In response to some questions concerning salt from this thread, http://www.mytoos.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=182323#Post182323, I am providing some articles on the topic.

Article 1:
From the Washington Post, September 6, 2000

FOOD 101; Salt Talks

Robert L. Wolke

Please tell me about sea salt. Why are so many chefs and recipes using it these days?

Boy, am I glad you asked that question! I've been waiting for a good excuse to vent my spleen on that subject. Stand back.

There is so much nonsense out there about sea salt that it's hard to know where to begin. It's easy to dismiss the assertions of some health-food faddists, who often require no evidence whatsoever before adopting a fervent conviction. Among the statements I've seen are that sea salt is "unrefined," "organic," "more natural," "more healthful" and "a living food," whatever that means. (Does it bite back?)

Poppycock, all. 'Nuff said.

Moving from the ridiculous to the sublime, it's not quite as easy to dismiss the pronouncements of respected chefs and cookbook authors, whose statements tend to be accepted as gospel even when misguided. Their misguided statements tend to cluster around two supposed virtues of sea salt: its high mineral content (a claim made even more passionately by health-food addicts) and its superior flavor. I'll address the mineral question in this column and the flavor issue in my next one.

Those magnificent minerals

If you evaporate all the water from a bucket of ocean (fish previously removed), you will be left with a sticky, gray, bitter- tasting sludge that is about 78 percent sodium chloride--salt. Ninety-nine percent of the rest consists of magnesium and calcium compounds. Beyond that, there are at least 75 other elements in very small amounts. That last fact is the basis for the ubiquitous claim that sea salt is "loaded with nutritious minerals." But cold, hard chemical analysis tells the tale: The minerals, even in this raw, unprocessed stuff, are present in nutritionally negligible quantities. You'd have to eat two tablespoons of it to get the amount of iron, for example, in a single grape.

Bowl of salt sludge, anyone? Not in the United States, because although people in coastal regions of some countries do use this raw material as a condiment, the Food and Drug Administration requires that food-grade salt be at least 97.5 percent pure sodium chloride.

But that's only the beginning of the Great Mineral Hoax. Because of how food-grade sea salt is extracted, the stuff that winds up in the stores contains about 10 times less mineral matter than the raw salt sludge. Food-grade sea salt is obtained by allowing the sun to
evaporate much of the water, but by no means all of it--and that's a critical distinction--from shallow ponds of seawater. When the concentration of sodium chloride in the ponds gets to be about nine times what it was in the ocean, it begins to crystallize out, whereupon it is raked or scooped out for subsequent washing, drying and packaging.

The vital point that nobody seems to realize--or admit--is that this "natural" crystallization process is in itself an extremely effective refining step. Sun-induced evaporation and crystallization make the sodium chloride about 10 times purer-- freer of other minerals—than it was in the ocean.

Here's why.

Whenever you have a water solution containing a preponderance of one chemical (in this case sodium chloride) along with a lot of other chemicals in much lesser amounts (in this case the other minerals), then as the water evaporates away, the preponderant chemical will crystallize out in a relatively pure form, leaving all the others behind. It's a purification process that chemists use all the time. The crystallized salt (called solar salt) that is harvested by solar evaporation of ocean water is therefore about 99 percent pure sodium chloride right off the bat. The other 1 percent consists almost entirely of magnesium and calcium compounds. Virtually all of those other 75-or-so "precious mineral nutrients" are gone. To get that single grape's worth of iron, you'd have to eat about a quarter of a pound of solar salt!

Even beyond that, some brands of sea salt are the result of subjecting the solar salt to the same further purification steps as mined salt, reducing their mineral content effectively to zero.

Is "sea salt" sea salt?

Let's not forget that mined salt is also sea salt, because the underground salt deposits were left by ancient seas that dried up. It therefore has a very similar composition--minerals and all--to today's sea salt. And how about this little-known fact: Your "sea salt" might not even have been taken from the sea, because manufacturers don't have to specify their sources and according to industry insiders I have talked with, fibbing does occur. Two batches of salt may be taken from the same bin at the mine plant and one of them labeled for sale as "sea salt." Well, of course it is. It just crystallized a million
years earlier.

Many sea salt enthusiasts deceive themselves by thinking that there are only two kinds of salt: mined salt in the shaker and sea salt in the fancy packages. Not only may the "sea salt" have come from a mine, but on the West Coast the salt in the shaker is most likely to have come from the sea. The point is that a salt's characteristics depend much more on how the raw material has been processed than on where it came from. You can't just generalize. There are probably a dozen brands of genuine sea salt with crystals of a variety of sizes, shapes and degrees of purity. Some are straight solar salt, while some have been purified further.

