Just a dusting of salt, even the best tomatoes will benefit… make a caprese, one with a small sprinkling of salt, one without and let me know which one shows off all of those flavors best?
Another really great use for the sea salt that I don’t think he mentioned specifically is when you’re putting that finishing touch on chocolate chip cookies or on brownies warm out of the oven. Just makes them
We don’t always have it around, but I got some as a stocking stuffer this year. It’s a special treat.
I’ve somehow managed to cook for forty years without “needing” more than two types of salt, and with all honesty I could probably have managed with just one.
I have also been transitioning to the Morton’s “Lite Salt”, which is potassium chloride/sodium chloride, as the possibility of one of my recipes being very slightly off sucks much less than having a stroke. As they say: “Don’t have a stroke”. Rural China study finds salt substitute cuts risk of stroke
Massive SSaSS Study Shows Switch to Salt Substitute Cuts Stroke, CVD | tctmd.com
They excluded people with kidney disease from the study, so if you or yours have kidney issues, it may not be as safe.
Jacobsen’s makes amazing sea salt in a variety of preparations. I tend to just use the regular sea salt. It’s made from the highly saline water from the same bay where I go clamming.
No Lawry’s Seasoned Salt. Can I trust what comes out of that kitchen?
If you’d ever had the misfortune to not be Scandanavian and eaten Salmiak liquorice you’ll know why other chlorides don’t make the kitchen cupboard.
I like to keep my magnesium chloride in the kitchen.
When it pains, it roars.
This kitchen is getting crowded. /s
P’snlly, my kitchen contains quite a number of salts, so as a pedant, I would suggest “the largest amount of salt used for seasoning in my kitchen is NaCl”.
Just saying.
Also, I would appreciate an explanation why kosher salt seems to be the thing in the US. I am pulling nice recipes from Serious Eats now and then, and they always seem to use kosher salt. As do other foodie webpages and books. How come?
In Europe, we have had salt fads, including various rock salts (sometimes with the additional label “fossil”), fleur de sel, variously coloured salts with geographic origins (black Hawaii’an among them), spiced salts and of course the general dichotomy between salt mills and salt shakers. Some of these have been driven by esoteric bullshit promoted by TV personalities, some seemed pop out of nowhere and thus were probably also PR driven. The fleur de sel thing is the only one among them which I believe genuinely driven by foodies first, and then becoming a social class distinction marker. (I like to call it “distinction salt”, Destinktionssalz in German. )
“Pedant” is just code for “someone who chooses to be willfully ignorant of context.” If you insist on a technical definition when you’re not actually in that technical context, you’ve already lost the debate.
Anyway, the reasons that kosher salt is popular in the US are: 1) it’s suffciently coarse to hold its own when salting is being used to draw out moisture or add texture to a dish; 2) it’s widely available; 3) it’s cheap; 4) it’s always made without iodine and anti-caking agents. This makes for a clean-tasting salt that’s easy to handle and has a lot of useful properties for cooking that just about everyone has access to.
Kosher salt doesn’t have iodine or other additives put in so you get just the pure salt flavor, in theory. In practice, there’s nothing to stop regular table salt being labelled as kosher salt, in the USA at least. There is Kosher certified salt too, which is labeled as such.
Fancy salts like you listed remind me that salt and salary share a Latin root. Whereas Roman soldiers may have been paid with salt, now you need your whole salary to buy fancy salt.
Hmmm, I think both are correct.
It would be appropriate to say NaHCO3 is a metal carbonate and is the sodium salt of the bicarbonate anion.
To add to what @wazroth said. It’s also coarse enough to easily pinch and sprinkle by hand, which is a better way to evenly distribute salt when cooking (though not baking). It’s like wise less dense per volume. So there’s less chance of over salting when doing that, or seasoning a dish in multiple steps as is fashionable (or necessary).
In the US it’s less “salt fad” than a long standing restaurant practice that was popularized by a few food personalities. I think early on Wolfgang Puck, Alton Brown made a big impact on it. Julia Child very specifically didn’t give a shit.
Lack of iodine and anti-caking agents primarily comes into for things like pickling. Where the additives can make shit cloudy or jack up the chemistry.
Ah, that answers a question which popped up after receiving the answers here. Iodine deficiency is still considered an issue in many areas where I lived, and when I don’t use sea salt, I usually choose salt with added iodine, especially for cooking staples. I definitely can not taste any difference there, and haven’t noticed any difference even when digested the same brand with and without additives, as @anon87143080 and @wazroth suggested.
Yeah it’s kind of impossible to tell. Some of the anti-caking agents can be funky, but I’ve only noticed that in like dollar store salt.
It’s more that the iodine makes pickles cloudy and mushy, and it can fuck up the color of canned goods. There’s also concerns that it could mess with the salt concentration with preserved foods, so you’re making like sausage or canning stuff there’s a slim safety concern.
There’s generally no issue with using iodized salt for general cooking, or especially as table salt. It’s just that coarse salts tend not to come iodized, and course salts are better for cooking.
I try to use iodized table salt once in a while or for table salt, cause I don’t consume a ton of dairy. And that’s apparently the big one in US diets these days. I do eat plenty of fish though.
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