For decades, Australians have reached for chicken salt when looking for a pop of flavour – we’ve sprinkled it onto chips, over roast chooks and even used it to season margaritas.
In fact, this particular seasoned salt has even helped save lives. In 2019, a customer’s request for this condiment diverted a fish and chip worker away from the deep-fryer – just as a car slammed through the Sunshine Coast shop’s kitchen. "The guy pretty much saved her life by ordering that extra chicken salt," store owner David Benjamin told 7News at the time.
But very few of us know about the origin story of this powerful, all-purpose flavour agent. It all started at Peter Brinkworth's chicken shop in Gawler, 40 km north of Adelaide, some time in the early 1970s.
Peter Brinkworth invented chicken salt in his South Australian chicken shop. Credit: Salt of the Earth
How chicken salt was originally made
Brinkworth combined everything into a multispice blend. Each ingredient served a purpose: paprika gave the meat a warm shot of colour, for instance, while MSG (monosodium glutamate) boosted the taste.
“Glutamate is what we find in matured cheeses, dark mushrooms, tomatoes. It's a very, very vibrant flavour. That’s the main thing that has made chicken salt what it was. MSG had that real flavour bomb,” he says.
Brinkworth also ran a wholesale chicken business, and when local takeaway stores bought his chooks, he supplied them with chicken salt. One particular shop owner had a momentous revelation. “He said, ‘gee, that's good on chips!’ And it went from there.”
Chicken salt has evolved since its invention with different ingredients being experimented with – including dry chicken skin and seaweed. Credit: Jana Longhurst
Chicken salt with a twist
After selling his recipe, the chicken salt inventor noticed his creation becoming “the standard option” in takeaway shops. Its golden glow has also been remixed in many ways – in Melbourne, Central Park Cellars offers chicken-salt margaritas while Chotto Motto produces the seasoning with a vegan Japanese curry twist.
When I interviewed co-owner Dylan Jones for my SBS podcast, Should You Really Eat That?, he discussed the seasoning’s national importance. “You know, being an Aussie, obviously I have chicken salt running through my veins,” he said.
Yet for many decades, Brinkworth’s identity as chicken salt’s inventor was unknown – until unveiled him in The Guardian in 2018. Liaw was school friends with Brinkworth’s daughter, Jodie, and that led to the chicken salt creator publicly sharing his story for the first time and revealing his original recipe.
Liaw was surprised the "vibrant orange-yellow colour came from the addition of curry powder", because its flavour isn’t that evident in the spice blend.
There’s a good reason why. There’s no curry powder in Brinkworth’s chicken salt. “I was pulling his leg,” he says and laughs.
So what’s actually in this seasoned salt?
“The main ingredient, of course, is salt,” Brinkworth says. Then there’s chicken stock powder, MSG, paprika, garlic, onion and celery. “I put a bit of rice flour in it these days as a stabiliser to stop it clumping in the jars. But that's basically what's in it.”
The inventor still makes the OG chicken salt from scratch himself. Credit: Salt of the Earth
“I put it on just about everything. We have it on our eggs for breakfast,” he says. “On a steak or red meat, it’s particularly good.”
He’s currently working on a vegetarian “white salt” version optimised for bechamel sauce, mashed potatoes and pasta dishes that don’t need that suntan-glow of chicken salt.
Chicken salt goes global
While chicken salt hasn’t yet captured the world's attention quite like, say, avocado toast, Aussies have been spreading the word overseas.
In New York, Thomas Lim created a high-end version at Dudley’s Deli, while comedian Andy Lee’s pub, Old Mates, dusts its chips in this seasoned salt. In 2022, Jacob Richardson and Thomas Van Kalken launched their film about Brinkworth, Salt of The Earth; it’s played in Egypt, the Czech Republic, France and the US, where it won Best International Documentary at the Florida Shorts Film Festival.
Perhaps this will help rev the international appetite for chicken salt, which was first stoked over 30 years ago, when Brinkworth delivered chicken salt to some Canadian farmer friends?
Meanwhile, closer to home, Brinkworth is still taken by surprise with his unintentional fame. He laughs that his grandson told him he was “a national icon” the other day. “He’s 11 years old!”
But he’s also right.
