Salt-Free
Creole Seasoning

Cook's notes

Provenance: these are Tony's own proportions. Tony Chachere published his formula in Tony Chachere's Cajun Country Cookbook — 26 oz salt, 2 oz ground red pepper, 1½ oz ground black pepper, 1 oz chili powder, 1 oz garlic powder, 1 oz MSG. Strip the salt and the MSG (the modern jar is labeled No MSG) and you're left with red : black : chili : garlic at 2 : 1½ : 1 : 1 — which is this recipe, scaled to a jar. The wording here is ours; the ratio is his.

What's actually in Tony's. The current label reads: salt, red pepper, black pepper, chili powder, dehydrated garlic, silicon dioxide. That's the whole product — no onion, no paprika, no herbs. US labels run in descending order by weight, so the list independently confirms the cookbook's ratio.

Why so little of it — Tony's is 85% salt. The nutrition data is blunt: a ¼ tsp serving weighs 1.0 g and carries 347 mg of sodium. Sodium is 39% of salt by weight, so that's 0.88 g of salt in a 1.0 g serving. The cookbook ratio says 82.5% and the label math says 88%; either way, five-sixths of that jar is salt and the flavor is what's left. (The cross-check: Tony's Lite lists 170 mg per ¼ tsp — almost exactly half, which is what "Lite" is supposed to mean.) This is why the shaker turns a dish salty long before it turns it hot, and why 2 tablespoons of it will wreck a pot of rice. The longer version — including how to run the same sum on any jar in your cupboard — is in Kitchen Notes.

The chili powder is the catch. McCormick's chili powder lists salt as its third ingredient, and most supermarket brands do the same — build this on one of those and it isn't salt-free, just less salty. Simply Organic Chili Powder is genuinely salt-free (chili, cumin, oregano, coriander, garlic, allspice, clove). Frontier Co-op and Penzeys are too.

Cayenne is the dial. 18 g is faithful to Tony's ratio, and Tony's is warm rather than punishing — but cayenne varies a lot between brands, and here it's a third of the jar instead of a twentieth. Make the first batch as written, cook with it once, and adjust: drop to 12 g for a mild jar, or swap half for sweet paprika, which keeps the color and drops the heat.

About the MSG. Tony's original cookbook formula included an ounce of it (Accent); the jar on the shelf today says No MSG, and this blend leaves it out to match. If you want the version Tony actually wrote down, add about 3 g of Accent to this batch. MSG is not the villain it was made out to be in the 1970s — but it is a source of sodium, at roughly a third of table salt's, so it's worth knowing it's there.

It will clump, and that's fine. Tony's contains silicon dioxide to keep it free-flowing; yours doesn't. Keep the jar somewhere dry and dark (not over the stove — steam is what actually cakes it), shake before each use, and drop a few grains of raw rice in if it gets stubborn. It keeps about 6 months before the cayenne starts to fade.

Where it goes: anywhere you'd shake Tony's — Cajun shrimp & sausage rice, a shrimp boil, eggs, fries, a compound butter, or a chicken before it goes in the oven. Start with a scant ¾ teaspoon where a recipe wanted a tablespoon of Tony's, then salt the dish separately and taste.

Sodium isn't only in the shaker. This blend has none, but the dishes it goes into usually get plenty from elsewhere — stock, smoked sausage, canned tomatoes. The seasoning jar is rarely the biggest number on the plate. It is, however, the one you can move today, and moving it means the salt lands where you decided rather than where a spice company did.