How do I cook with less salt and sugar without it tasting worse?

Simply using less salt or sugar makes food taste worse, which is why the change rarely lasts. Understanding what each was doing lets you replace the effect with something else.

What you'll need

• Lemon or vinegar (optional)
• Herbs and spices (optional)
• Umami ingredients (optional)

Step by step

1. Reduce gradually rather than all at once.Taste adapts over a few weeks. A sudden large reduction tastes bland; a gradual one is barely noticed and lasts.
2. Use acid where you would use salt.Lemon, lime, vinegar. It brightens food and makes flavours perceptible, which is much of what salt was doing.
3. Add umami instead of salt.Mushrooms, tomato purée, miso, nutritional yeast, parmesan. They provide savoury depth, though some are salty themselves so check.
4. Use more herbs, spices and aromatics.Garlic, ginger, chilli, black pepper, fresh herbs. They add interest that compensates for less salt, and toasting spices amplifies them.
5. Cut the processed sources first.Most dietary salt comes from bread, sauces, processed meat and ready meals rather than the salt cellar. Reducing those matters far more than seasoning less.
6. For sugar, reduce and add spice.Cinnamon, vanilla, cardamom and nutmeg increase perceived sweetness. In baking, reducing sugar by a quarter is usually undetectable.
7. Be careful reducing sugar in baking.It affects texture, browning and moisture, not just sweetness. Large reductions change the crumb, so go gradually and expect some difference.
8. Season at the table rather than in the pot.Salt on the surface is perceived more strongly than salt cooked in, so less achieves the same effect.

Tips

• Toasting and blooming spices makes them noticeably more potent, which lets them do more of the work in a lower-salt dish.
• Cooking from scratch is the single biggest lever. Processed food accounts for the large majority of salt and added sugar in most diets.
• If reducing salt for a medical reason, take specific advice — some salt substitutes are unsuitable for certain conditions and medications.

Common mistakes

• Cutting salt sharply all at once — Food tastes bland and the change is abandoned within a week. Gradual reduction lets taste adapt without a noticeable loss.
• Focusing on the salt cellar and ignoring processed food — Most dietary salt comes from bread, sauces and ready meals. Seasoning less while eating the same processed food changes very little.
• Cutting sugar heavily in baking — Sugar affects texture, moisture and browning as well as sweetness. Large reductions change the crumb substantially.

Questions people ask