Salt vs. Sodium in getting a bind

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LinkMeAllOver
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Salt vs. Sodium in getting a bind

Post by LinkMeAllOver » Tue Apr 20, 2021 18:23

This may seem like a silly question, but I'm feeling a little puzzled and having trouble finding information on this question: when we add salt (NaCl) to the meat and mix and proteins are extracted giving us the bind we desire, is it the sodium that's doing it, or the NaCl?

The reason I ask is that I'm making a recipe with a decent amount of soy sauce and I want to compensate for amount of sodium in the soy sauce when measuring how much salt I add to the mix. I also don't want it to be too salty tasting. Each tbsp (15ml) of reg soy sauce contains slightly under a gram of salt. Salt contains about 40% sodium. Should I just be subbing out one for the other and doing the math, or do I still have to add the requisite amount of salt to get a bind because it's NaCl that does the work of producing a bind, and then make sure I don't add so much soy sauce that it's unpleasantly salty? I could use low sodium soy sauce, but I already purchased gluten free soy sauce as a couple people I know can't do the gluten. And besides, low sodium soy sauce still has about a half gram per tbsp so the question remains.

Can anyone shed more light on the actual chemistry of sausage making here? I'm very curious.

Thanks.
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Scogar
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Re: Salt vs. Sodium in getting a bind

Post by Scogar » Tue Apr 20, 2021 20:26

Interesting question that I thought would have an easily googleable answer. Is the sodium in soy sauce just salt or another form? I don't know. Loosey goosey websites simply consider them the same and other more cerebral sites seem to acknowledge that there are distinctions...simple one that comes to mind is MSG which brings NA but not CL.

I would bet that for sausage it is the salt and the mechanical manipulation of the meat to develop myosin. Me, I would go for a lower natural soy sauce and count the sodium as salt since even in soy sauce regardless of specific sodium it tastes salty. For me that soy sauce of choice is Tamari but there may be countless better versions including low sodium versions. And I know some of the Listmoms here will have far more accurate answers then me making this stuff up.
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Albertaed
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Re: Salt vs. Sodium in getting a bind

Post by Albertaed » Wed Apr 21, 2021 01:06

Scogar wrote:
Tue Apr 20, 2021 20:26
Me, I would go for a lower natural soy sauce and count the sodium as salt since even in soy sauce regardless of specific sodium it tastes salty. For
On the face of I’d have to agree
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Re: Salt vs. Sodium in getting a bind

Post by LinkMeAllOver » Wed Apr 21, 2021 01:39

I think at the end of the day, the answer was right there in front of me. They don't just put the element sodium in soy sauce - they put salt in, and then show how much sodium that results in in the nutritional information. So, since sodium represents about 40% of the make up of salt, that means that if you multiply the sodium by 2.5 you'll get how much salt is in there. Each tablespoon of soy sauce (at least the one I was using today) had about 960mg of sodium in it, so by that measure we can deduce that there's about two and a half grams of salt in there.
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Re: Salt vs. Sodium in getting a bind

Post by Lorenzoid » Wed Apr 21, 2021 15:07

I agree NaCl is likely the only source of the sodium that the label lists. If they make soy sauce with MSG, I sure have never bought it.
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