The bottom line is that when a recipe specifies simply "sea salt" it is pure folly, and stems from a lack of knowledge, misguided political correctness or a thoughtless desire to climb onto a popular bandwagon. And you know what? It may make absolutely no difference anyway.

That was a teaser for my next column, in which I'll examine a few flavor fables. Do sea salts really make food taste better than mined salts? And if so, which ones are best?

Don't go too far away.

Article 2:

From the Washington Post, September 20, 2000

FOOD 101; Sea Salt Shakedown

Robert L. Wolke

Why are so many chefs and recipes using sea salt these days?

Indeed, if Alan Greenspan were a food critic he would say that today's chefs, cookbook authors and food gurus are displaying "irrational exuberance" over sea salt. In my last column I wrote--some might say ranted--about claims that sea salt is "loaded with healthful minerals." It's not. Today I want to address--okay, rant about—the claims that sea salt is superior in other ways to mined salt.

In this corner, wearing a pretty little cut-glass shaker, is ordinary table salt, more properly known as evaporated salt. It is usually made by dissolving mined salt in water and using fuel-fired heat to partially evaporate the water.

And in this corner, wearing a designer package with a high price tag, is true sea salt, more properly known as solar salt. It is made by using heat from the sun to partially evaporate seawater.

Because strictly speaking they are both evaporated salt (as distinguished from rock salt, which is chunks chopped out of the mine and is not suitable for food use), I'll call them "shaker salt" and "sea salt," with the understanding that I mean genuine sea salt, not
mined salt that has been labeled and sold as "sea salt." (Yes, it happens; see previous column.)

Choosing up sides

Some of the most respected names in food have variously praised sea salt as tasting clean, pure, fresh, rich, bright, subtle, delicate, saline, sweet (!), sharp, gentle, refined, balanced and well-rounded. (One cannot help but marvel at the human imagination.) In contrast,
granulated shaker salt has been scorned as tasting acrid, bitter, tinny, harsh, nasty, metallic, acidic, shrill, characterless and "like a mouthful of chemicals." (News flash: All salt is chemical, and if you're filling your mouth with it, no wonder you don't like it. And a special note to West Coast sea-salt fans: The shaker salt that you condemn so vehemently has most likely been taken from the sea.)

There is no denying that some of the finer (read more expensive), genuine sea salts--and they may sell for more than 100 times the price of shaker salt--have unique flavor characteristics. But to paraphrase an infamous presidential parsing, it depends on what you mean by "flavor."

A food's flavor consists of three components: taste, smell and texture. With salt, we can eliminate smell, because salt has no odor. (People who claim that sea salt has "the fresh aroma of the sea" undoubtedly also hear voices.) That leaves taste--what the taste buds
actually detect--and texture--how it feels in the mouth.

First, the taste. As I pointed out in my previous column, most food-grade salt is close to 99 percent pure sodium chloride. Whether it came from land or sea, pure sodium chloride tastes like pure sodium chloride: salty. Period. The remaining one percent of impurities is a mere one-hundredth of the fraction of an ounce of salt that a person consumes in a given dish. It's simply too far-fetched to expect that to make any difference. In short, specifying sea salt as an ingredient in a recipe is just plain silly. Those sea-loving recipe writers should put their palates where their mouths are, so to speak.

Shaker salt does contain anti-caking additives to keep their tiny grains flowing smoothly. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration limits the total amount of all salt additives to 2 percent. That means that a teaspoon of salt in a recipe that serves six can contribute at
most 15 or 20 milligrams of additives to each diner's plate. That's hardly going to make or break a dish. Oh, and several of the most common additives are tasteless anyway.

The solid facts

One can certainly do comparative taste tests by placing pinches of various salts on the tongue, and that's undoubtedly how chefs and food writers have arrived at their conclusions about the flavors of various sea salts. When tested in that way, there can indeed be detectable differences. But it's not in the taste; it's in the texture: the size and shape of the crystals. That's the only thing that distinguishes most sea salts from granulated shaker salt.

Sea salts generally have large, irregularly shaped crystals because that's what slow solar evaporation produces, whereas the rapid vacuum-evaporation process used in making shaker salt produces tiny, regularly shaped grains that will fit through the holes in a shaker. That single difference makes all the difference between sea salt and shaker salt.

