Producing delicious food for customers to salivate over is a driving force for most chefs. To cook tasty food, surely salt - the most obvious single flavour enhancer found in the kitchen - is a necessity. So to be advised that less salt, or even no salt, will improve the natural flavour of food seems to fly in the face of something that has been accepted as a culinary mantra by chefs for several hundred years.

However, Graham MacGregor, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at St George's Hospital in London, believes that chefs would be doing their customers a favour by reducing the amount of salt in their cooking, or even cutting it out completely. He enthusiastically describes the fantastic improvement in the flavour of food that results from this, but it is primarily for health reasons that he urges chefs - and everyone from home cooks to multinational producers of processed foods - to cut back on salt.

"Salt is a long-term toxin that slowly puts up blood pressure," says Prof MacGregor, "and there is overwhelming evidence that high blood pressure is responsible for half of all cardiovascular deaths in this country."

Currently, about 250,000 people in the UK die each year from cardiovascular disease, either strokes or heart attacks. Prof MacGregor believes that if adults were to reduce their salt intake from the current average of 10-12g per day to 5-6g per day, the number of cardiovascular deaths would drop by 35,000 a year. Cutting back on salt in the diet would also help with problems of water retention and stem the rises in the incidences of osteoporosis, asthma, kidney disease and stomach cancer.

Chefs such as Nick Nairn, Raymond Blanc and Anton Edelmann have already been persuaded by the professor's arguments. Nairn argued the case two years ago in his keynote speech at the 2002 Caterer & Hotelkeeper Chef Conference. And he has nearly eliminated added salt from his cooking. Blanc and Edelmann, too, say they have reduced the quantities they use.

Nutritionally, there is enough salt found naturally in foods to sustain the human body. We actually need less than 1g of salt per day for good health. However, even if you avoided adding salt to food, it is unlikely that the average person would be able to reduce their salt consumption to less than 2-3g per day. This is because of the amount of hidden salt in foods - processed bread being one of the main culprits, with an average of 0.5g of salt per slice.

While more and more chefs are becoming switched on to offering a healthier style of cuisine - and therefore may have already adjusted their usage of salt - the suggestion that less salt in cooking can actually improve the taste of food will seem controversial to most chefs. However, it is not something that can be noticed overnight. It can take four to six weeks for a person to adjust to a lower-salt diet.

Initially, food will taste bland with less salt than a person is used to. But gradually, as the salt taste receptors adjust, foods with just a little salt will give a strongly salty taste and the real, natural flavour of the food will dominate.

"Without salt, you can start to enjoy the real taste of food," Prof MacGregor argues. "I can now tell the difference between all sorts of different types of fish, but with added salt you lose all the individual nuances of flavour and only get a generic fish taste." Some chefs, of course, may beg to differ.

If you choose to go down the route of reducing the amount of salt in your cooking, it is vital that you ensure that the ingredients you buy are of the very best quality. It is no coincidence that the reason processed foods contain so much salt is to enhance the taste of what are likely to be cheap, flavourless ingredients. As well as boosting flavour, of course, salt was initially regarded as a vital ingredient for preserving food - and today it is still used to help extend the shelf life of ready meals.

But, for a chef who is preparing food from prime, fresh ingredients on a daily basis, the use of salt as a preservative should not be a consideration. And the use of salt as a flavour enhancer could be minimised if the ingredients used were selected primarily for their qualities of taste.

As principal chef at Sodexho's fine-dining arm, Directors Table, and executive head chef at Allium, London, Edelmann counsels caution to chefs who might consider reducing their usage of salt. "You need to take more care of the way that you cook in order that the finished dish is acceptable to the customer," he says. "As well as only using the very best ingredients, you have to be more precise in the way that you cook."

Edelmann was converted to low-salt cooking following conversations with Prof MacGregor. Soon after, he prepared a lunch, at which the professor was speaking, for members of the Academy of Culinary Arts. "I added no salt to any of the dishes, and no one noticed or complained that any of the dishes were under-seasoned," he says.

Of course, the long-observed practice of adding salt to the water when cooking vegetables has for some time been regarded as unnecessary, and Edelmann follows the enlightened route. He also uses minimal salt elsewhere in his food preparation. Instead, to enhance food flavours, he makes maximum use of ingredients from the allium family - in particular, onions, garlic and leeks. "They are all such big flavour carriers," he explains. Lemon juice and balsamic vinegar are also major flavour enhancers that can be used in place of salt, he adds.

Edelmann has also developed his own freshly ground meat and fish spices for added flavour. The meat one contains Scotch bonnet peppers, turmeric, garlic powder, ginger powder, cumin, chilli powder, allspice, black pepper, pimento, coriander seeds, paprika, onion powder (using fresh onions dried out in an oven at 80¼C), thyme and brown sugar. The fish spice does make a concession to salt use, though, in the shape of celery salt. However, Edelmann combines this with cayenne pepper, cumin, ginger powder, paprika, allspice, black pepper, lime peel, coriander seeds, onion powder and thyme to reduce its effect.

