A quest for Low-Salt Bread
An Apology
This time I’m writing about my ongoing quest to find a delicious low-salt loaf of bread. This post is appearing later than I intended because, like any good scientist, I had to do my research and analyse the results before publishing. More about that later, but first a little bit of background.
What’s the deal with Bread?
When I first started looking to cut the salt in my diet, a big shock to me was just how much salt is in a slice of bread. A typical sliced loaf will contain 0.4g or more of salt in each slice. That was a problem as ‘a quick sandwich’ was a big part of my diet covering anything from a meal to a snack. The contribution of bread to sodium levels in normal diets is discussed at length in this article from the Journal of Renal Nutrition. It has an American focus, but we’re not wildly different in the U.K. as this information on the NHS website shows.
I’m not really a half a slice person – more two slices and plenty of filling – so my quick sandwich would use up nearly half my daily ration of salt – more with thick slices – before I’d even put butter on, let alone a filling. If I could make a low salt bread it would really make life easier for me.
Rather than describing a sequential journey of discovery, I’ll write about the various things we have tried. Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Skwerg was chief investigator of recipes. Until recently I just tasted them. There are links to the recipes in the post, or you can find them on the recipes page.
Who Needs Salt anyway?
One of the earliest experiments involved leaving out the salt entirely. We used a recipe from Paul Hollywood’s Book on Bread [1]. That… didn’t work. It turns out salt is quite an important part of the recipe. I mean, who would have known that every one of breads’ four ingredients would be vital…?
There is a Russian proverb (according to the internet, so…) “Bread and salt never quarrel”. It turns out there’s a reason for all that salt in bread. As it happens the salt isn’t there simply for flavour. As you might imagine, in a food with only four ingredients, each is essential. The Salt interacts with the yeast affecting rise and structure. This fact-sheet from the Federation of Bakers gives a good explanation, including discussion of the industry’s efforts to reduce the salt content of loaves.
Professional Help
We even went to the ‘Bread Lady’, running a stall at our local market asking is she could make a low salt loaf. Unfortunately, despite the excellence of her standard (and other specialist) loaves, we didn’t think the low salt loaf tasted any better than what we could produce at home.
Beer Bread
Casting around for ways to improve the bread we tried another of Paul Hollywood’s recipes – beer bread. We still left out much of the salt, but the beer and honey in it added flavour. That went well, until I found beer contained a fair bit of salt [2].
Nut’s, Chillies and bits of Shrubbery
Following the theme of adding stuff for flavour, we tried a number of different things to give a bit of taste to the bread. Chili flakes, Rosemary, Garlic and Walnuts (Not all in the same loaf I hasten to add!). We still left out or reduced greatly the amount of salt. By far my favourite was the addition of chilies. Unfortunately, I’m no longer allowed chilies (the reason why is a tale for another post). The bigger problem is that these breads tend to be specialty breads that go well with particular things – cheese, cold cured meats or pizza. As a day-to-day loaf for a bit of jam or honey, they didn’t work so well.
A Literary interlude?
If you recognise the tile as a book, you’d almost be right! It’s a bad pun on John Steinbeck’s ‘East of Eden’ pictured here on the right.
For the musical among you I found this song explaining how to make bread:
I also considered trying to lever ‘toast’ into the title so I could reference this:
Flatbreads
A particularly useful recipe we found was this one for flatbreads.These use no yeast as they are unleavened, so leaving out the salt does not have consequences beyond the flavour. We use them as one might use a wrap, often with a slightly spicy or strongly flavoured meal like a spiced chicken fajita. The main dish provides the flavouring, and the lack of salt is less noticeable. They are fried which also helps with the flavour and adds calories. They are also very quick to make because they don’t need proving.
Quirky Inspiration
Last year we attended an’ Artisan Bread and Scone Making’ course at the delightful Quirky Workshops in Penrith. Whilst the course didn’t give us a salt free bread, it inspired us to rethink our bread by introducing different sorts of bread such as enriched doughs, challah and sourdough.
Current Loaf
I don’t mean current as in fruity, nice though they are. Rather the recipe we currently use for bread. A s suggested in the previous section the workshop got us (Mrs. Skwerg) thinking about a better loaf. After some experimentation we ended up with the one using this recipe. Thanks to the magic of Kenwood mixers I can produce this unaided. It’s also fairly flexible – it can be made into buns or loaves. Initially there were walnuts in it to add a bit of flavour. I’m a fussy so and so though and wasn’t so keen on the bits in it. We dropped them, but the walnut oil and black treacle that are still in there add flavour.
Future Proving
As part of the preparation for writing this post I investigated low salt bread. Searching around I found this recipe for Pane Toscano, an Italian no-salt loaf that originated from Florentine monopoly on salt making it too expensive for other areas. I decided I should bake a loaf first before I wrote about it – hence the delay due to research. You can see the recipe here on the King Arthur Bakeries website. It’s a complicated loaf, or more accurately it takes a lot of making because it’s a two-stage process the first stage left to prove overnight. The dough is also very sticky and wet making it tricky to work with, however the result was good. The lack of salt left it bland, but when eaten with something salty (Reduced Salt Marmite being a favourite of mine) it’s really doesn’t matter. I’ll definitely bake it again. Andrew Morton in his book ‘Brilliant Bread’, has a pure sourdough version of this recipe [1].
Onwards and Upwards!
My search for a low salt loaf is still ongoing, though the variety of options I have now make it less essential. I doubt I’ll ever find anything to match a nice fresh baked loaf of tiger bread with its high salt content, but that’s not going to stop the experiments!
Until next time,
Wear a mask, keep your distance, and Stay Safe!
Skwerg
[1] For copyright reasons, I can’t give you the recipe, all l I can do is point you to his excellent book.
[2] I spent a good while looking for the article that alerted me to this, with no success. In fact, what I’ve found are many sources suggesting beer is quite low in salt! I’m now wondering if I was mistaken.