One common assertion is that sea salt is saltier than shaker salt. But since they're both about 99 percent pure sodium chloride, that has to be nonsense. The idea undoubtedly arose from the fact that in on-the-tongue taste tests, the flaky, irregularly shaped crystals of many sea salts dissolve instantly, giving a quicker rush of saltiness than do the small, compact, slow-dissolving little cubes of shaker salt. But it's not the ocean that made that difference; it's the shape of the crystals. And that is completely irrelevant when the salts are used in cooking. People just don't eat salt by placing it directly on their tongues.

The mistaken notion that sea salt is saltier has led to the claim that one can use less of it in seasoning. ("Good for those watching their sodium intake," trumpets one sea salt manufacturer.) Obviously, because sea salts generally have big, complexly shaped crystals that don't pack down as tightly, a teaspoonful will contain less actual sodium chloride than a teaspoonful of tiny shaker grains. Teaspoon for teaspoon, therefore, sea salt is actually less salty than shaker salt. Weight for weight, of course, they're identical, because any gram of sodium chloride is precisely as salty as any other. You can't cut down on salt by eating a different kind of salt.

Depending on how they were harvested and processed, the crystals of different brands of sea salt vary widely in shape, from flakes to pyramids to clusters of irregular, jagged fragments. The sizes of the crystals also can range from fine to coarse, although almost all of them are coarser than shaker salt. It's the large size and complex shapes of the crystals that give sea salts their reputation, and they are prized for only one reason, whether people realize it or not: When sprinkled on relatively dry food such as asparagus or a slice of tomato just before serving, they deliver bright little explosions of saltiness as they hit the tongue and dissolve, or when they are crushed between the tongue and the hard palate or crunched between the teeth. That's how the savviest chefs use them. These sensuous little bursts of saltiness have nothing to do with the salt's nautical origin.

On the other hand, any salt used during cooking, whether in big or small crystals, dissolves and disappears almost instantly in the food juices. And once dissolved, all salts are indistinguishable from one another because the texture is gone. That's another reason why it's silly to specify sea salt in any recipe that contains moisture, and what recipe doesn't?

How it all shakes out

At home, which large, complexly grained salt should you sprinkle on your foie gras or venison carpaccio? The ones that earn the most frequent praise from chefs are the (surprise!) French salts harvested from the coastal waters of Brittany, either at Guerande, on the island of Noirmoutier or on the Ile de Re. You will find them in several forms. Gros sel (big salt) and sel gris (gray salt) are the heavy crystals that fall to the bottom of the salt ponds and may be gray with algae. (Exotic solar salts from other parts of the world can be different colors from different algae or from the clay floors of their ponds.)

In the battle of the salts, most connoisseurs agree that the champion is fleur de sel (flower of salt), the delicate crystals that form on the surface of the French ponds when the sun and wind are exactly right. Because it forms in very limited amounts and must be carefully hand-skimmed from the surface, fleur de sel commands the highest price
and is (as a consequence, perhaps?) most highly regarded by leading chefs. Because of its fragile, pyramidal crystal shape, it does indeed produce a delightfully crunchy salt-burst. Just don't cook with it.

The emperor's salt

No one has ever said that chefs cannot be opinionated. But when one prominent chef says that he uses only French sea salt in the water for boiling pasta and another says that he uses a different-flavored sea salt with each kind of sea food, ya just gotta wonder. And when nationally known food gurus keep generalizing that "sea salt" in whatever form or use tastes superior to "mined salt," everybody has to agree for fear of appearing to have an insensitive palate. It's a classic case of The Emperor's Salt. Maybe where salt is concerned, flavor has four, not three, components: taste, smell, texture and hype.

The battle of the salts, then, isn't between sea salt and mined salt; it's between big salt and little salt. If Goliath appears to win, it's only because of his size, and where salt is concerned, size matters.

Next column: Freshly ground salt and kosher salt.

Article 3:

From the Washington Post, October 4, 2000.

FOOD 101; Salt, the Final Episode

Robert L. Wolke

This is the last (I hope) in a series of columns on salt. My two preceding columns on sea salt spurred several readers to ask about kosher salt.

First of all, kosher salt is misnamed; it should be called "koshering salt" because it is used in the koshering process, which involves blanketing raw meat or poultry with salt in order to draw out the blood. (Salt draws liquid out of foods by osmosis, a naturally arising force that transports water molecules out of places where they are plentiful, e.g., inside the meat cells, and into places where they are less plentiful, e.g., a strong, salty brine.)

