A few years ago, I was at a friend’s house and she asked me to make a gravy for a pot of chili she was making. It was a big pot, so I asked that she double the recipe instead of adding salt. She said… “Well, no, but I would love the gravy to be that way.” I was so shocked; I couldn’t believe my ears.
That is the problem with the “salt free” gravy trend. It is not salt free. It contains salt, so you are adding salt to the gravy as well. It is a great way to add salt to your chili, but it is not salt free.
When you add salt to gravy, it can actually make your gravy less salty. The easiest way to figure this out is to look at the recipe side by side. The recipe calls for 1.5 cups of salt, but the only ingredient is the chicken broth. If the recipe calls for 2.5 cups of salt, the chicken broth is what you are adding. If the recipe calls for 3 cups of salt, the salt is nowhere to be found.
If you’re talking about chicken broth, that’s like adding a can of Raid. The broth is what you are adding, not the salt.
Salt is a common ingredient in gravy, but most people would agree that the salt is the main ingredient in chicken broth. If you add water to the broth, the broth is only slightly salty and will still taste great. The problem is the fat in chicken broth is saturated fat, which leads to a lot of the salt in gravy being lost to the taste. In addition, if you add too much salt, the gravy will taste a little too salty.
The problem here is that most of the salt is being lost to the taste and it’s not actually necessary. You can use a ratio of three tablespoons of salt per cup of liquid, but I’m pretty sure you can also use two tablespoons of salt per cup of liquid.
Just a few years ago we had to use a lot of salt in our gravy to ensure it wasn’t as salty as salt water. Now we just add a pinch of salt to any liquid we want. It’s a much healthier way to cook.
The best way to make gravy less salty is to use water. That way you are retaining the salt, and you are using the liquid to cook the food. But you can also reduce salt in food just by cooking it longer. If you can cook the food at a lower temperature, you’ll be reducing the salt content and reducing the overall saltiness.
When I was a kid I used to get really salty when I was going from my parents to their kids; then I would get a little salty when I was going back to my parents. Nowadays I get a lot of salty when I go back to my parents, but it is the only way to increase the saltiness. You can also use some water to get the salt off the gravy.