Food Chemistry:
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “does salt make coffee less bitter“
Food Chemistry:
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “does salt make coffee less bitter“
Salt tends to enhance the presence of specific flavors, and this effect can be very pronounced even in small concentrations.
I can’t give a detailed explanation of the chemistry, but here’s a fun example – with the right filtration process, you can take salt out of milk. There’s not much to begin with – from a normal cow, around 0.15% by weight (a teaspoon in a gallon). Get rid of that salt, and even whole milk will taste bland.
From the National Institutes of Health:
One understood mechanism by which sodium-containing compounds may improve overall flavor is by the suppression of bitter tastes. Various sodium-containing ingredients have been known to reduce the bitterness of certain compounds found in foods, including quinine hydrochloride, caffeine, magnesium sulfate, and potassium chloride ( Breslin and Beauchamp, 1995 ). Further, the suppression of bitter compounds may enhance the taste attributes of other food components. For example, the addition of sodium acetate (which is only mildly salty itself) to mixtures of sugar and the bitter compound urea enhanced the perceived sweetness of this mixture as a consequence of sodium suppressing bitterness and thereby releasing sweetness, as illustrated in Figure 3-3 . No change in sweetness was found when sodium acetate was added to sugar solutions without urea, indicating that it is the suppression of bitterness by sodium acetate that is responsible for the improved taste of those solutions ( Breslin and Beauchamp, 1997 ).
Apparently, many sodium-containing compounds have this effect.
Taste and Flavor Roles of Sodium in Foods: A Unique Challenge to Reducing Sodium Intake