Stock Cube

Food · Pantry & Condiment · Food, Typed Supps

Eighteen grams of sodium per hundred. One cube is a quarter of a day’s worth.

Stage by stage

Savoury depth (Taste): Free glutamates and fat carry the flavour; the salt is inseparable from them here.
Half salt (The cube): Roughly 47 g of salt per 100 g of product — the flavouring is the minority.
Sodium load (Circulation): About 500 mg per cube, a quarter of a day, before you season anything.
Iodine (Thyroid): 44 mcg per 100 g from the iodised salt — a small unrecognised contributor.

Timing

Add it early enough to disperse, then taste before salting further. The cube has usually already seasoned the dish.

Time to effect

2–4 weeks: Blood pressure response to reduced sodium.
Per cube: Around 500 mg of sodium — the number worth carrying.

Allergens

None of the fourteen major allergens. May contain: Celery, Gluten, Fish, Soya. Derived from what this food is, not from a product label.

Eating patterns

Depends on the product: Halal, Kosher, Low-FODMAP, Gluten-free.

Satiety

Not scored: the satiety index is measured on 240 kcal servings, and nobody eats a 240 kcal serving of this. The question does not apply rather than the answer being unknown.

Cost band

Cheap — roughly £1.5 per kg, as a band midpoint rather than a price.

Key nutrients

Sodium
Iodine

Nutrition per 100g

Calories: 215
Protein: 11.3g
Carbohydrate: 22.5g
of which sugars: 4.3g
Fat: 8.9g
of which saturated: 4.4g
Sodium: 18400mg

Food vs. supplement

Home-made stock is the one substitution here that changes the arithmetic completely: bones, vegetables and water contain almost no sodium, so everything in the pot is what you chose to put there.

Kitchen tip

Half a cube, plus a squeeze of acid at the end. Acid sharpens flavour the way salt does, and costs nothing.

Common myth

“It’s just a flavour cube — the salt in it can’t be much.” In reality: It is roughly half salt by weight. One 10 g cube carries about 500 mg of sodium, a quarter of the daily target, and a casserole using two has spent half a day’s allowance on seasoning. Halving the cube and reaching for herbs and acid instead usually goes unnoticed, which makes it one of the easier reductions to actually keep.