But meaty hunks of shiitake are little help to a product developer working on a low-sodium chicken stock. And while fermented fish sauce may enhance the savoriness of a salt-reduced alfredo sauce, it enhances the fishiness, as well. Mushroom powders eliminate the visual and textural roadblocks to using fungi for umami enhancement, although they don’t totally sidestep the flavor issue. Colorless soy sauce powders have acquitted themselves as functional umami ingredients, too, but mainly in applications that can tolerate a little soy-sauce character. Soy sauce manufacturer Kikkoman, Walworth, WI, offers a natural, powdered flavor enhancer made from fermented wheat that not only has a neutral, mild bouillon character, but provides a label-friendly replacement for MSG and vegetable and yeast extracts.
It also provides salt, somewhat compromising the sodium-reduction purpose. Unfortunately, it’s a necessary evil of umami boosters like soy sauce, miso and other fermentation products that they contribute no small measure of sodium themselves to formulations. Regular soy sauce kicks in around 1,000 mg sodium per 18 grams (1 tablespoon), although low-sodium versions range from about 300 to 800 mg. True, their flavor-enhancing properties allow for salt reduction elsewhere, and a little of these ingredients goes a long way. However, they’re not a universal solution.
The wrinkle with new umami strategies is they capitalize on savory tastants beyond MSG, IMP and GMP. “I think that there may be new types of umami enhancers that will be more effective at enhancing salt,” Salemme says. Some of these might still reside in the nucleotide and amino acid class, “or they might be chemical compounds that resemble those,” he says. But he believes this new generation of ingredients will do a better job of enhancing salty perception independent of any contribution from potassium chloride— thus reducing its bitterness faults. However, he points out, “I do think that we’ve already been able to make some products where we’ve removed about 50% of the sodium chloride, replaced it with potassium chloride and a variety of savory enhancers, and it’s quite an acceptable product.”
Substituting with systems
When it comes to salt-replacement ingredients, a systems approach to nutritional reformulation is exactly what we need.
“Salt reduction and flavor enhancement products need to be designed for each application to have total commercial appeal to the consumer who wants low-sodium products to taste like full-sodium,” Gray says. “As we learn more about the interaction of salt and the physiological mechanism, we are better equipped to address attributes such as masking and enhancement, and deliver the desired goal.”
Or, as Eckert puts it, “It’s more like a jigsaw puzzle.” To put the pieces together, he says, “we typically do a sensory profile on the full-salt product. Then we would do a sensory profile on the salt-reduced product to identify the shortfalls of reducing the salt. And then you’d address every single attribute individually, and then you’ve still got to balance them.”
Take the case of a classic chicken soup. “You would have a certain profile of saltiness, but you also have a certain profile on mouthfeel,” Eckert says. You’ve got to consider the poultry-type meatiness and characteristic fatty notes, both of which salt potentiates. “And it gives you a bit of texture. It triggers salivation, which fits nicely into the fatty profile, as well,” he adds. So, if you were to remove 50% of that salt, you could replace it with, for example, an appropriate amount of potassium chloride. But, while that restores some of the salivation, “it changes the character of the way people would now describe the chicken broth,” he says. “It was a nice, cooked, white-meat profile before; they’d say now that it’s more red-meaty. You’re also suppressing some of the volatiles of the flavor, so the aroma is not as good as it used to be.”
A satisfactory solution would account for the full complexity of this target profile rather than just the saltiness itself. “You’ve got to rebuild more of the flavor profile of the meat. You’ve got to bring the salivation to a similar level. You’ve got to address the issue that your aroma may not be on par with the target. You look at it more as a flavor system,” says Eckert. To be sure, potassium chloride can play a part in that system, but you’d also look to the armamentarium of umami stimulants, from yeast extracts to nucleotides. “You would probably add some of the white-meat chicken notes to bring the meat profile back up. And you would probably work with some fatty acids to get the texture back into the product, too,” he adds.
But don’t expect perfection. “In some cases you’ve got to compromise,” Eckert says. You may get the overall flavor profile back up. You may get the mouthfeel almost there. But you may not get the saltiness of the full-salt product. But, as long as you get on par with your full-salt product in terms of overall consumer acceptance, then you definitely have a superior product to the product that had just been reduced in salt.”
Making it work
What does this mean for on-the-ground formulation? Everyone from flavor houses to dairy processors to salt suppliers themselves is proposing new “ingredient systems” for addressing salt reduction before it becomes a crisis.
According to Sparks, the general trend toward healthful formulation has given the flavorists at her company experience working with vitamins, nutraceuticals and other ingredients notorious for their off flavors. “Through this learning,” she says, “we have designed a technology, SaltTrim, that uses the benefits of potassium chloride while eliminating the undesirable notes.” By clipping off the bitter and metallic tones while building in sweetness and acidity, it “enhances the whole profile to make the reduced-salt version taste like the full-salt product,” she says. She also notes that all-natural Savor- Crave is an umami-enhancing taste modifier handy for when you need to “intensify flavors and create mouthwatering characteristics in savory products.”