Fun Facts About Salt
- Using a pinch of salt in some desserts will make them taste sweeter without the need of adding extra sugar.
- Salt water taffy was created when flood water got into the taffy and the owner sold it anyway as joke.
- Potato chips were invented in 1853 when a cook got fed up with a customer sending his fried potatoes back to the kitchen for being too soggy. To spite the customer, he sliced the potato as thin as he could, deep fried them, and dumped piles of salt on them. The customer instantly loved them... no surprise!
- In 2010, Taco Bell secretly reduced the sodium content of its food by 23% at 150 of its restaurants in the Dallas area. Without telling anyone, they replaced the salt with “other spices and other ingredients.” Two months later, they had received exactly zero complaints about the changes.
- Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt – which is where the word ‘salary’ comes from. Difficult to spend it in stores today though.
- Salt is so essential to the body that if you drink too much water it can flush it out of your system and cause fatal hyponatremia. This is what killed Jennifer Strange who entered a “Hold your wee for a wii” competition.
Sodium at TFD
We try to make our dishes as healthy as possible, so as a rule we don’t add salt (sodium) to our recipes, even when it’s part of the recipe. Lots of people are very salt-conscious and simply don’t consider dishes with a high salt content. We occasionally have people say that dishes are too salty…and surprisingly, sometimes customers complain that a dish isn’t salty enough! Most everyone has a salt shaker at home, so if you feel like a dish would be enhanced with a bit of salt, have at it (we also offer a variety of spices, including salt, at the spice rack in the store)! Salting your food is a personal choice and we like to leave it up to you.
Sometimes dishes require salty prepared ingredients that we just can’t eliminate. These ingredients contain varying amounts of salt; 1 teaspoon of LaChoy Lite (i.e. reduced sodium) Soy Sauce contains 183 mg (a lot), 1 teaspoon of Mae Ploy Sweet Chili Sauce contains 67 mg, and 1 teaspoon of Liquid Smoke contains only 11 mg (minimal). We do keep the salt content at a minimum when we can.
A lot of our customers choose their dishes according to the salt content, and we understand why. You probably know the health risks associated with high sodium intake. If you eat too much salt, the extra water stored in your body raises your blood pressure. So, the more salt you eat, the higher your blood pressure. The higher your blood pressure, the greater the strain on your heart, arteries, kidneys and brain. This can lead to heart attacks, strokes, dementia and kidney disease. Nobody wants anything to do with these!
