Why Does Coffee Taste Sweeter with Salt? Why Add Salt to Bitter Coffee? Is It True That Salted Latte Tastes Like Cheese?

Adding sugar and milk are common methods for flavoring coffee. However, in recent times, the coffee world has suddenly embraced the practice of adding salt for seasoning. While this isn't rare in the vast history of coffee, it was previously done primarily with black coffee. The recent trend, however, isn't about adding salt to black coffee, but to milk coffee!

(Exaggerated example below - don't try this)

I believe many friends will feel curious about adding salt to milk coffee—won't this make the coffee salty and unpleasant to drink? How could it become popular? Salt belongs to the category of seasonings, which refers to special materials that can influence flavors. Although they have their characteristic representations, such as sugar being sweet and salt being salty, many times when we add seasonings, we don't want to fully bring out their characteristics. This is because the relationship between flavors is mutually balanced. Therefore, many times they serve as auxiliary functions, just like harmony in music!

So the question arises: what effect does adding salt to coffee have?

What Effects Does Adding Salt to Coffee Have?

Actually, FrontStreet Coffee has shared this before. The reason people in earlier times added salt to coffee was mainly to dilute bitterness! In the early 19th century, coffee was popular across European countries. At that time, because the coffee was deeply roasted and of poor quality, coupled with extraction methods that primarily involved boiling, the resulting flavor could only be described with three words: bitter, astringent, and strong.

This black liquid was extremely difficult to swallow for most people, so they would add various seasonings to dilute the bitterness. Although sugar was the best seasoning, unfortunately, refined sugar at that time was an expensive luxury that few ordinary people could afford, so people would look for other seasonings to dilute the bitterness. Salt was the best substitute at that time.

The bitterness in coffee mainly comes from the presence of chlorogenic acid lactones and phenylindanes within it. When we use a high extraction rate to brew coffee, these bitter substances are dissolved in large quantities, making the coffee full of bitterness.

When bitter coffee enters the mouth, our taste buds release calcium ions and then transmit the "bitter" signal to the brain, activating the bitter taste receptors. Therefore, generally speaking, the time we perceive bitterness is slightly delayed compared to when the coffee enters our mouth. The sodium ions in salt activate the salt receptors on our taste buds and bind with them, which increases our sensory perception of other flavors. Therefore, when people add a small amount of salt to coffee, the presence of salt enhances the taste buds' perception of other flavors in the coffee, which is equivalent to amplifying other flavors. The proportion of bitterness will decrease, achieving balance, and the coffee will not taste as bitter.

To this day, many regions still maintain the habit of adding salt, especially some coastal cities! Here comes another question: adding salt to over-extracted black coffee is to reduce bitterness, but milk coffee isn't bitter either, so why would people think of adding salt to it?

Why Add Salt to Milk Coffee?

It's very simple: to add more layers to the coffee. As FrontStreet Coffee mentioned earlier, the addition of salt enhances the taste buds' perception of other flavors, so adding salt can amplify certain flavors in milk coffee, thereby creating a completely new taste. FrontStreet Coffee tried adding 0.1g of salt to the original latte preparation (added to the milk and frothed together), and as expected, the originally sweet and fragrant latte developed a cheese-like salty fragrance under the effect of salt, and the sweetness became even more obvious with the assistance of the saltiness—it was very good!

If friends want to try this, please pay attention: you absolutely must not add too much salt. When too much salt is added, it becomes too prominent because the sweetness of lactose is insufficient, then it becomes the main flavor of the entire coffee. An overly salty latte would be quite terrible!

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