Doctor's Choice Salt Free Seasoning:

[Dagger]

Developed by a Cardiologist for people who want to control their sodium intake. A special blend of spices that enhances all foods. No MSG. This blend does a superb job of enhancing the flavor of any meat or vegetable dish.
Ingredients:
Onion, Spices, Garlic, Orange & Lemon Peel, Bell Pepper, Tomato Powder, Carrots, Lemon Juice Powder, Citric Acid, Extractive of Lemon and other Spices.

What do you think of blends like this? I have mixed Accent in flour to coat chicjen for frying and it was something like this.

[Suzanne]

There are lots of products like this on the market -- Mrs. Dash comes to mind first.

A neutral reaction: I guess they are good for people who are unsure of how to create flavor by combining their own herbs and spices. But to me, if you have even a few good dried items in your spice rack, you can do just as well and tailor the taste to what you like best.

A negative reaction: the name hints at health benefits that are not there, and also at a way to charge more for something not really all that special. If you make your own blends, you're probably better off flavor-wise, and no worse off health-wise.

EXCEPT for the MSG!!!! That stuff is almost all sodium, and many people have a bad reaction to it (me, for instance ). If you want to find a non-sodium flavor enhancer, look for mushroom powders; they have the same "umami" properties (the Japanese fifth taste, sometimes thought of as "savoriness"), but without the bad stuff.

[phatch]

MSG is much less sodium than equal amounts of salt. A teaspoon of table salt is about 2000 mg sodium. A teaspoon of similarly granulated MSG (Accent) is about 600 mg sodium.

Frontier makes a line of salt free seasonings that are useful if you don't want to blend your own.

Helen Witty's Good Stuff Cookbook ( http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...61108831&itm=7) has some good herb mixes for this purpose and lots of other great pantry cookery.

For Low Sodium cooking, The No Salt Lowest Sodium cookbook has REAL cooking and very low sodium counts. ( http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...12291647&itm=4 )

Phil