If it seems like the food you’re getting at restaurants is all about salt, you’re not imagining it. The folks at Technomic checked the menus of 2,000 restaurants (everyone from chains to independent operators) and found that salt mentions on major chain and independent restaurant menus have increased by 144 percent over the last five years.
“Salt and pepper has always been prevalent on the menu,” Technomic EVP Darren Tristano said in a press release. “However, we are seeing more artisan, spice blended and designer finishing salts being introduced broadly across appetizers, entrees and dessert menus. Although the roots of this trend originate in fine dining establishments, it’s catching on in mainstream casual dining, fast casual and quick service restaurant chains.”
“Mentions” means everything from salt and vinegar fries at Old Chicago, Caramel Ice Cream with Maldon Sea Salt at the French Laundry and Nori salt on the Kimori cocktails at SushiSamba.
Technomic was careful to point out that this doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a correlation between mentions of salt and higher sodium overall at these establishments, but that’s probably due to the fact that that aspect wasn’t investigated.
Having a shelf full of cookbooks can be a terrific resource, and it’s a great way to kill some time as you flip through long-forgotten books or share favorite recipes with friends. But if you’re putting together a dinner and need recipes from multiple books (or just can’t remember where you saw that recipe for flank steak), it can be a frustrating search. Enter eatyourbooks.com, an online database of over 2,000 of the most popular cookbooks and over 500,000 searchable recipes.
You can either enter your cookbook library and search the site or just look up books or authors on your own. The site doesn’t store the recipe itself, but it’ll direct you to the book or magazine that contains it. You’ll get a list of the key ingredients as well as the page the recipe appears on for $2.50 per month or $25 per year.