Add A Pinch Of Salt To Your Lemonade And Taste The Magic

When you're looking for a way to enhance the flavor of your food, adding a little salt is a go-to option. Whether it's during the cooking process, or just before eating, salt draws out flavor. Surprisingly, salt will add flavor to sweet foods, too, including lemonade. Kantha Shelke, PhD, CFS (Certified Food Scientist), principal at Corvus Blue LLC, and senior lecturer of food safety regulations at Johns Hopkins University, spoke exclusively with Chowhound to explain why adding salt makes lemonade taste better.

There are many ways to make the best-tasting lemonade, and simply adding a dash of salt is one way to draw out the sweetness. The properties of salt create chemical and sensory effects that can alter the flavor of food, depending on how you use it. "A small amount of salt acts like a flavor amplifier and harmonizes all functionalities to optimize flavor," Kantha Shelke said.

If you start with the best-tasting store-bought lemonade brands, adding salt will make them even better. Salt affects the taste of lemonade by acting on the tongue's flavor receptors for a range of flavors, allowing you to tweak the tasting notes. "A small amount of salt masks bitter compounds like limonin in lemons by blocking bitter taste receptors on the tongue," Shelke explained. "In the case of lemonade made with sugar, salt can intensify the sweetness without the addition of more sugar just by changing how sugar molecules interact with sweet taste receptors," Shelke said.

In general, sweet foods taste sweeter with salt because of the way the chemical makeup of sodium alters the perception of flavor. "The sodium ions in salt interact with taste receptors to dial up their perception of other tastes like sweetness and tartness," Kantha Shelke explained. Just enhancing contrast appeals to many because our taste systems thrive on contrast."

The key is using a small amount of salt — just a pinch — so it doesn't overpower the drink and make it too salty. "For an 8-ounce glass of lemonade, a pinch translates to about 1/16 to 1/8 of a teaspoon," Shelke said. "This concentration (0.05-0.1%) is below most human detection thresholds for saltiness in a sweet tart drink and hits the 'flavor enhancement threshold' without crossing into 'salty' territory."

Adding salt works to amplify the sweetness of more drinks than lemonade. Many sweet or tart drinks will benefit from salt because they contain similar compounds. ​​"Most citrus and tart fruits contain bitter compounds that salt can mask," Shelke explained, including sweet-tart-bitter citrus drinks such as (salted rim) margaritas, limeade, grapefruit juice, and chinotto — the bittersweet national soda of Italy. 

Even non-citrus beverages can be sweetened by altering the way you perceive the flavors. "Salt works similarly in tamarind drinks, tart cherry, pomegranate, and cranberry juice drinks by suppressing bitterness and enhancing contrast by amplifying taste receptors," Shelke said. So add a pinch of salt the next time you enjoy these drinks, and taste one of nature's most delicious magic tricks.