LEYF Guest Blog - Empowering Chef’s to Reduce Salt
by Sean Cowden, Chef Lecturer at LEYF’s Chef Academy-350x350.jpg){kind=logo}
Cooking a meal without salt! Any high-flying chef will tell you the same thing – “It’s bland. It needs more salt.”
At the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF) Chef Academy we teach chefs to let the natural flavours of meat, vegetables, herbs and spices do the talking. If you go back a few generations, not many families would use salt in their cooking. You would typically have your meat, potato and two vegetables. Thankfully, we have come away from that old routine, accepting more diverse cuisine into our lives. However, with more restaurants than ever and easily accessible “ready meals” and “fast food”, our salt intake has increased dramatically over the years, as have our tastes and apparent need for it.
Children are born with brand-new tongues and brand-new taste buds. Craving salt is linked to habit and mealtimes are a habitual event. If we reduce the salt in a child’s diet, then positive habits and engagement with the food’s natural flavours are learnt.
Early Years chefs should be encouraged not to add salt to the meals they cook and stay away from overly processed foods. It is important not to demonise salt as our brain would not function without sodium. However, the sodium that occurs naturally in food is usually enough to keep our electrolytes stimulated.
One tip I always give chefs is to match classic and beautiful flavours together. I bet the first person to make a carrot and coriander soup was laughed out of the kitchen until the others tasted it. Flavour matching is an excellent way to get natural BIG flavours into the dishes you cook. Look at herbs and spices that go well together (cumin and coriander is a personal favourite of mine).
Knowledge is power. Giving chefs the understanding of the body’s reaction to salt and the damage it can do by overindulging in salty foods can make the difference. For example, telling a chef that a child aged three should consume no more than 2g of salt is great information, but if you put that into the context of how much that equates to gives them more clarity. For context, a teaspoon of salt is roughly 6g – three times more than a daily limit for a three-year-old.
Encouraging chefs to interact with, and share their knowledge with children, parents/carers, and peers is crucial. Not only are you empowering your chef to refresh and upskill their knowledge, but you’re also permitting the children to make healthier choices through their newfound understanding. When children are given a wide breadth of choices, you are giving them the opportunity to make decisions for themselves. If those choices are all healthy, then that child will start to make healthy choices and that pattern will be likely to continue for as long as the child has those options. When you look at areas of deprivation and the unfair levels of early childhood disease and obesity, one key factor is that the child had limited healthy choices available to them.
A great way for chefs to engage with children and parents/carers is to empower them by presenting workshops and activities. I recently presented a parent’s workshop focusing on children’s favourite food with low waste. I taught the parents how to make simple bread dough, flavoured with fresh rosemary from the garden and then using that dough to make ‘rainbow pizzas’ – a plethora of multi-coloured vegetables with no added salt. In the end, the children were so engaged that they took over the workshop and showed their parents how to make the pizza.
My final thought revolves around the nurturing nature of the chef. A good Early Years chef will cook healthy food for the children. A fantastic Early Years chef will go on the journey with them. Guiding the children through the good times, the bad times and the aversions.
