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[Frumple]

Most of the developed world at a minimum is a culinary dystopia. As far as I'm aware sodium being in basically literally everything in go-die amounts is a problem more or less everywhere.

... plenty of places are probably less bad, though. It's certainly easier (if generally more expensive) to find alternatives if you're in or near a city of some sort.

[pisskop]

I was taught to worry about my love of salt as a child, but I actually have an electronic cuff lying around and I took my vitals last week.

135/77, resting rate of 6[X]

[Il Palazzo]

Most of the developed world at a minimum is a culinary dystopia. As far as I'm aware sodium being in basically literally everything in go-die amounts is a problem more or less everywhere.

... plenty of places are probably less bad, though. It's certainly easier (if generally more expensive) to find alternatives if you're in or near a city of some sort.

I've travelled Europe some. It's mostly fine food-wise, whether it comes to sugar or salt or processing. I'm sure it'd be easy to find examples of badness, but in the aggregate I don't see that much of a problem. UK is relatively shit in that respect, but still not US-level shit.

[Mathel]

As with all these make-yourself sort of things, it might be cheaper to buy flour (and I guess the power spent in cooking it and w/e else) but it also costs more time, and you gotta find a balance between the two costs.

... more than that, it's actually sometimes difficult to find flour without salt in it. Like, it exists and it's not super hard to find, but it's more difficult to find than salted flour and sometimes has stock issues you're not going to have with the salted stuff.

I've heard about bakers cutting bread with chalk.
I've heard of people cutting rice with plastic.

And now people are cutting flour with salt?

[Rolan7]

Most of the developed world at a minimum is a culinary dystopia. As far as I'm aware sodium being in basically literally everything in go-die amounts is a problem more or less everywhere.

... plenty of places are probably less bad, though. It's certainly easier (if generally more expensive) to find alternatives if you're in or near a city of some sort.

Yeah even Skyrim has this problem!

[Sirus]

Wow, I'd never even heard of salted flour. I just checked the bag of generic all-purpose flour we have, and it contains no sodium at all. Which makes sense, so folks can use exactly as much salt as they want.

So I have to ask, what sort of crazy place do you live in that sells salted flour?

[McTraveller]

I saw this thread earlier today, so I was primed because today is my weekly grocery day. I only sampled three brands of flour, and none had added sodium.   I did it to confirm my initial response which was also "where are you where salt in flour is common?"

Now if you get a bread mix, or cake mix, or pancake mix, or anything else that is a "mix" then yes, ridiculous amounts of salt.

My physician says that in general the rule of thumb is that mg sodium should be less than calories.  It's really hard to find packaged food of any kind that meets that criteria, even "low sodium" foods.

[Frumple]

Near as I can tell from a quick check of junk left over in the food stuff at home, it's at-minimum common with self-rising flour in/around north florida. 200 something mg of sodium per serving. I'm pretty sure from checking in the past better than half the just plain all purpose flour around here has a similar amount. Pillsbury, offbrand, whatever.

E: And it's not store limited, far as I can recall the spread's about the same in places other than walmart around here. It may be a south-eastern US thing for flour in particular, I'unno.

[McTraveller]

Ah yeah, if it's "self rising" then it is a kind of "mix", it's not regular flour.  Salt is part of the chemistry that makes it rise, either baking powder or baking soda, I can never remember which.

Fewest Ingredients diet, folks!

[Frumple]

Eh, salt can be part of it, but it's not a requirement -- there's saltless self-rising flour, and self-rising flour in general's used for recipes that can be done sans-sodium without much trouble.

Still, the stuff's in general purpose flour around here, too. It's hard to get away from.

[Mathel]

Okay, I never tried self-rising flour.

However, does this mean that it is not actually difficult to get flour without salt, but rather difficult to get self-rising flour without salt?

Because when you said it was difficult to get flour without salt, I though you meant a product labeled as just flour. That is the kind I used for bread, having to add yeast myself.

[Frumple]

Nah, again, like... most of the all-purpose flour around here has salt in it, too. It's not just the self-rising stuff. It's harder to get unsalted flour than not.

[Mathel]

Then I am worried for wherever it is you live. Flour should really not contain salt.

Where I live, salt and flour have around the same price, and according to the data tables on the products, flours contain <0.01g of salt per 100g.
They certainly contain too little salt for me to taste.

[Frumple]

Yeah, the self-rising thing in my cupboard is 370 mg sodium per 31 grams, so... about 1.2 grams of sodium per 100g, or somewhere over ~120 times what you're seeing on those data tables. I'd compare some of the salted all-purpose stuff, but I'm pretty sure I threw the last batch of that in the house in the garbage a few months ago.

... honestly, you still can't really taste it in a finished product (which, pointedly, means there's not much difference in taste between the salted and unsalted varieties _{so why the hell put it in there i know it's probably for cheapass preservation but still}), but when just one serving is about half the salt you need to survive any particular day, well...

[Lord Shonus]

I just checked info for four major national brands of all-purpose flour (Walmart, Pillsbury, Gold Medal, and King Arthur) and none have significant levels of sodium (most were zero, one of them was 3).