What Are the Effects of Adding Salt to Coffee? What Are the Benefits of Adding Salt to Pour-Over Coffee? Why Can Adding Salt to Coffee Suppress Bitterness?

The Surprising Secret to Better Coffee: Adding Salt

Whether in the past or present, people have always added various seasonings to their coffee. The purpose is not only to balance the bitterness of coffee but also to achieve a more distinctive drinking experience. Therefore, ingredients like sugar, dairy products, and other various materials have mostly become commonplace coffee "companions."

However, among all the ingredients added to coffee, there is one whose use many people cannot understand because its own characteristics don't seem like it could "coexist harmoniously" with coffee. But in reality, its role is actually much more than everyone might imagine. And that is "salt."

That's right! The clever technique mentioned in FrontStreet Coffee's title that can "improve quality and enhance flavor" is: adding salt to coffee! Salt is a very common seasoning in daily life. As the king of all flavors, it not only imparts saltiness to food but also enhances the intensity of other tastes and suppresses the appearance of unpleasant flavors. Even due to its unique chemical characteristics, it possesses many other effects, making it an indispensable essential consumer item in daily life. And the "effects" of salt in daily life can also be applied to coffee, so FrontStreet Coffee has shared quite a bit about the uses of salt in coffee. So today, FrontStreet Coffee will compile all the effects that adding salt to coffee can have!

1. Suppressing Bitterness

Suppressing bitterness was the earliest purpose for people adding salt to coffee. In food science, there is an effect called taste interaction. It means that when two identical or different taste substances enter the mouth, they influence each other, causing the taste we perceive to change. And when we add salt to coffee, this effect occurs! The presence of salt brings saltiness, which can effectively balance the bitterness of coffee.

Human perception of bitterness has a certain delay. When bitter substances enter the mouth, taste buds release calcium ions to send the "bitter" signal to the brain, which then activates bitter taste receptors, allowing us to perceive bitterness. However, bitter taste receptors are quite sensitive to the sodium ions in salt because the perception of saltiness is relatively direct. Therefore, the addition of salt effectively suppresses the tongue's perception of bitterness, thereby reducing the expression of bitterness in coffee.

2. Improving Quality and Enhancing Flavor

Improving quality and enhancing flavor, when broken down, means: improving texture and increasing taste. As FrontStreet Coffee mentioned earlier, influenced by taste interaction, the addition of salt reduces the bitterness we perceive from coffee. When our perception of bitterness is weakened, the sweetness in coffee becomes more prominent. Meanwhile, sodium ions can alter the activity of sweet taste receptors, amplifying the sweet signals we perceive. Therefore, when salt is added to coffee, we can better appreciate the hidden sweetness within it.

In addition, flavors previously masked by bitterness will have better expression due to the reduced perception of bitterness, allowing us to more easily capture the positive flavors in coffee. So it's not difficult to understand why salt has the nickname "flavor enhancer." Now let's talk about texture! Many times, we feel a rough, wrinkled sensation when swallowing coffee - a convergent feeling as if the mouth and tongue are being "grabbed," which we usually call astringency. Coffee develops this astringent feeling because it contains excessive tannic acid or other substances, which might be caused by extraction reasons or the coffee itself. Then these substances like tannic acid combine with salivary proteins, making the coffee "not smooth" and rough when we swallow it.

The addition of salt can reduce the occurrence of this situation, decreasing the astringency caused by coffee. At the same time, after salt dissolves, it slightly changes the surface tension of coffee. Combined with the above effects on astringency, coffee will have a smoother mouthfeel after adding salt, thus improving its texture.

3. Adding Complexity

Different from the first two points, which modify coffee without making the saltiness prominent, this third point requires making the saltiness stand out to achieve the purpose of increasing coffee's complexity. Products like salted caramel macchiato and salted latte were born from the addition of salt. By adding a certain amount of salt to coffee, making the saltiness prominent, it then blends with and enhances sweetness,进而 giving coffee a richer complexity. For example, in an experiment FrontStreet Coffee conducted before, adding 0.1g of salt to an already sweet and fragrant latte resulted in a cheese-like salty flavor through the collision between the latte and salt. Quite excellent!

So above are the three effects that salt can bring to coffee. Interested friends can try it at home. However!!! There are two points to note when putting salt into use. The first is that the amount of salt cannot be too much! You must not let the saltiness be too prominent in the coffee, otherwise the saltiness will overshadow the main flavor and replace bitterness as the negative taste affecting the coffee's performance.

Another point to note is that salt is not a cure-all; it doesn't apply to all coffee. Most of the time we use salt because that cup of coffee isn't outstanding and has some negative characteristics, such as astringency and bitterness, so we need salt to improve it. However, when a pour-over coffee itself already performs excellently (rich aroma, balanced taste, thick mouthfeel), FrontStreet Coffee does not recommend forcefully adding salt to further improve the texture, as this might instead give the coffee an incongruent flavor.

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