When did you start adding salt to your child’s food?

[Hope54321]

When did you start adding salt to your child’s food?

I cooked pasta for a chef once. He tasted it - glared at me because I hadn’t put salt in - and tossed it all in the bin! Lesson learned…

Christ, not keeping salt in the house and only having chips once a month is peak MN.

We dont add actual salt but we eat seasoned food like chicken and rice and my DS has eaten what we have since weaning. Everything in moderation

@daisyjgrey

Christ, not keeping salt in the house and only having chips once a month is peak MN.

Loool, I just can't with some of the people on here.

@CovidCorvid

The only thing I put salt in is home made bread. I cook quite a bit from scratch and stuff doesn’t taste bland. I can’t think of any curry recipes or pasta recipes I have in my numerous recipe books which have salt in the ingredients. 🤷‍♀️

Do you exclusively own "the big book of saltless meals" volumes 1-9? Because Nigel Slater et al all include salt in their recipes.

@CovidCorvid

The only thing I put salt in is home made bread. I cook quite a bit from scratch and stuff doesn’t taste bland. I can’t think of any curry recipes or pasta recipes I have in my numerous recipe books which have salt in the ingredients. 🤷‍♀️

"Season to taste" means add salt, FYI.

I didn't not put salt in my DC's meals. We cook pretty much exclusively from scratch (I mean, I'm not making my own sausages but we rarely use tinned or jarred sauces or anything out of the freezer) so I just cooked as normal. Cooking water has salt in it, meat is seasoned. But if you look at the amount of salt 'allowed' per day, it's a huge amount so it's quite easy to stay under it as long as you're putting it in yourself.

Never I never add it to mine either. If child is eating foods and likes them then why do you need to add it?

@Comefromaway

I hate garlic.

Me too. Vile taste, ruins every nice thing it touches.

@ThoseFestiveLights

I am boggling at people who don’t use salt and pepper in cooking. Do you think restaurant meals taste awful?

I don’t have any processed foods - apart from bread and cheese I suppose - but I used salt all the time when cooking.

No I don't think food in restaurants tastes awful but I don't believe people eating restaurant style food 24/7 is healthy either. Good quality ingredients correctly cooked taste great without the need for salt & butter in every recipe.

First and foremost food is fuel. If someone likes a nicely cooked plain chicken breast with no salt added and no butter or oil why would someone want to encourage them to eat differently?

I don’t add it to my 4 year olds food. I don’t add it to mine either!

Any when when the shops are open go and buy some Msg. Omfg, that's flavour

I love MSG It adds an umami kick to many dishes and I often add it in small quantities to stir fries etc.

An alarming number of people don't know that you are supposed to salt pasta water. As the Italians say, it should be "salty like the sea".

Your body does need salt though. If you eat a lot of processed food, then yes you probably consume too much. If you cook food from scratch, then you'd be better off adding some. A diet with too little salt can be as bad for you as a diet with too much salt.

Salt is a flavour enhancer. If you add it when cooking, it will bring out the other flavours. If you add it afterwards, that's when you get the salty taste. Usually all you need is a small pinch to enhance the flavour something that may be shared into many portions.

In cakes and biscuits it helps support the role of the baking powder. In some countries it is added to the self-raising flour (not in the UK). Your cakes and biscuits will be denser if you don't add any (1/4 of a teaspoon is more than enough normally).

Omg this thread. The number of people who seem to think home cooked food is just as good with no salt added are exactly why Britain got a reputation for having such terrible food. I guess when people say times have changed and that reputation is no longer deserved, they don't live in MN-land (would love to see the reaction to this in the French or Italian equivalent of Mumsnet - they'd be horrified)

@daisyjgrey. *
Do you exclusively own "the big book of saltless meals" volumes 1-9? Because Nigel Slater et al all include salt in their recipes.

I just randomly turned to 3 recipes in Nigel SLaters Tender Vol 1 and no salt in any of the 3. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Never I'm 42 and I don't add it to mine so I'm not going to add it to my kids

[quote CovidCorvid]**@daisyjgrey*.
Do you exclusively own "the big book of saltless meals" volumes 1-9? Because Nigel Slater et al all include salt in their recipes.

I just randomly turned to 3 recipes in Nigel SLaters Tender Vol 1 and no salt in any of the 3. 🤷🏻‍♀️[/quote]

Of course you did.

This is the whitest, most British collection of responses to a thread I've read in ages

Never - and it made it very difficult to eat MILs vegetables - she cooks them in so much salt it makes your tongue wrinkle

@daisyjgrey. Well it was you who brought Nigel Slater into the mix. 😂😂😂

So baffling that people don't season their food for their families. How strange!
From 1 is fine (for very little amounts). Normal seasoning from 2+ I would say.

I don't add salt to cooking, but that's because DH has one of the forms of hypertension which is easier to manage on a low salt diet. I add salt at the table to my food; DD having been raised on less salty foods doesn't usually except on something like roast potatoes. By not adding actual salt, we can still use salted ingredients like bacon, stock cubes or cheese.
We even got a bread maker originally specifically so we could make saltless bread, having realised how much he was eating that way. I don't like it as much but it's OK - and for anyone horrified at the idea, traditional tuscan bread is saltless.

Re the OPs question, dd started having saltier cheeses etc after the age of one.

I don't add salt to any food cooked from scratch. We've all survived... I find other people's food and restaurant food incredibly salty most of the time tbh. I also hate pepper so would never add that.

I could quite happily live without salt or pepper in the house, but DH does add it to potatoes and soup (often before he's tasted them which I find baffling).

@About10thusername

So baffling that people don't season their food for their families. How strange! From 1 is fine (for very little amounts). Normal seasoning from 2+ I would say.

People didn’t say that- the question was about salt- I use pepper and herbs and spices and stock (low salt)

I use salt when cooking but that’s about it. I’ll put salt on my own chips and DS has grabbed one of those once or twice before.

I'm foreign (south European) and the thought of cooking without salt is just baffling to me.

Our children would hate it. But then again we don't eat any processed food and the few times they tried McDonalds they actively disliked it.

I don’t “add” salt, but most processed crap has more than enough. It’s impossible to avoid it. A lot of food has natural salt in it. That’s fine. Your body needs a certain amount of salt (and there are different kinds of salts) mostly as electrolytes, etc… a little bit occasionally won’t hurt your child, but developing a taste for it, or a habit of automatically grinding salt and pepper all over their meal without tasting it isn’t a great idea either. (Also insulting to the cook!)