Kosher salt may be either mined or taken from the sea; nobody seems to care. Its crystals, however, must always be coarse and irregular, so that they will cling to the surface of the meat during koshering. Ordinary granulated table salt would fall off too soon. Besides the
rabbinical supervision of its manufacture, its crystal size is the only distinction between kosher salt and other salts.

In restaurant kitchens, kosher salt is pinched more often than an American signorina in Rome. Because of its coarseness, pinching lets you see and feel exactly how much you're using. That's why most chefs use kosher salt. I keep it ever handy in a little dish, not only in the kitchen but on the table. I use my shaker mainly for sprinkling salt on the tails of birds.

Some people believe that kosher salt contains less sodium than granulated table salt. That's nonsense. They're both virtually pure sodium chloride, and sodium chloride contains 39.3 percent sodium. Period. On the other hand, there are those who claim just the opposite: that kosher salt is saltier than shaker salt. In an on-the-tongue comparison, it may indeed seem that way, because the complexly shaped crystals of kosher salt dissolve faster and give a quicker shot of saltiness. (As I pointed out in the preceding column,
that goes also for most sea salts.) But gram for gram, every edible salt is precisely as salty as any other.

There really is a difference, however, in the amount of kosher salt to use in cooking. When a recipe specifies simply "salt," it almost always means granulated table salt. But coarse-grained kosher salts don't settle down into a teaspoon measure as compactly as table salt does. So a teaspoonful of kosher salt contains less actual sodium chloride and you must therefore use a larger volume of it to get the same degree of saltiness. That's what's behind the "less sodium" myth; if you use the same number of teaspoonfuls, you are, of course, getting less salt, and hence less sodium, than in granulated salt.

By carefully weighing a cupful of each kind, I have determined the following conversion factors: For Morton's Coarse Kosher Salt, use 1 1/4 times the specified volume of granulated salt. For Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt, use exactly two times the specified volume.

Adding up additives

It is often said that kosher salt contains no additives. And indeed, because its crystals aren't flat-sided cubes like shaker salt's, they don't tend to stick together and don't generally need shaker salt's anti-caking additives. But read the labels. Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt has no additives, but Morton's Coarse Kosher Salt contains a tiny amount--limited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to less than thirteen ten-thousandths of 1 percent--of the anti-caking agent sodium ferrocyanide. Even though that's a totally different chemical from poisonous cyanide, the label lists it by its less frightening name,
yellow prussate of soda.

Anti-caking and free-flowing additives to shaker salt are primarily there to absorb moisture. On the labels you'll see such drying agents as tricalcium phosphate, sodium silicoaluminate, silicon dioxide, calcium silicate and magnesium carbonate--all harmless and mostly tasteless, and limited by the FDA to a total of 2 percent, although few products even come close to that amount.

Any salt, whether from mine or sea and whether kosher or secular, may be iodized. Up to one-hundredth of 1 percent potassium iodide is added as protection against the iodine-deficiency disease goiter. Iodized salt does require a special additive, however, because potassium iodide is somewhat unstable and in a warm, humid or acidic environment will decompose, its iodine content wafting off into the air. (Techspeak: the iodide is oxidized.) To prevent this, a tiny amount (four-hundredths of 1 percent) of dextrose is often added.

What? Sugar in salt? Yes. Dextrose is what is known as a reducing sugar, and it prevents oxidation of the iodide.

Incidentally, the notion that sea salt arrives naturally iodized is a myth. Just because some seaweeds are rich in iodine, people think of the oceans as vast pots of iodine soup. But un-iodized commercial sea salts contain less than 2 percent of the amount of iodine in iodized salt.

Pounding salt

I can't end my series of salty remarks without commenting on those classy salt mills and combination salt-and-pepper grinders that are sold in so-called gourmet shops. The idea seems to be that if freshly ground pepper is so much better than the powdered stuff in cans, then why not use freshly ground salt as well?

That's a (highly profitable) delusion. Unlike pepper, salt contains no volatile, aromatic oils to be released by grinding. Salt is solid sodium chloride through and through, so a small chunk is absolutely identical to a large chunk in everything but size. Other than its
novelty appeal, the only virtue of a salt grinder is that it deposits coarse little chunks, instead of tiny grains, on your food, and the burst of saltiness you get when you crunch them can be fun.

So go ahead and buy one if you wish, but don't believe the hype about "the superior flavor of freshly ground salt" printed on the cute little card that comes with it.

Thanks Mythrees! What great articles. Although I too believed that sea salt was 'saltier' I knew it wasn't saltier than coarse ground and I never could tell the difference in soups. I also believed that sea salt had less additives. Thank you for the debunking!