The Saltless Chef

Mini donuts are the treat I make when I want something sweet, warm, and a little bit special — without a pile of salt. These baked mini donuts are soft, golden, and just right for dipping in cinnamon sugar, and each one has only 5mg of sodium. The smart swap is my homemade sodium-free baking powder. I use it instead of regular baking powder, and that one change makes all the difference: with regular baking powder, each donut would have about 38mg of sodium. With my homemade v

Tuesday is slow cooker day at my house, and this is the roast that goes in it more than any other. A regular packet roast is a sodium trap — those seasoning packets are mostly salt wearing a flavor costume. Mine uses the no-salt versions instead: MySALT ranch and garden Italian packets, a no-salt onion soup mix, and my own homemade beef gravy mix. Same cozy pot roast dinner, and the whole plate comes in at 250mg of sodium a serving. Everything goes in together — the roast, th

Some recipes earn their place. This soup is a standard in my house — the one that gets asked for, the one that reheats like a dream, and the one I point to when somebody tells me low sodium must mean bland. It's also proof that canned goods aren't the enemy. The labels are. Made the usual way — regular broth, regular canned beans and tomatoes — a bowl like this can run past 800mg of sodium without anybody noticing. Mine comes in at 100mg a serving, and nobody at my table has

Italian dressing was completely out of my sodium range — the bottled kind runs about 350mg in 2 tablespoons, so a real pour costs half my day (my limit is 1,500mg) before the salad even starts. And oil and vinegar is fine, but every salad, every night? I just wanted something else on a salad again. Catalina was the answer — sweet, tangy, actually a dressing. But Kraft's bottled Catalina runs 320mg of sodium in 2 tablespoons. A real pour — a quarter cup — is 640mg, nearly half

Bottled BBQ sauce is a sugar-and-salt delivery system. A popular bottled sauce runs about 340mg of sodium in 2 tablespoons — and nobody in the history of cookouts has put just 2 tablespoons on their ribs. Mine runs 23mg per 2 tablespoons, and it still tastes like a cookout. I created this sauce for a dinner at my friend Michelle's. It had to be good on ribs, and it had to be low sodium — no pressure. It was a hit with everybody at the table, including the guest who has a BBQ

I miss the Tex-Mex places — sitting there with the guacamole and the homemade chips, the bowl in the middle of the table. That bowl was never coming home with me: the tub version of that guacamole runs 140mg of sodium in two tablespoons. So I make it myself. The smart swap in this one isn't an ingredient. It's not buying the tub. Avocado never did anything to anybody; the salt truck backed up to the tub, not the fruit. A real scoop — half a cup, the way people actually eat it

These rolls reminded me of a sweet roll I made back in high school — soft, a little sweet, brushed with butter. I didn't think I'd get that roll back without the salt. Then I made them — and there it was. Some recipes you just don't make anymore. But this one came home. The original version runs about 200mg of sodium a roll. Mine run about 18mg — and nobody at the table would ever guess. Three quiet swaps do the work. The salt becomes potassium chloride, just a teaspoon and o

There used to be a sodium-free baking powder on the shelf — Hain Featherweight was the last one, and it has been discontinued, like all the rest. So I make my own. Regular baking powder runs about 400mg of sodium in a teaspoon — about 1,200mg in a tablespoon. This mix runs 0mg, and it swaps 1 for 1 anywhere baking powder is called for. It is three ingredients and five minutes: DIY SODIUM-FREE BAKING POWDER Makes 4 tablespoons · 0mg sodium 2 tablespoons cream of tartar - 1 tab

Taco night feels harmless. It's just a little packet, right? One packet of regular store-bought taco seasoning — the kind that flavors one pound of ground meat — carries roughly 2,280mg of sodium. My whole day is 1,500mg. The packet was taco night's whole problem. But the real reason I mix my own goes back to chemo. The treatments messed with my taste buds — food tasted flat, and I wanted dinner with a lot of flavor. One night I was out of Mrs. Dash and had to create my own f

Read the bottle sometime. The famous steak seasoning runs 250mg of sodium in a quarter teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon! The tablespoon you'd actually shake over a pound of steak is about 3,000mg — two days of my sodium budget, as a garnish. My blend runs about 1mg per tablespoon. Same bold, coarse, peppery rub. No salt bomb. It's the spices doing what they always did — coarse black pepper, paprika, garlic, onion, coriander, crushed mustard seed, dill seed, red pepper flakes, and

Well — not trash. Scraps. But it starts as a gallon zip bag in my freezer, and it might be the most useful thing in my whole kitchen. Here's why it matters. A cup of regular canned chicken broth runs about 860mg of sodium. My homemade scrap stock? About 40mg a cup — and that's just the sodium nature put in the vegetables. When I first went no-salt, broth was one of the hardest things to replace, because it hides in everything — soups, rice, sauces, gravy. Making my own put al

This one isn't a recipe, exactly — it's a method. And that means I will never have made the salad you make. Mine comes out of my fridge: whatever vegetables are around, whatever needs using up. Yours will come out of yours. It's supposed to be different every time. The way I actually make it: I cook some pasta. I throw in whatever vegetables are around. And over the whole thing goes an avocado dressing I mash together in about five minutes. That's the recipe. It changes every

Char siu is the sticky, glossy, sweet-savory barbecued chicken, and I refused to give it up. The problem was never the chicken. The problem is the sauce math: made with bottled sauces, a serving of this runs about 915mg of sodium — most of my whole day, on one plate. Mine runs 137mg a serving, and it still glazes like it means it. The marinade is where it happens: my homemade soy sauce substitute and my homemade hoisin (those two live in my kitchen and, for now, in the book —