The Salt of the Earth

James Mellgren

Ye are the salt of the earth. — Matthew, 5:13

If anyone ever tells you that they don't eat salt, check their pulse or at least take it, well, with a grain of salt. The reasons is that salt, or to be more precise, sodium, is essential to life, at least on this planet, and some others too apparently as evidenced by space exploration that has begun to indicate that traces of salt are present on extraterrestrial spots and hence, water in places like Mars and the moons of Saturn. As important as it is to life, it is the most important ingredient in the kitchen. For a food item that has been taken for granted for so long, it is gratifying to witness the huge interest in salt today among cooks, professionals and otherwise. Also, there is a huge range of salts available today, some never heard of before by most Americans, and they are beginning to supplant the use of regular table salt full of additives and iodine. Standard table salt is to gourmet cooking what Popeye's is to four-star restaurants. Up until now, the alternative was basically kosher salt or sea salt, if you could find it. Today, there are a great many choices types of salt, the coarseness and even flavorings. It would seem that where gourmet salt is concerned, when it rains, it pours.

Worth Your Salt

Saltiness is one of the four basic tastes that our little taste buds can distinguish. To say that salt is essential to life doesn't mean that if you don't cook with salt, you'll expire. In fact, it's the sodium that is essential to life and it is in all kinds of foods whether you add salt to them or not. Among other reasons, we use salt in our cooking because it enhances other flavors, including sweetness. Prior to the advent of refrigeration, salt was also a major component of food preservation. Salt accomplishes this by simultaneously drawing out moisture and retarding the growth of harmful bacteria. Perhaps, cheese and air-cared hams are the best modern examples of the use of this technique, although virtually every type of commercial and home food processing operations employs salt in the procedure.

Considering the importance of salt in the kitchen, it is very fortunate that it is also the least expensive ingredients available to the modern cook. However, this was not always the case. At one time, salt was a precious commodity indeed, and its nomenclature in antiquity left, its mark on almost all modern European terms for the substance, including our own. From the same Indo-European root, we have sel in French, sal in Spanish, salz in German and sol in Russian. According to the Oxford American Dictionary, our word “salary” is derived from the Latin word salaruim, “originally denoting a Roman soldier's allowance to buy salt,” and we still describe people as “being worth their salt.”

Strictly speaking, all salt is sea salt since that is its origin. For the sake of argument though, we'll concede that there are basically three types of salt. The first is sea salt, that is to say, salt that has been recently harvested from the briny seas. This is performed via a variety of ways, from an artisanal hands-on process to huge, industrial operations. Although many sea salts are superior due to the flavor and nutritional benefits they bestow, being sea salt alone does not necessarily make them better. As the folks at Redmond RealSalt in Redmond, Utah, say, being from the sea “is no more of an assurance of a natural, wholesome product than it is to say that white, refined flour is healthful because it came from a farm. They advise consumers to look at labels fro mineral analysis. The reason for this is that some sea salts are heated, refined, and over processed, so know your brands.

Secondly, we have mined salt. Salt mines—literal ones, not the ones we all trudge off to work in every day — were originally covered by prehistoric oceans that over the millennia have become dessieated, leaving behind huge deposits of salt. They exist all over the world. The best salts from salt mines are those that are brought up to the surface, crushed, screened and packaged. Thus, they retain natural trace minerals, minerals that were in the sea at one time.

The third type of salt is also from a mine but it is overly processed table salt. The good folks at Redmond RealSalt give a good description of how it is processed:

“Normal table salt begins as a saline solution. After processing and kiln drying at temperatures in excess of 400 degrees, its natural state is changed and most trace minerals are lost. Then, chemicals like silico aluminate, potassium iodide, tri-calcium phosphate, magnesium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate and yellow prussiate of soda are added. These chemicals are added to bleach the salt, prevent caking and aid in free-flowing.” Sounds appetizing, doesn't it?

Of course, within those basic categories, there are now legions of salts from which gourmet cooks can choose. Sel gris and fleur de sel are moist, flaky hand-harvested salts from the coasts of France. Various hand-harvested, multihued sea salts come from Hawaii, Peru, Italy, England and Japan. Some bear heftier price tags and sophisticated pedigrees. Is there a difference? While some nay-sayers have argued that in blind taste tests even experienced tasters cannot discern the differences, others disagree. Some of the world's top chefs claim that the type of salt used makes a huge difference and that they can absolutely tell the difference. While it may be true that one would have a hard time discerning the difference between a selection of gourmet sea salts from around the world, almost anyone could distinguish between a good, hand-harvested sea salt and an ordinary table salt.

Salt & Health

Much has been said of the health aspects of consuming salt. Many people are on low sodium diets and shrink at the sight of a salt shaker. For a long time, salt was blamed for high blood pressure and people were told to reduce or eliminate the use of salt altogether. Now, it is generally thought that salt is not the culprit but that some people are hypersensitive to sodium. Not being a doctor or a nutritionist, I defer to and close with the words of Edward Behr, author and publisher of the inspired and erudite newsletter The Art of Eating:

“I respect and sympathize with those who have to restrict their use of salt, but some zealous puritans would like everyone o cut down on salt because a small percentage would benefit from abstinence. These fearful proselytizers have no spirit, no joie de eipe. Does the sensual, the aesthetic, have no value in life? To those with high blood pressure, it may be an injustice on the part of Fate, but it is impossible to enjoy good food fully without salt. Salt is part of the structure of taste. Its use isn't weakness, but an intelligent application of the senses.”