Substituting Salt
With the growing market for salt/sodium reduced food products, there is an increased demand for salt substitutes or salty taste enhancing ingredients.
05/01/07 In Western diets the current daily salt uptake adds up to twelve grams of salt per day, which is the double or triple the amount said to be healthy. Around 70-80% of the daily salt intake comes from processed foods. Research carried out in recent years in various countries showed that excess sodium intake increases the chance of developing hypertension which rises the risk to suffer from heart disease and stroke. Clinical studies showed that the reduction to 6g salt per day would prevent 70,000 strokes and heart attacks each year, half of which are lethal.
Awareness campaigns and national health plans have strongly encouraged food manufacturers to reduce sodium in their products. The main challenge for them in this regard is the loss of palatability: Simply adding less salt is not a good option as the taste characteristics will no longer be the same. Manufacturers might sometimes be able reduce sodium by about 10% without losing the consumers acceptance of the product, but an additional 10-15% reduction will significantly affect consumer preferences.
Substitute Demand
With the growing market for salt/sodium reduced food products, there is an increased demand for salt substitutes or salty taste enhancing ingredients. Most of the existing salt substitutes do not match the taste characteristics of pure sodium chloride at a significant sodium reduction level and tend to have bitter or metallic off-notes. One of the biggest barriers for salt replacement is cost, as salt is still the cheapest food ingredient available. Furthermore, consumers are used to the taste of salt and might not except product with lower or different salty taste characteristics.
Reduction Option
Jungbunzlauer’s sub4salt helps manufacturers to meet reduction targets and to come up with tasty products with a sodium content reduced up to 50%. sub4salt does not only contribute to the product’s taste, it also holds up the functionality of salt in food products.
sub4salt is designed to replace sodium chloride in a formulation in order to reduce the sodium content by 25-50% without losses in taste. Compared to other salt reduction systems, sub4salt offers four main advantages: similar salty taste characteristics, no additional off-notes, easy handling and comparable dosage levels.
1 g NaCl (salt) contains 0.40g Na while 1g sub4salt contains approx. 0.26 g Na. In other words, a 1:1 replacement of salt by sub4salt (use of 2g sub4salt instead of 2g salt) already provides a 35% sodium reduction in a product.
The achievable reduction level without losses in taste or functionality depends on the product matrix.
Soup Addition
In soup, salt is mainly a taste carrier. Sodium/salt reduction normally results in a changed taste profile, which is often disliked by consumers. Tests with sub4salt in soup applications have always shown that sodium reduction levels up to 50% are possible. Trained taste panels did not find significant differences to a standard soup containing the ‘normal’ salt content.
Bread/Bakery Applications
The influence of salt on the technology (fermentation process, biochemical reactions during dough formation) is an additional problem to the change in taste when reducing the salt content in bakery applications as salt stabilises the three-dimensional wheat gluten network.
Breads with sodium content reduced by 25 to 50% were produced by using sub4salt. In these breads, there were no significant differences in taste, crumb texture/appearance, crispiness and colour against the standard bread with ‘normal’ salt content. Additionally, there were no differences in the production process (dough preparation, baking process). Tests with pastry products showed comparable results.
Use in Meat
The influence of salt on the water binding capacity yield loss after cooking is the main problem in sodium/salt reduced meat products. In hams produced via the brine injection process similar functional properties can be obtained using 2.2% sub4salt instead of 2% NaCl. This amount of sub4salt equals nearly 30% sodium reduction, without a significant difference in taste, while keeping the desired functionality.
