Sugar is sweet, salt is salty, and vinegar is sour. These are common sense even children know. Everyone knows that if you want sweet food, put more sugar, and if you want salty food, put more salt.
Recently, however, it has been reported that the ice cream we like to eat turns out to be salty.
Not only ice cream, cakes, bread, plums and other sweets that we take for granted, they are also salty. These are all sweets. Putting salt in the sweets will not make the sweetness weaker?
This news indicates that adding salt to these sweets is to enhance the taste of sweets, and adding an appropriate amount of salt to the sweets will make the food sweeter. Is this statement true?
The truth of the matter is that this statement is indeed true. This is why? To understand the scientific principles, we have to start with the size of sugar molecules and salt molecules.
Because sugar molecules are larger than salt molecules, the solubility of sugar is weaker.
In other words, salt is easier to dissolve in liquid than sugar. After adding salt in the sugar solution, the more soluble salt will increase the osmotic pressure of the solution.
As a result, people perceive the taste of liquid faster.
Therefore, when salt is added to sweets, the sweetness of sugar will be perceived by our taste buds faster under the drive of smaller salt molecules.
This is the reason why adding salt to sweets not only doesn’t feel salty, but makes them sweeter.
However, in order to achieve this effect, the amount of salt must be mastered. If too much salt is added to the sweets, so that the taste of salt will cover the taste of sugar, it will really become salty.
