Using salt in your cooking—whether you’re seasoning a dish with kosher salt or sprinkling a little flaky salt over a pan of freshly baked brownies—is a no-brainer. But have you ever thought about adding salt to your coffee?
- Taylor Murphy-Dyer, director of education for The Roasterie Coffee Company
- Kathryn Hendrix, recipe tester, BHG Test Kitchen
Putting salt in coffee isn’t a new idea. The tradition stretches back hundreds of years in countries such as Hungary, Siberia, and Turkey, the latter of which even incorporates salted coffee into wedding rituals. Salt is also one of the key ingredients in cà phê muối (salt coffee), a popular drink in Vietnam that combines robusta coffee, condensed milk, and just a touch of salt to mellow out the bitterness of the beans.
Salt coffee hit social media earlier this month when Logan Moffitt, a content creator known as “the cucumber guy,” posted a TikTok of himself making Vietnamese-inspired coconut iced coffee. After blending together coconut cream and condensed milk, Moffitt pulls a shot of espresso and then adds a sprinkling of Himalayan pink salt to it.
“A little hack to make this bomb is to add some salt into the coffee,” Moffitt says before mixing the salt into the espresso. He then spoons the coconut mixture over the espresso and finishes the iced coffee off with another grind of pink salt.
Should You Put Salt in Coffee?
We’re all about mixing up our morning coffee routine, so we wondered: Should we be adding salt to our coffee? The short answer: It depends.
Taylor Murphy-Dyer, director of education for The Roasterie Coffee Company, says she almost always adds salt to the signature beverages served at the brand’s cafés across the Kansas City metro area. Adding salt to a beverage made with coffee, she says, isn’t so different from using it to season your food.
“Just like with food, salt is an enhancer and balancer of flavor when added in the right amounts,” Murphy-Dyer says. “Think about how cocktails often have saline added to them or how Margaritas have salt on the rim. That salt enhances and changes the overall flavor experience. We can do the same with our curated coffee beverages.”
But while salt can be a great way to enhance the flavor of various coffee drinks, like our Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew or Hot Orange Mocha, Murphy-Dyer doesn’t recommend adding salt directly into your brewed coffee if you plan to drink the coffee on its own.
“Coffee naturally has so many flavors, including savory and vegetable-like flavors,” Murphy-Dyer says. “Salty is something we often associate with under-extracted coffee, meaning we haven’t dissolved enough of our sweet coffee flavors to balance those other flavors out. Adding more salt to coffee would likely enhance these savory and vegetal flavors and result in an unpleasant, unbalanced cup.”
That said, if you find yourself with a lackluster cup of coffee, the BHG Test Kitchen has found that adding a pinch of salt to coffee can sometimes help tame the bitterness. “It definitely cuts the bitter,” says Recipe Tester Kathryn Hendrix. “I do this to save cheap coffee in restaurants all the time.”