Edelmann hasn't completely cut out salt use in his cooking - he has merely reduced it. He will use ingredients that contain salt (such as the celery salt in his fish spice mix), but he believes that this is acceptable as long as it is in moderation. "For instance," he argues, "bread - which needs some salt - is a staple that chefs cannot do without."

Since cutting out virtually all added salt in his cooking three years ago, Nairn asserts that he has tasted flavours in food that he never picked up on before. "My taste-buds are now so much more sensitive," he explains. "Salt tends to short-circuit everything and you lose the subtleties of so many flavours. People ask me how can I possibly eat mashed potato without salt, and my answer is that I can now enjoy the specific variety of potato that I am eating, because without salt I can actually detect what the variety is."

Nairn, who last year sold his Glasgow restaurant, Nairns, says that he now finds eating out less enjoyable than he previously did. To his highly sensitive taste-buds, most of the food he is served now seems over-salted. He recognises, though, that it is enormously difficult to get chefs to reduce salt in their cooking - he only partially achieved it at Nairns. He concedes: "You just have to convince them that, in the long run, the food will taste better."

Nairn's biggest criticism of chefs who over-salt food is reserved for some of his colleagues working on television. "There are a couple of TV chefs, in particular, who are very heavy over-salters," he says, without naming names, "and, unfortunately, this sends out the wrong message to the general public."

The only time that Nairn now adds salt to food is when he makes bread. "I add less than I used to, but just a little is necessary technically," he says. His salt intake generally comes via ingredients that arrive in his kitchen already containing salt - such as cheese, Parma ham and smoked salmon.

Prof MacGregor's advice to chefs is to take steps to cut back gradually on the amount of salt they use. "Don't add salt at the beginning, as you immediately lose control," he says. "And remember that customers can always add a little extra at the table, if they need it, but they can't take it out if they don't want it."

He doesn't advocate the use of low-sodium salts in place of the real thing. "Surely," he says, "it is better to enjoy the natural flavour of ingredients rather than introducing potassium that is used in low-sodium salts, which itself will mask the true flavour of the food."

He concludes: "By reducing our salt intake, we will not only improve the taste of our food, but we'll also help to bring about the biggest improvement in public health since the cleaning of public drains in the 17th century."


Tasting times at Le Manoir
At Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons in Great Milton, Oxfordshire, Raymond Blanc has long been a convert to the use of minimal salt in cooking. However, at times, he has struggled to convince his customers and chefs that he is doing the right thing.

"When I first started cooking in Britain 30 years ago," he says, "customers would chuck salt all over their food before they'd even tasted it. Some of them even accused me of serving food that tasted of nothing, but that was because their palates were so over-salted that they couldn't taste the true flavour of the food."

Blanc has also found that many of the chefs he has employed over the years have palates which he describes as being "mismanaged". He explains: "It is because many of them have grown up on diets of over-salted fast food. I have had to educate them into understanding that salt is the enemy of good food."

Blanc tests the salt-taste receptors of all new chefs who join Le Manoir. Seven or eight glasses are filled with water, one of which has no salt added while the rest have salt added in different quantities. The new chefs must select the glass of water that has an acceptable level of salt. Those who select a salt level that is regarded as too high by Blanc are asked to adjust the salt levels of their palate, by reducing the salt in their own diet, before joining the kitchens at Le Manoir.


Measuring the salt content of food
Salt is made up of sodium and chlorine, and it is the sodium content that is the undesirable element. At present, most food labels only list the amount of sodium in the food, shown as fractions of a gram per 100g of food. In order to convert the sodium content to salt, you need to multiply the amount of sodium by 2.5. So, bread containing 0.5g of sodium per 100g would, in fact, contain 1.25g of salt per 100g (because the sodium atom is lighter than the chlorine atom it combines with to make salt).

Government advice on daily salt intake is that adults should eat no more than 6g per day, children between the ages of seven and 10 should consume no more than 5g, and babies younger than one month less than 1g.

Most people's daily salt intake comes through processed foods. Some of the most highly salted foods that chefs use regularly - and must be wary of if they are considering lowering the salt content of their cooking - include some brands of soy sauce, smoked salmon and capers. Soy sauce, for instance, can contain twice the concentration of salt that seawater holds.

Clever use of herbs, spices, and lemon and lime juices as flavour enhancers in place of salt are also worth considering.


Is food without salt possible?
Philip Howard, chef-proprietor, The Square, London

It's simple. If you want flavour, you have to use salt. Food would be staggeringly bland without it. Salt is a heinously strong chemical and imposes a lot of physiological changes to food, but it also enhances flavour.

John Campbell, executive chef, The Vineyard at Stockcross, Berkshire

Salt is bad for us in large quantities, but you need it to enhance flavour. We use only pure salt at the Vineyard and tend not to over-season, and we do use alternatives sometimes. If you use better salt [non-concentrate ones with less sodium], then you don't need to use as much.

Getting chefs to reduce salt in cooking won't solve the coronary health problem, though. Fifty years ago, we didn't have a salt issue - but we were more active, we ate less processed food. We need to change our lifestyles. It's a huge issue - and not just a salt issue.