkets disproportionately blamed for society's bad diet.

crun, why not make your own bread? Then you can make it without salt.

It doesn't follow that because food manufacturers have to publish their ingredients, and home cooks don't that home cooks are showering salt on everything they cook. I do not know any home cook who adds salt to food, except in the most exceptional circumstances. If people are eating an overall balanced diet the odd high salt or sugar product does no harm at all. If bread is the cause of your high salt intake, perhaps you should rebalance your diet and eat less of it.

Salt is essential in bread to slow down the fermentation of the yeast and produce an even crumb.

I used to make bread without salt and didn't have any problems.

Bread without salt is horrible. But you would have to eat a whole loaf of mine to get your daily maximum.

A doctor friend told my OH that if he went without salt for 2 weeks he would stop missing it. He did try but after 2 weeks he went back to his usual overload!

Monica I know it doesn't necessarily follow that home cooks are putting lots of salt fat and sugar in their diet, but just see how many of the contestants on Secret Eaters are foodies who insist their diet is healthy when they actually have no idea what they are eating. Their assumption is always that it must be healthy because it's home cooked, when healthy is about what you eat, not who cooks it.

As Ben Goldacre says: "There's no such thing as an unhealthy meal, only an unhealthy diet", which is why I have a diet that's well below average in salt even though bread is a high salt foodstuff.

Cutting out bread is all very well and good, but you have to find something better to replace it with. Bread is high in fibre, low in free sugar, low in fat and high in complex carbs. It's also very cheap by comparison with most of the alternatives.

I have yet to see a foodie on Secret Eaters - and what they eat isn't home cooked either. An awful lot of people consider taking the wrapper of several different types of prepared foods (oven chips, bought sauce tipped over chicken pieces, and mushy peas)and putting them in the oven is home cooking. It isn't.

The problem with most of the Secret Eaters is not so much what they prepare and eat at home but all the stuff; take-aways, food from garages and sandwich shops and sweets, biscuits etc that they consume between meals.

One woman I remember in particular was making a homemade cheese sauce using 2000 calories of cheese. She's complaining that she can't see why she's fat, but it hadn't even entered her head to read the nutrition labels.

2000 calories of cheese is over a 1lb of cheese. Not sure how much sauce she was making and how many people it was meant to feed, but that is bizarre. I think for these programmes to work they need the contestants to be at the extreme (and stupid) end of any group they are featuring.

What always puzzles me about these programmes is the people they feature are ordinary people with ordinary jobs receiving around the average wage and it is clear they are spending a fortune on food, far more than I could have afforded at any time in my life. How on earth do they manage it and keep paying for housing, fuel and all the other costs of life?

First you say "If people are eating an overall balanced diet the odd high salt or sugar product does no harm at all."

and then you say "The problem with most of the Secret Eaters is not so much what they prepare and eat at home but all the stuff; take-aways, food from garages and sandwich shops and sweets, biscuits etc that they consume between meals."

That's just my point, people claim they're eating a healthy diet, and then when you point out the "food from garages and sandwich shops and sweets" (or a piece of pork soaked in salt & sugar) they dismiss it as "the odd high salt or sugar product".

I recall a woman on a forum crowing about her nice healthy salad lunch, but when I pointed out that it only contained 50 cals and asked her where the other 1950 cals were coming from she didn't answer.

Then there was a woman who claimed to be a nutritionist posting a picture of a plate with her 5-a-day on it. To her, three cherry tomatoes counted as one portion, and four slices of cucumber another.

My first statement is absolutely correct and there is plenty of information online, on television and in the print media to make it clear exactly what a well balanced diet is. The fact that people choose to be culpably ignorant and not realise or find out what a well balanced diet is does not invalidate the original statement.

Personally, I work to Michael Pollan's mantra 'Eat well, not too much, most of it plants' and his corollary 'If its made from a plant eat it, if it is made in a plant, don't.

I didn't say that your first statement wasn't correct, on the contrary, I've already quoted Ben Goldacre saying much the same thing. The point I was making is that unhealthy eaters are apt to dismiss unhealthy food as "just an odd one meal" even if most of their diet is the same.

Does this mean I have to give up pork scratchings? ☹️!