In other threads, some folks in this forum have professed to be food snobs. So they must be down with recipes for authentic old timey Texas cooking which call for Kosher or Sea Salt?

Anyone wanna elaborate on or offer proof why Kosher or Sea Salt is better than Morton's

All I know is that smoked sea salt is the tits I don't care who you are.

Seriously table salt has some anti caking additives and iodine usually and some think it has too much bite to it which is probably because it's purity is more than sea salt because of the processesing. You could say it lacks any nuance I guess.

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All I know is that smoked sea salt is the tits I don't care who you are.

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I bought a tiny bit of this Mexican smoked sea salt. Oh my, it might be one of the greatest things ever and I don't like things with much, if any, salt.

Tanya, what have you tried it on? Or on everything?

I am no food snob, but in general, "kosher" salt is characterized by being slightly larger and in more a flake form than normal table salt. This form is typically used for 'koshering' meats (drawing out blood/moisture). It has nothing (necessarily) to do with the salt being 'kosher' in the religious sense. It is considered better to cook with because it typically has no additives and the slightly larger flatter salt flakes, which are better for some reason (don't ask me, I don't know much).

Anyway, I don't know what 'blessed salt' is.

I'll now sit back and wait for drive on to be a dick to you, or bonfirewillburn to give you some useful info.

Tenn Ag

I've used it on grilled chicken, seared salmon, and as a finish to pasta sauce and salad.

I use Morton's kosher salt, for everything except finishing dishes. Where I will play with many different sea salts to get different mouth feels and tastes.

The big two are Morton's a red diamond (the flaked stuff). It "pretty much" boils down to which you started using first. Both have a very clean flavor with the flaked stuff being a bit more dense(I think or vice versa)

You become accustomed to how much salt is in your individual pinch and you learn to salt by feel. Switching between the two will drastically slows down the line, and can cause some issues with dishes being u/o salted.

The biggest reason those two dominate the industry is their speed. A cooks hands are constantly wet, from slicing some beef, washing and not drying well, etc, These salts work very well with wet hands. I can season a paticular item on the fly from the bucket of salt on the line, and the remainder if the salt will brush off extremely fast. Doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but imagine cooking 4-6 hundred plates in a night (app, entree, dessert dor 140-240 people) that little ability can really add up)




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Bacon: the candy bar of meat.

this is slightly off topic, but salt varies greatly between brands and types. i read something a few weeks ago that explained how crystalline structure and particle size effect the amount of salt per unit measurement. one brand of kosher salt may have 2.5x the mass per tsp as one brand of sea salt which may have 0.5x the amount of salt as a table salt. food for thought.

Get your sea salt from am Asian market. Super cheap and the ocean's the
Ocean. I use Sea salt to finish dishes and diamond crystal for my erry day kosher salt seasoning. Why diamond you axe? Wal-Mart sells it cheap. I usually buy 4-6 boxes and 2-3 bags of lump charcoal to avoid going back.

I found some Ghost Pepper infused sea salt here at our local hot sauce store. AMAZING.

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"Guns don't kill people, I kill people."

I used smoked sea salt to make a simple Alfredo sauce and it was AMAZING. good stuff but gets pricey.

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I found some Ghost Pepper infused sea salt here at our local hot sauce store.

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Interesting.. Going to have to look for that sort of thing.

As for Morton vs diamond cristal, per Thomas Keller in Ad Hoc, the DC is more flaky and less dense, ie there's less actual salt in a teaspoon of salt. That said, he says to use what you're used to. I've always bought Morton's, because it's what I could find consistently. I have a couple of kinds of sea salt that I haven't used much.

I'm going to be a bit contrarian and say that I don't think that the taste of table salt is significantly different than kosher. It's denser, and it's hard to measure by pinching, which means you have to slow down and use measuring spoons, plus, if you use the same volume, you will end up with more salt than you want. Also, the smaller pieces dissolve easier. That's a good thing for table salt, because you may not want chunks of salt if you add some at the table (which nobody ever has to do because their food is perfectly salted while cooking, right? ). If you're salting a steak before cooking, it's not so good, because you want the salt to dissolve slower and not suck out a ton of moisture.

You must of course take what I'm saying with an grain of salt .
I'm NOT a professional cook. I'm a physician with an engineering undergrad, which means I've been trained to be skeptical as hell of conventional wisdom and anecdotal evidence, and I try to find or reason out the science of why things work. That said, I use Morton's kosher salt for just about everything. About the only thing I use table salt for is adding to pasta water.

I use Morton's kosher salt for cooking, pickling salt for brining (because it has much smaller crystals that are easier to dissolve in cold liquids), and Maldon sea salt for finishing dishes on occasion.

BTW, all salt was sea salt at one time or another.

Tanya, never thought to try it on salads, I'll give it a whirl sounds interesting. I find I use it most on starchy foods like potatoes or pintos, anything that could use a little depth without putting in the time.

Read an interesting section about salt in a new book I just bought called what Einstein told his cook By Robert Wolke. He basically says that all of the talk about sea salt tasting better than other salt is baloney for the most part. What does make a difference is the size and shape of the crystals. A lot of the finishing salts do have more complex shapes, which allow them to stick to things and dissolve faster on your tongue, increasing the salt taste. Interesting read, so far, if you like cooking science.

That is true - and that is why table salt is so much finer than "cooking salt" which is finer than "finishing salt"

Now if you take into consideration other minerals that can be in the salt - or the different make up of the minerals across the world that produce the different salt you lose some argument.

Salt it is not food, it is a mineral that effects food and how we taste. By playing with the different salts we can change how the eater perceives the food on the plate, thus changing the flavor.




[This message has been edited by bonfirewillburn (edited 2/3/2012 12:03p).]

kosher salt

I use kosher salt in everything. I love it! It's fun to pinch and add while cooking too...nice texture.

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and the ocean's the
Ocean.

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That's not very accurate out side of all oceans have salt water. The mineral content in the different regions of the world is a big factor as to why different regions produce different flavors in sea salt.