One doesn’t have to travel great distances or seek out obscure drinking establishments to find people taking pleasure in the combination of salt and alcohol. It’s likely happening right now, around the corner, at whatever dive bar or college hangout or off-the-path roadhouse you’re lucky enough to be within striking distance of. The shot glasses come clanking out, and with them the ubiquitous team of tequila, salt, and lime wedges are quick to follow.
These accoutrements of the tequila shot were called “training wheels” when I was learning to bartend. The joke, of course, was that this salt and lime business was for children, and the grown-ups could forgo such embellishment. It was the early aughts, and I didn’t know about Charles H. Baker Jr., or how the famous food and beverage travel writer had documented performing this same ritual with Mexican locals in his 1939 The Gentlemen’s Companion.
But perhaps we can forgive the bartenders of those years for being a little misinformed, at least about salt. In relation to its siblings in taste—sweet, bitter, sour, and umami—that we humans are prepared to detect through our tongue, salt was (and still is) the most mysterious, from a scientific perspective.
In 2010, the now defunct Beta Cocktail Blog published an influential post on salt, citing Hervé This’s Molecular Gastronomy and research by Philadelphia’s Monell Chemical Senses Center. Some of the research was over a decade old by then, but it was certainly new to most of the bartending community. Many of us had been working with salt a fair amount at that point. At Milk and Honey, Sam Ross had created his Chin Up cocktail (a martini riff with salt and cucumber that hinges on artichoke-tinged Cynar and salt), and Death and Co’s Phil Ward had christened the Silver Monk (a tequila sour with yellow Chartreuse, salt, and cucumber). These drinks, sourced as they were from two hugely important New York cocktail dens, quickly became canon for us waistcoated, jigger-wielding types. Both cocktails depended on a pinch of salt, and this was the first time most of us had heard scientific explanations for what salt was actually doing, specifically that tasting salt in small amounts seemed to mute our ability to taste bitterness.
At the time, the cocktail community was working hard to repopularize classics like the negroni, a drink which today is served at nearly every reputable bar on earth. That drink taught a lot of people about the beauty of Campari, and those at the front line of the cocktail revival couldn’t get enough of other amari—the family of Italian products that translate literally to “bitter.” And while many of us were shooting from the hip and experimenting with salt in various drinks, we came to learn that the addition of salt (either as a pinch or a few drops of saline) could transform a drink that depended on one of these liqueurs.
Amari aren’t just bitter. They are complex spirits that are full of rich volatile compounds like fragrant terpenes and funky esters that are detected by our sense of smell. These are crucial elements of the many rich flavors brought to us by the unique bouquet of herbs that makes each amaro what it is. By dimming the bitterness, these other flavors in a bracing amaro seem to come swimming to the surface. Give it a try sometime when you’re sipping one and you’ll see just how revelatory salt can be. But keep adding salt to a drink and at a certain threshold that sense of mutability is transferred to another taste—sweetness, too, can be tamped down by salt. This is why a poorly made, sugary margarita can be saved by an aggressively salty rim.
These are phenomena of taste in the technical sense—meaning that they are about things that happen on our tongue. It’s common knowledge today that most of what we talk about when we talk about “flavor” lies a few inches above that, in our noses. Through our olfactory apparatus, we detect the volatile compounds that make food what it is to us—some of which can even read to us as “salty” without any actual sodium.
Our tongues and noses work together alongside our textural perceptions and experiential knowledge to form our ability to taste, and it is very hard to parse them once they’ve run through the house of mirrors that is human psychology. Take, for instance, the once-common use of a pinch of salt to thicken soup. In a reaction still not entirely understood, it seems that triggering salt receptors on our tongues can alter the way we perceive texture.
This is because we taste salt in a very big way. Food scientists sometimes refer to this as a “hedonic” response—the idea that salt simply tastes good in a way that other triggers don’t. Tasting salt on your tongue is so intense, it’s almost like a bright light blinding us for an instant. This is why salt has also been used at various times in human history to cover up other flavors. While it might not be the origin of pairing neat pours of tequila with the stuff, it does maybe account for some of that ritual’s ubiquity, especially in the States, where we sometimes find inexperienced drinkers doing many shots of questionable, cheap tequila well into the night.
There are better ways to use sodium chloride when getting blotto. Unfortunately, you’ll still find bad drinks with salt added principally to cover up what either isn’t working or what was missing to begin with, but mindful bartenders are more prone to using the accent as a subtler tool. Take for instance the classic Paloma—a simple highball of grapefruit soda and agave where a thick rim of salt tempers a sugary mixer. (I’ve always liked rimming only half the glass so drinkers can tweak their own levels of saltiness; Epi’s Paloma recipe calls for a pinch of salt right in the drink.)
Or you’ll find barfolk using salt the way I do in my Black Angel. This bitter martini riff substitutes a big, boozy amaro in place of vermouth and depends on a little salt to tame the bitterness in order to work properly.
Whether working with a margarita variation, a martini homage, or some new experiment that defies classic form, you can add salt as a dash—the smallest amount, just 10 to 15 grains on the tips of your finger—or if you want to emulate the consistency of many elite cocktail joints, make yourself a saline solution (typically one part kosher salt dissolved into to three parts water.)
Some folks put salt in everything by adding it to their simple syrup. I’m not a fan of this last approach personally, as it takes away the mindfulness of choosing when and how much salt to add. One of my favorite bartenders told me, “There’s not much that doesn’t taste better with a little salt.” But for me, there are drinks that taste better without this addition. When a drink relies on the subtle bitter compounds of lime juice the way a daiquiri does, or the more aggressive sort that makes the negroni famous, a pinch of salt not only tames the bitterness—it tames the whole drink.
Of course, that’s me. I’d encourage fellow bartenders to stick to the social contract and make the classics as we know them when ordered. Meanwhile, at home, as a drinker, I’d encourage you to experiment. Try different salts. Explore your own unique intersection of biology and aesthetics. Customize your own experience. That’s why they put a shaker on every table.
