Using salt in boiling water

[Dave]

I am in a discussion on uk food and drink misc about putting salt in the water to boil pasta and vegetables. Can anyone tell me definitively how the idea works please.

Dave

[Skipweasel]

Badly.

In theory it will raise the boiling point and so allow the veg to cook more quickly and thus more cheaply.

In practice you need to an an unreasonable amount of salt for this to have any effect other than to add sodium to your diet. Also, make the solution salty enough and osmosis will draw water from the cells into the cooking liquid making your dinner all limp.

[JW]

Hmmm...food for thought. I must admit, I do put a little in, not realising that it would make little difference to the cooking time. Might stop bothering.

[S Viemeister]

See if your local library has a copy of 'On Food And Cooking - the science and lore of the kitchen', by Harold McGee ISBN 0-684-80001-2.

[Bernard Peek]

In what sense do you mean work? Some salt left on the pasta will make it taste better. I suppose that salt in the water might prevent the pasta from dissolving if it was boiled to death.

[Halmyre]

Do they have discussions there? Any time I've looked in it more resembles the apes shrieking and gibbering at each other round the water-hole in "2001: A Space Odyssey", but less coherent.

[tim....]

It makes it taste differently! You either prefer this or you don't.

But if you do want the salt, adding it to the boiling water works better than adding it to the cooked food because it will affect the food uniformly.

tim

[jgharston]

I experimented in the early '90s and it makes so little difference to the boiling of the water that's it's pointless to do it for that purpose. As for evenly distributing salt around the food, most of the salt will remain in the water and go down the drain, so you use less salt if you add it to the finished food.

Similarly, adding sugar to tea /after/ taking the teabag out, otherwise the teabag takes some of the sugar with it.

JGH

[Skipweasel]

Unless, of course, you prefer your salt distributed locally.

[Alan]

In message , Bernard Peek wrote

No, it just makes it taste of salt.

[Phil L]

I can see this is going to be a god versus evolution type thread.

Can we just state the obvious right now? - some people like salt and some people don't, so obvioulsy those who do like salt, want things to taste like salt, and to them, that tastes 'better' than unsalted....it's pointless going around in circles.

[alexander.keys1]

Or even better, you could make the tea properly in a teapot, and try it without sugar, then you actually taste the tea rather than the sugar. Use good quality tea too, loose if you can still find it, Sainsbury's currently has 'Ceylon' loose tea which is drinkable without milk ( I can't drink milk any more because of digestion problems). Lapsang Souchong is a very good black tea, but hard to get now, though Co-Op does stock Twinings L-S teabags.

[Frank Erskine]

I don't use teabags. I prefer the real stuff.

[Tim Downie]

Yeah but, who on earth adds salt for that reason? =20

Well quite. What made you think that was the reason for adding it?

Well it all depends on the salt concentration within the cells of = whatever you're cooking. If you boil vegetables in a hypotonic solution = (i.e., one with less salt that the concentrations within the cells) some = salt will leach out during cooking leaving the veg tasting saltless & = bland. How much salt you need to add to minimise this will depend on = personal preference and the permiability of the vegetable skin/surface.

In general, most of us probably put too much salt in cooking water as = many veg probably have relatively impermiable skins and don't loose too = much salt during cooking. At the end of the day, it's down to taste. = Experiment and see what works for you.=20

Tim

[jgharston]

I usually only make tea for one person at a time. In the rare times I'm making tea for guests I break out the teapot. And I put hardly any sugar in, to the extent that I often don't let other people sugar my tea because they reinterpret "just a bit" to mean "only one heaped teaspoon".

JGH

[Andrew Gabriel]

The difference in taste between tea bags and loose, for apparently the same tea, is very striking.

If making for just myself (normally the case), I use loose tea in a mug. I have a strainer which exactly fits in standard mugs and goes full depth of the mug. Put that in the mug, tea in that, and then boiling water directly on top. I usually lift the strainer in and out a few times to agitate the leaves, and finally lift it out with all the leaves and flick them into the bin.

I've had this strainer for ~25 years, and never seen another one. I'm keeping an eye out because, being fine plastic mesh, it will break one day, and that will completely wreck my well established tea making ritual.

I always try to remember to take some tea with me when I go abroad. In both the US and many EU countries, you will find a large display of tea products in stores, but without any "tea" in them whatsoever. Some of them can be quite nice, but if you want a cup of tea, not much use pouring boiling water over dried apple, pine nuts, and cloves (or whatever mixture you found). Actually, it got quite funny going to the US - I would get a queue of people in the office wanting to take the remaining "real" tea bags off me when I returned. Eventually, this turned into orders for Costco sized sack of teabags which I needed to take out with me. You can buy UK style tea at specialist outlets, but only for really stupid prices.

[Owain]

A good cup of tea brings out the flavour of the sugar.

Owain

[Dave]

By about 2 degrees C I have found out.

Wont that be good for crisp vegetables and bitable pasta?

Dave

[Dave]

That was my thought some years ago.

Dave

[BartC]

If it's 'dry pasta' (ie. drained after boiling), with sauce or accompaniment added after, then it's more difficult to add salt uniformly after it's cooked.

Salt is traditionally added to the water so that the saltiness ends up actually inside the pasta (so needs to be added near the start).

(These days I use ready-made sauces which are already salty enough, and I don't like too much salt anyway, so my pasta is cooked in plain water.)