Sea Salt v Table Salt

With baking my own bread, as well as baking bread for others as an Artisan baker, a question came up that made me think. Anyone who has tried to bake bread and forgotten to add the salt will know, well okay its only me that has done this. Well the bread tastes awful. It does make me wonder who tried out exactly how much salt is needed.

Well I gave a sample of a new recipe to a woman to try, and the only aspect that was not perfect for her pallet was the salt. As she does not add extra salt to her own cooking, she notices salt more than most. I too hardly add extra salt so I notice salt saturated foods much more than most people do. It is why I am often very critical of the food industry for adding extra salt to foods. It is added along with sugar to make bland cheap ingredients taste better, and in many cases have any taste at all.

But the one fact that is never said regarding salt is that if you use sea salt, as I do, you actually need 25 to 30% less salt than most recipes state to get the same flavour. Thus, when I baked the test sample for the woman, she noticed that I had failed to make that adjustment as I was using sea salt.

Therefore if people want to reduce the salt in their diet for health reasons, just changing to a good sea salt and stopping using table salt will enable you to cut your salt intake by a quarter.

Spelt Bread

Having baked various types of bread before, trying spelt wheat bread was something that did make me a little concerned. Not least because it lacks the gluten content of standard wheat's, it can be a rather dense bread. But having mastered Rye bread and I can produce a loaf with a light crumb, I was reasonably confident that I had my technique right, but I was prepared for a failure. However, I was very pleased to discover that it worked first time.

I had tried using spelt before, many years ago but with mixed success. However my bread making skills have developed and now I can feel when I have the dough right. As spelt is not a cheap flour and I was using an organic one too, I could not afford to have made to many mistakes.

For those that don't know, spelt wheat is one of the oldest wheat's used for making bread. Used by the Egyptians four thousand years ago. However, it is the taste that really matters and it does make a great bread too.