Hold the Salt

Your dear Aunty is here today to do a little bit of food and health stuff. Today’s topic is salt.

If you eat processed foods (that is, you buy them in a can, bottle, box, tub or plastic bag at your grocery store), you are getting a lot of added salt (we are not discussing what takes place in restaurant kitchens — that’s a topic for another time entirely). Everything that food processors create, whether it’s cheese of any sort, baked goods, cereals, canned veggies and so on has added salt. Many food items, just by themselves, naturally, have a lot of sodium in them, so you need to understand where you can make changes and where you can’t.

For example: Liquid milk, all by itself, has 100 mg of sodium per cup. One cup of 1% fat cottage cheese has 918 mg of sodium in it. Why? Well, first of all, to create one cup of cottage cheese takes several cups of liquid milk, PLUS processors are adding salt to the process, first to pull off the whey to create the cottage cheese and second for what they receive is the consumers’ taste for saltiness in the cottage cheese.

Now, just for a moment ask yourself this: How much salt do healthy people need – that is, what’s the recommended daily allowance for sodium? And, if I’m not such a healthy person – how much, if I have a family history of heart disease, or already have high blood pressure, or I have kidney disease, should I be allowing myself?

Ready for the answers to these questions? I was shocked myself.

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends 2300 mg OR LESS of sodium per day, 1500 mg or less if you are over 50 years old, have high blood pressure, family history of heart disease or have chronic kidney disease.

At that rate, you can run through your 2300 mg pretty quickly (and 1500 mg REALLY quickly) if you eat cottage cheese.

Here’s another ‘hair-curling’ fact: One teaspoon (1 tsp) of table salt has 2,325 mg of sodium in it.

Makes you want to put down the salt shaker, doesn’t it?

But one really big problem for Americans is this: How can we take control of the amount of sodium we eat when so many processed foods have so much sodium in them (and sugar also, but that is not the topic of today’s discussion)?

Now, if you’ve been visiting with your Aunty for a while, you know I am very very big on ‘just one thing.” I do believe it is far easier to get into a good habit by choosing one thing to do and doing that a lot until it becomes auto-pilot. Then you can move onto something else.

One of the processed items which seems to have just a huge amount of sodium in them for what you are getting (bang for the buck nutritionally that is) is commercially produced baked goods. Next time you go to your grocery store, check the labels and it will shock you. And it doesn’t matter if we are talking bread, cake, muffins, cookies (And, as a digression: why the heck do we need salt in sweet baked goods? That is totally nuts), or the more exotic items which have entered America’s fridges and bread boxes — there is just a huge amount of sodium.

Here are just a few examples that I found on my grocery store’s web site (they give all nutritional info on every product they sell which is a really neat service):

Naan bread, half of one (they come one to a package): 430 mg sodium
Pita, whole wheat, one: 300 mg
Tortilla, flour, one: 400 mg
Sandwich rolls, potato, one: 300 mg.
Hot dog/hamburger rolls, one: 250 mg.

And that’s just by itself, before any sort of filling (considering a hot dog has 600 mg. of sodium in it all by itself, that hot dog on a bun with relish, etc. is hitting the sodium red-line for a whole lot of people).

So, what can you do, besides going on a diet strictly of fresh fruits, veggies and pasture raised chicken?

Your Aunty is also someone who believes in starting with WHERE YOU ARE, right now. I know there are a lot of ‘cold turkey’ folks out there (that is, change your diet as if you were quitting smoking ‘cold turkey’ – clean out the cabinets and fridge and throw it all away). But I also understand that for a lot of people, a sandwich on a roll or a tortilla filled with veggies and little bits of meat and cheese is something that is as close to heaven as they are going to get.

So, let’s start WHERE YOU ARE – what can you do to control that situation?

You can make your own breads and … LEAVE OUT THE SALT.

I know there are going to be readers who will be saying back to the screen at this point, “Can’t do it – they will taste funny.”

Yes they do. They taste like the baked grains in them instead of salt. That is a flavor you can actually get used to very quickly. So, get rid of the commercial baked goods and make your own with no salt. And our first ‘exotic’ bread is pita bread (which is actually a terrific example because after you make it, you can cut them up into chicks, toast them a little bit and throw out the snack chips in the cupboard. Chips have even MORE sodium in them than the baked goods do). As you can see from the photo at the top, these come out of the oven big and puffy just like the commercial ones are and can be used with fillings from tuna salad to hummus and everything in between.

What you will need:
Ingredients:
flour — 5-6 cups (these were made of whole wheat flour, but regular ‘all purpose’ will work too)
water: 2 cups of warm water
2 tbl. of olive oil
teeny little bit of honey or sugar
2 pkg. of dried yeast (if you are using bulk fast-rising yeast, this is about 1 tablespoon and a half)

Equipment:
Oven
rolling pin
flat surface
big bowl
Cookie sheet or other flat shallow baking pan
Spatula

How to:
1) Take the water and oil and put them into the bowl, stir in the honey and the yeast and put the bowl into a warm place for the yeast to get bubbly – this should take 15-20 min.
2) Stir in your flour until it makes a sticky dough.
3) Put more flour on the flat surface and dump the dough out on that (I use my kitchen counter but if you’ve got a dough board, go for it). Knead the dough, adding flour when it gets too sticky, until it is no longer sticky.
4) Clean up your bowl, grease it, and put the dough back into it. Cover with a towel or piece of plastic wrap and put the bowl into a warm place until the dough doubles in size, which should take about an hour.
5) Punch it down and let it rest. At this point, take out one of the racks in your oven, put the other one on the bottom-most rack-spot (technical term, that) with a baking pan (cookie sheets work well for this too) and pre-heat the oven to 500 degrees F.

YES, I DID SAY 500 DEGREES F. Trust me on this one, ok? You will not burn the house down or burn the pitas.

While the oven is heating up, take the dough, cut it in half (strictly to make the next bit easier) and roll one half into a log that’s about 16″ long – it will be about 2″ in diameter. Cut it into pieces that are about 1.5″ wide (that is, you’ll get about 12 pieces out of this log of dough). Roll into balls. Dust them with flour and with your rolling pin, flatten the balls into round shapes that are about 1/8″ thick.

When the oven is heated, take 3-4 (depending on how big your pitas have come out) and lay them flat on the baking pan. Close the oven door and leave for 4 minutes. Then with your spatula, flip them over and bake for another 2 minutes. Take them out and put on a rack to cool. Repeat the process with the rest of the dough.

After the pitas are cool, you can freeze them in a plastic bag. You can reheat them in the oven or in a toaster oven for a minutes or two. They also make great chips. To make sandwiches, cut across the top of the bread and fill with shredded veggies, and whatever protein you want (mushed beans, cooked ground meat, cheese and so on).

Enjoy.