E510 - Ammonium chloride
What it is and how it is used
Ammonium chloride is salmiak — the sharp, tongue-stinging salt that defines Nordic and Dutch salty liquorice. The taste is genuinely distinct from ordinary salt: it is savoury and slightly astringent, with a numbing quality that the region's confectioners have built an entire category around and that most other countries find alarming.
Its other traditional uses are technical: as a yeast nutrient in bread dough, where the ammonium ion feeds fermentation, and as an acidifier.
Foods commonly containing it
Salty liquorice (salmiakki, salmiak, dropjes) from Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and northern Germany; some bread improvers; and a few traditional baked goods.
Safety summary
The regulatory position here needs stating carefully rather than simply. E 510 does not appear in the FSA Register of Food Additive Authorisations — the chloride salts on the GB additives list are E 507 hydrochloric acid, E 508 potassium chloride, E 509 calcium chloride, E 511 magnesium chloride and E 512 stannous chloride, with no E 510 between them.
Salty liquorice is nonetheless lawfully sold across Europe and the UK, so the substance is clearly permitted by some route. The likeliest explanation is that its use is governed under flavourings law rather than the food additives regulation, which would explain why an E-number circulating in international product databases has no entry in the GB additives register. We have not been able to verify that framing from a primary source, so we are flagging it rather than asserting it, and we have not quoted an additive ADI for a substance whose regulatory route we cannot confirm.
What is not in doubt is the dietary caution, and it belongs to the liquorice rather than the salmiak: glycyrrhizin in liquorice root raises blood pressure and lowers potassium at sustained high intakes, and the FSA and other agencies advise moderation. Salty liquorice also carries meaningful sodium.
Known concerns
The health caution with salty liquorice is the glycyrrhizin in liquorice root, not the ammonium chloride: sustained high intakes raise blood pressure and deplete potassium. Salty liquorice is also a concentrated source of sodium.