Does salt type matter in cooking?
FAQs
Is there a “best” salt for home cooks?
- No. You can achieve the same results in cooking with any kind of salt once you understand how to use it. Choose whichever salt is available or affordable for you.
Do different salts taste better than others?
- No. You may be swayed by appearances, price, or textures, but when controlled for weight and dissolved in water (or in food or your mouth), all salt tastes virtually indistinguishable.
Is some salt “healthier than others?
- No. All salts are 97-99% NaCl so other trace ingredients are negligible in comparison to the rest of your diet.
Is there an optimal salt % to use in cooking?
- In general, the average person seems to enjoy food salted between 1-2% salinity by weight. Less for simple foods, and more for rich or complex foods. But you need to figure out preferences for yourself since palettes are personal and you could be an outlier in your salt sensitivity.
How do I correct oversalting?
- You can either dilute the total salt amount by adding more of other ingredients.
- If that isn't an option, you can add competing tastes and aromas (like sweet, sour, or bitter elements, or heavy spices or aromatics) to make the salty taste less perceptible.
How can I make something taste salty and not use as much salt?
- Cook simple foods. Less competing flavors mean you can have something feel “seasoned” with less salt.
- Add salt at the very end of cooking or as a garnish. By preventing the salt from dissolving and equalizing into the food, you’ll be able to taste the “saltiness” of the salt on its own, so you’ll need to use less overall salt to flavor the dish.
Experiments You Should Try
- Dissolve different kinds of salt into water (controlled by weight) and conduct a blind taste test to see if you can taste or smell any differences between salt types.
- Take a plain chicken breast, cut it up into equal pieces, and season with 0%, .5%, 1%, 2%, 3%, and 4% by weight to see what your optimal salt percentage level is. You’ll need a precise scale for this.
- To see how competing flavors can help with oversalted foods, add sugar (sweet), a squeeze of citrus or vinegar (sour), or lots of spices (bitter) to some of the oversalted chicken pieces from test #2.
Salt Consumption Notes
How much salt should you consume?
In short, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. It depends on factors like age, fitness level, and water consumption.
It seems that our body autoregulates sodium consumption, but the generally recommended daily value is around 2300 mg, although some sources say closer to 3400 mg per day is fine.
- Salt is about 40% sodium.
- 2300 mg of sodium per day equates to about 5,750 mg or 5.75 g of salt per day
- 3400 mg of sodium per day equates to about 8,500 mg or 8.5 g of salt per day
Always listen to your doctor.
If you are prescribed a low-salt diet, doing your own cooking can help you control exactly how much salt you are consuming because you can closely monitor how much salt you add to your dishes. By contrast, when you get take out or eat processed foods, they are typically very high in sodium/added salt.
Video Section Summaries
The video had three main sections. Here are the main points and takeaways from each part:
1) Where does salt come from? Why do some salts look different?
Salt (Sodium Chloride —NaCl) is essentially an infinite resource on our planet.
Over millions of years, water in the form of rain, rivers, and streams washed over rocks and materials containing the two component atoms, bringing them together. Salt became naturally concentrated in several places:
- The ocean.
- Saline lakes
- Salt mines (Halite rock salt deposits)
- Mineral Springs
In general, salt is harvested by concentrating (evaporating) a brine so that the salt comes out of the solution. It can then be refined (removing extra trace minerals or particulates), dried, and packaged.
Why are there different shapes of salt?
The harvesting process determines the shape and density of the salt crystal formation.
For example: Modern, vacuum chamber processes create dense, tiny cubes of salt (table salt), while slow and tedious open pan evaporation methods allow the salt to crystalize into large, pyramid-like flakes (flakey sea salt).
Why do some salts look different?
Pure Sodium Chloride is white, but some salts have distinct colors due to trace minerals. For instance, Himalayan salt's pink hue comes from iron oxide. Other possible trace minerals include:
- Calcium, cobalt, copper, iron, magnesium, potassium, zinc, and others
These trace minerals aren't listed on salt labels as they occur naturally in minute amounts, varying based on the salt's source and processing.
Edible salt is highly refined, typically 97-99% pure NaCl. The remaining 1-3% can include trace minerals and additives.
At the end of the day, all salt, regardless of where it comes from, how its mined, or what crystalized shape its in, is primarily just a crystallized mass of NaCl — and has virtually identical properties and flavor.
2) The 7 properties of salt every home cook should know
1) Pure NaCl is odorless
- Sodium transmits that salty taste to our brain, NaCl has no smell we can detect. If you are smelling else, it could be the trace minerals in the salt over even the box or container it’s in. It’s not the NaCl.
