What Is Salmiak?

Salmiak is named after its salt. Sal ammoniac, or salmiak, is the old name for ammonium chloride. Finns call the candy salmiakki, Swedes saltlakrits and the Dutch zoute drop. The extra-strong Dutch kind is dubbelzout, "double salt".¹

Why it tastes the way it does

Ammonium chloride is not just salty. It is sharp, a little bitter and a little sour, and it dries the mouth the way strong tea does. Strong kinds can tingle.

A 2023 study from Emily Liman's lab at the University of Southern California helps explain the sour part. It found that ammonium chloride switches on OTOP1, the receptor on the tongue that detects sour taste. Mice with the receptor avoided ammonium chloride; mice without it did not mind.² So salmiak reads partly as sour because, to one of your taste receptors, it is.

Under the salt is licorice. Licorice root extract supplies glycyrrhizin, a sweetener many times sweeter than sugar that arrives slowly and lingers. Anise oil is often added, and its anethole brings the familiar black candy aroma. For how those two differ, see anise vs licorice.

Where it is eaten

Salty licorice is common across the Nordic countries, the Benelux and northern Germany. Nobody is sure where it started. One Finnish writer suggests pharmacies, which used ammonium chloride as a cough medicine. By the 1930s, salmiak pastilles were being made in Finland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands.¹

It now goes into ice cream, chocolate, chewing gum and spirits as well as candy. Finland's Salmiakki Koskenkorva is a salmiak-flavored vodka.

How much goes in, and the rules

Those figures are as summarized in Wikipedia's entry on salty licorice.¹ In the US, ammonium chloride is GRAS, generally recognized as safe, as a flavor enhancer, leavening agent, dough strengthener and processing aid. There is no fixed limit beyond good manufacturing practice.³

The licorice has rules of its own. In the EU and UK, confectionery with 100 mg/kg or more of glycyrrhizinic acid must say "contains liquorice". At 4 g/kg it must also warn people with high blood pressure to avoid eating too much.⁴ In the US, the FDA has warned that adults over 40 eating two ounces of black licorice a day for at least two weeks could develop an irregular heartbeat.⁵

Building a salmiak product

Dose for your market. Nordic strength is a lot for people who did not grow up on it. For a new market, start well below the Nordic norm, or use salmiak as a coating or a ripple rather than the whole product.

Watch moisture. Salmiak powder coatings can pull in water. Tyrkisk Peber, a Danish hard candy from 1976 now made by Fazer, was hygroscopic in its original form, meaning it drew moisture from the air. The recipe was later changed to stop that.⁶ Pack well and test at your storage humidity.

Check the black. Some European black licorices are darkened with vegetable carbon (E153). The US does not permit it as a food color, so a US version has to get its color elsewhere.

Pair it with fat or alcohol. Dark chocolate, ice cream and vodka all carry salmiak well and soften the salt. Chili works too, as Tyrkisk Peber shows.

What no formulation can do is make salmiak an easy sell where people did not grow up with it. Plan the product, and the volume, around that.