Salt/sodium content

[MarcG]

Hello.  I'm looking at a recipe for Chevre and it calls for 1 tbsp of salt for 1 gallon milk with an estimated yield of 700g of cheese.  I calculate this to be 295mg of sodium per 30g serving (1 tbsp salt = ~6900mg sodium).  I find this to be very high, especially compared to a commercial product at 80mg per 30g serving.  Does all of the salt remain in the final cheese or will some of it drain with the whey?  Perhaps this is just a salty recipe.

[awakephd]

Hi Marc,

For most cheese makes, not all of the salt makes it into the cheese; if you are dry salting, it forms a brine on the surface that runs off. (Likewise, if you salt curds before pressing, as in a cheddar, some of the salt comes out with the whey in pressing.)

That said, 1 Tbs per gallon make seems high to me. For comparison, I use 1.5 Tbs for a bit more than 2 gallons when I make camembert.

Note that if you are making a soft cheese that you will mix salt into - e.g., ricotta - then of course all of the salt stays in the cheese.

[MarcG]

Thanks!  Perhaps I'll lower the salt a bit and judge the amount of sodium in the final cheese by taste - or maybe there's "home" method for estimating sodium content out there on the internets...

[MarcG]

I searched a bit and came across and article which says that Potassium Chloride can replace a portion of the salt and still make good cheese.  Apparently it tastes like salt and actually has been shown to lower blood pressure (I'm interested in this subject because my wife has hypertension).

[mikekchar]

Just be a bit careful because some hypertension medicine causes you to retain potassium, so it's possible to introduce problems.  Check the "potential side-effects" documentation that comes with the medicine to be sure.  I have hypertension and have found that mine is completely unrelated to salt intake (after much experimentation). YMMV.  When I was worried about salt, though, I realised that regular exercise is potentially a better way of reducing salt than reducing your dietary intake.  If you do endurance events it's actually pretty easy to sweat out a surprising amount of salt.

Salt is hard to estimate no matter how you do it because the absorption depends on the density of the curd and various other factors.  The main thing is to keep good notes and adjust for taste.  And yes, a lot of salt comes out in the whey, especially for higher moisture cheeses.  It's often suggested to dry salt twice with an application of half the salt each time.  When you add the salt, it causes the whey to run out, which will take a lot of the first addition.  Then when you add it again it gets absorbed better.  You can wait as little as an hour between applications and I've even seen a recipe that cut the salt into 4 and applied it once a day for the first 4 days (though it was for a camembert, so they may have been trying to keep the initial salt down to encourage geotrichum growth).

[MarcG]

That's good stuff to think about, Mike, thank you!

[awakephd]

Yes, definitely dry salting should not be done all at once. I generally salt the top, wait 12 hours, then flip it and salt the other face. I do not worry about salting the sides - it just falls off, and salting just the faces seems to work just fine.

With any cheese, salt slows down or stops the action of the acidifying bacteria and helps to preserve the cheese. With some cheeses, though, the salt plays a very specific role in its affinage. In particular, the way salt can encourage or discourage certain mold or bacteria for surface-ripened cheeses can be very important. Blue cheese is another example - I'd have to look it up to remember the exact details, but as best I recall off the top of my head, when a blue cheese make is dry-salted, the high salt concentration on the exterior discourages development of blue on the rind, while allowing the blue in the interior to work - but then, as the salt works its way inward, it actually changes the form of the mold a way that is helpful for the ongoing development. Or something like that - as I said, I'd have to read back through Caldwell or such to remember the details.

The  amount of salt can also play a significant role in Emmentaler and other gas-eyed cheeses. The proprionic shermanii bacteria that produces the eyes and the distinctive taste of a swiss cheese cannot tolerate too much salt, so generally these cheeses have a relatively low salt concentration. If you make a "swiss" cheese but add too much salt (brine too long), you will get a nice, basic, alpine cheese without any eyes - no matter how much PS you added to the milk!

I've never made chevre, not having access to goats' milk , but I'm thinking it is just a basic cheese - no eyes, no surface ripening, no mold - is that right? If so, then I would guess you can go pretty much entirely by taste as far as the amount of salt.

[MarcG]

Yessir, chevre is a fresh cheese and I just found another recipe that actually has no salt at all - I think it's just to help dry it out a bit, keep the bacteria tamed in the fridge, and maybe for flavour, good news.

[mikekchar]

Yeah.  No salt cheeses fresh cheeses are definitely a thing.  Here's Gavin Webber's video for making schiz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWQYI3ktJQ4  Another really nice fresh cheese that's relatively low in salt is crescenza.  Again a Gavin Webber video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWJ87DRMDZ8&t=303s  You add the salt to the *milk* to get a very slow acid development, but in my experience it mostly drains out in the whey.  The result is a really pleasant, tart, soft (can be *very* soft, depending on how big you cut the curds).  In Gavin's video, he adds geotrichum and because he became ill, he didn't eat it for a month or so.  This led to the geo covering the cheese, making it less acidic -- which is also a traditional variant.  I've used this recipe with great success: https://cheesemaking.com/products/crescenza-recipe  Again, don't be fooled by the amount of salt you use: the end result is very low salt.  I really like this cheese on salads...  The only real downside is that it's a bit tricky to make for a beginner because of the "stuffatura" (high temperature draining of the curds), but it's not really difficult.  You just have to think about how you are going to keep the temp up (I use a pot-in-a-pot method to keep my milk warm for making cheese, so I just drain the curds *inside* my inner pot -- I do the same thing with cheddars).

Another Gavin video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vXHJ-HkxQ This is icelandic skyr, which is a bit like a cross between yogurt and cheese.  I think the thing I like about this cheese is that it shows you that yogurt really is just a form of cheese.  So while the idea of salt-less cheese may seem strange, of course we usually eat yogurt without salt.  (As an aside: salt lassi is *amazing*.  Lassi being an indian yogurt drink.  Usually you will see it with fruit, but in hot areas of India and Pakistan the salt version in more popular as people are generally lacking salt due to sweating all the time.  I highly recommend giving it a try one day).  The main reason we add salt to cheese (apart from it being yummy and as Awakephd mentioned to encourage different kinds of mould and bacteria to help us out) is for *aging*.  There is no reason why a fresh cheese can't be on the sweet side, served with fruit, for instance, rather than on the salty side.