Homemade Seasoned Salt

Welcome to the February 21, 2016 edition of Sunday Scratchups: Your weekly recipe from scratch around grocery store sales and affordable ingredients. Earlier this week, SavingStar was offering Morton salt for free after rebate — how kind of them, right? But how do you make your free salt even better? By turning it into seasoned salt, of course!

Note: Two years later, in March 2018, I’m still using this exact same seasoned salt recipe even though my free salt is long gone — it’s just. that. good.

Homemade Seasoned Salt

Ingredients

1 Tbsp salt
1/2 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 tsp powdered garlic
1/2 tsp smoked paprika
1/4 tsp cayenne
1/4 tsp turmeric

Directions

Mix all ingredients together. Store in a cool dry place in a tightly sealed container. (Reuse an empty spice bottle for easy shaking!) Use your homemade seasoned salt on oven baked potatoes, burgers, & more.

And that’s how to make seasoned salt!

Or, one way to make seasoned salt, at least: This would be super easy to vary up with your own combination of spices, or you could use regular paprika if you prefer yours a bit less smoky. I think I’m going to try mine with sea salt next time for a bit more texture, and maybe pick up some onion powder to throw in there as well. The beauty of homemade seasoned salt is that you can customize it to your own family’s preferences!

I came up with this blend through some trial & error and changed it up until it tasted great to me, but you might taste the same mix and decide to alter the proportions or substitute in some different spices.

In a blind taste test made up of… my family, lol, everyone preferred homemade. (Which is good, because that’s what they’re getting from now on!) And isn’t it purty? Lawry’s even contains added paprika oleoresin for color, and still — quite literally — pales in comparison.

Not all brands of store-bought seasoned salt contain sugar, but the store brand and Lawry’s seasoned salts I had in my cupboard both do. Given the color and taste difference, and given that sugar is the second ingredient after salt itself, I’m wild-guessing that this seasoned salt is mostly made up of salt & sugar with a few spices thrown in.

Homemade seasoned salt is sugar free!

So on that sugar note, one of the reasons I decided to try to make my own sugar free seasoned salt was because I noticed the added sugar in my store bought brand the last time I used it. Well, I accidentally grabbed iodized Morton salt at Jewel earlier this week, and guess what’s added? Yeah, that would be sugar. My old regular Morton salt contains just salt + calcium silicate, and my new iodized Morton salt contains dextrose.

I looked this up online, and dextrose helps stabilize the iodine so it doesn’t oxidize out of the salt. Who knew? (Well, OK, maybe you all knew and I am the last to find out, but…) Morton iodized salt, however, apparently contains just .04% dextrose (40 mg per 100g), which is a very small proportion — but if you are avoiding GMOs or have a corn allergy, it’s good to be aware it’s in there.

Homemade Seasoned Salt, printable recipe

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Homemade Seasoned Salt

Course seasoning

Total Time 2 minutes

Author Rachel Singer

Ingredients

• 1 Tbsp salt
• 1/2 tsp chili powder
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1 tsp powdered garlic
• 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
• 1/4 tsp cayenne
• 1/4 tsp turmeric

Instructions

• Mix all ingredients together.
• Store in a cool dry place in a tightly sealed container. (Reuse an empty spice bottle for easy shaking!)
• Use your homemade seasoned salt on oven baked potatoes, burgers, & more.

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