The art of Salt

If you’re using regular table salt, I hate to say it, you’re salting all wrong. First of all, you’re missing around 78 trace minerals, and you’re depriving your food from really shining. We’ll get to the health part second, but first lets talk flavour.

Not all salts are created equal

Apart from having varying nutritional constituents, the flavour profile of different salts can also change and we can use this to our advantage in creating interesting dynamics with our food. That might sound like foodie pretentions but an interesting thing happens when you layer different types of the same flavour; wether it be sweet, salty, sour, pungent, bitter. In your day to day cooking change up the type of seasoning depending on what you’re cooking, some salts lend their traits better to certain cuisines or dishes over others. And then there are some salts you with cook with and some you will finish with. Generally speaking, flake salts are ideal as finishing salts, whereas your fine granulated salt (this can be ground from rock salt) is best used in cooking. The bolder flavour of Himalayan or Celtic sea salt thanks to their generous trace mineral profile adds depth and complexity more suited to richer dishes with a long, slow cook times and will overpower more delicate styles such as French cuisine where a smack-in-the mouth full bodied salt will lend too much of it’s character.

Keep in mind that each type of salt will have differing levels of salinity so you would be wise to know the intensity of the salt before adding. Celtic sea salt stitched me up a few times when I first transitioned, it can be quite intense for such a small amount.

When seasoning your dish, you want to add it in stages. As you’re sautéing off your mirepoix - add a pinch. When you add the stock or other ingredients, add a pinch, and so on. Salt’s nature is to brings out and concentrate the innate flavours of each ingredient. If a dish is simply salted at the end it leaves a less integrated and no one likes salt sitting on top and overriding the other ingredients.

Finally, make sure you err on under-salting, then you can use a mellow flake finishing salt like Murray River pinks salt to create that flavour layer without ending up with a health condition.

The rule is always that salt should enhance your dish not dominate it. If you can taste the salt, you’ve used too much.

Isn’t salt unhealthy?

It was somewhere back in the 60s, or maybe even earlier that salt became the enemy to health. Fast forward to somewhere in the 90s and it was discovered that sodium deficiencies were on the rise and becoming a health concern. So which one is it, friend or foe?

Each and every cell in our bodies has a sodium-potassium pump to transfer nutrients into the cell and wastes out and like most nutrients too little or too much of either will cause imbalance which can have a cascade effect on other biological functions and acid-alkaline balance. It’s kind of a big deal.

What is most interesting is that “whole salt from the sea has a mineral profile most similar to that of our blood.” (Healing with Wholefoods, Paul Pitchford p. 198). Common refined salt stripped of nearly all trace minerals can lead to cravings as the body’s innate need for the whole salt is not met and so if you mix up the different salts in your pantry you are getting a wider breadth of minerals in the diet and satisfying this deep and primal need.

In Chinese medicine, the action of salt is to soften and moisten, descend and cool, nourishes the Kidneys, regulate water passages and cleanse the blood of impurities. We use salty flavoured foods and herbs to aid us in certain health objectives such as purging stool or soften hard nodules, glands, or muscles (this is why magnesium aka epsom salts are so effective for muscular aches and pains).

Salt can alkalise acid-forming foods such as grains (think of salting cooking water for pasta), legumes and meat.

That’s all the good points, but it still needs to come with a warning that it can also be a poison used in excessive amounts and out of balance with potassium. Potassium rich foods are vegetables especially the leafy green variety, potatoes with skin on, soy products and other legumes, millet and other grains, bananas and most other fruits, culinary herbs. A focus on wholefoods and avoid processed foods helps maintain the vital potassium-sodium balance and advert an inevitable spiral into salt cravings which can have an add-on effect to sweet and alcohol cravings.

I’ll finish by saying that salt is so much more than a seasoning. For millennia salt has been a prized luck charm, purifier of both the body and evil spirits and preserving agent. In our radiation-filled world that salt lamp you have in the corner is an excellent antidote to your wifi radiation and adds to the reason why underground salt deposits are used as storage sites for nuclear waste.