- Aka salt adds pure salty taste to food but no aroma/flavor.
2) NaCl is water soluble, but not fat soluble
- This is why we can season our pasta water (which in turns seasons our pasta) but we can’t season our frying oil. If we want fried food to be seasoned with salt, we need to add salt before or after frying.
3) NaCl melting point is 801°C or 1474°F
- Salt’s melting point is closer to the melting point of Silver & Gold. Why does this matter for cooking? It won’t change color or flavor at normal cooking temperatures.
- By contrast, if you add some sugar to a pan and heat it up it will start to melt at just around 320°F/160°C and then begin rapidly caramelizing around 338°F/170°C where the color darkens and hundreds of new aromas are developed.
- Caramelization is the same chemical reaction that can happen with the sugars (even those found in fruits and vegetables) which can lead to lightly crispy or browned exteriors when cooked.
4) NaCl is not a fuel or energy source
- Carbohydrates are a fuel source that provide us with calories and can change drastically in taste, aroma, texture, sight, and physical appearance when heat is applied through cooking.
- Sodium Chloride does not work this way. Throw some salt on a pan, heat it as a high and as long as you want it nothing will happen.
- All we can do with sodium chloride is dissolve it into our food or dissolve it with the water in our mouth. This brings us to the last 3 properties, which explain how salt is able to move through our food…
5) NaCl is hygroscopic
→ meaning it draws moisture from its environment
- Imagine if we sprinkle salt on two sponges, one is completely dry. The other is wet.
- The salt will just stay on the top of the dry sponge, but for the one that is wet it will start to draw that moisture towards the salt. Once there is enough water, this is how the salt dissolves and goes through two more processes: diffusion and osmosis…
6) NaCl will diffuse from areas of high concentration to low concentration
→ Diffusion is the natural movement of particles from an area of higher concentration to an area of lower concentration.
7) Dissolved NaCl can pass through semipermeable membranes
- Osmosis is the diffusion of a solvent through a semipermeable membrane.
- Most food is made up of semipermeable membranes such as protein fibers in our meat and cell walls in our fruits and vegetables, which allow salt to move around via the water.
3) How salt affects the 6 flavor fundamentals
For more context on why these are the six elements of flavor, check out our Fundamentals pages.
- Your brain identifies the sodium in NaCl as the ‘salty’ taste. When used in cooking, you might not think of something as “salty” if it is properly seasoned, because the salt could be balanced with the other tastes (sweet, sour, bitter, umami).
- NaCl is odorless. It adds no flavor in the form of aroma to foods.
- It can, however, have secondary effects that allow other things to effect the aroma of food. An example of this is dry brining a steak. The salt can help reduce moisture on the surface of the meat, which can improve the Maillard reaction during searing, which develops more aromas on the meat.
- Has your mouth ever started watering just by looking at some sour candy? That is your SIGHT impacting flavor. Our eyes are the first sense to interact with the food we eat.
- In terms of salt, we can visually see a difference between the large pieces of Himalayan salt, the light flaky sea salt, and the tiny pieces of table salt on, say, our avocado toast.
- Sight does not typically play a large role when it comes to using salt, but you could be influenced by the visual cues of the size, shape, or colors of specialty salts.
There are two ways salt can affect the texture:
- The texture of the salt itself
- For example, Himalayan salt is crunchy, flaky salt is crisp, and table salt is grainy.
- However, we rarely pick up on the specific texture of salt since it tends to dissolve into foods (unless added as a last minute garnish
- The salt changes the texture of the food it was added to:
- Salt can wilt vegetables or change the texture of protein over time (brining, curing, etc).
The physical element of flavor refers to how ingredients impact our physical body or trigger certain responses (like cold vs. hot temperatures, or spicy foods).
- Salt interacts with our body by dissolving as soon as it hits moisture content in our saliva and mouth. The rate at which the salt dissolved in our mouth determines how “salty” our taste buds can recognize it.
- For instance, a big chunk of rock salt will taste less salty than a spoonful of table salt because the rock salt takes a much longer time to dissolve in your mouth.
The human element is a reminder that flavor is a perception that is formed inside of your brain, not just in your mouth.
- Humans have different salt level preferences, partially determined by the number or sensitivty of taste buds on an individual’s tongue.
- You might have a preference, cultural tradition, or bias toward a certain kind of salt, or color or shape, which will influence your brain to percieve the flavor in a certain way.

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