Shaken or flaked, it’s salt of the earth

Last month, while we were observing a cooking class at Laguna’s Culinary Institute, one of the students asked the teacher, “What is the difference between sea salt and regular salt?” Although the teacher said she wasn’t exactly sure, she said she preferred cooking with coarse sea salt.

We realized that we didn’t know the difference either, and our interest was piqued. We knew that a few years ago, there was a foodie frenzy over fleur de sel (flower of salt). People were paying $30 per pound for this particular kind of salt that you couldn’t even cook with. You just sprinkled it on as a finishing touch. What made this salt so special? Why would you pay $30 a pound when you can buy regular salt for 30 cents a pound? It’s just salt, stupid!

Well, we did some research and found that there are definitely differences in the various kinds of salt. We were surprised to discover how many varieties are out there. Our local Ralphs, née Albertsons, has table salt ? iodized or non; sea salt ? coarse and fine; kosher salt; and rock salt.

Williams Sonoma has sea salt in French grey, Australian pink and Balinese coarse. Then there are the finishing salts; French fleur de sel, Cypriot white flake and Maldon flaky to name a few. The infamous fleur de sel is also for sale at the Culinary Institute in the canyon, and the new shop on Forest Avenue called Stylistic Intervention.

To begin with, all salt is sea salt if you think about it. As the waters receded and evaporation occurred, some ended up under ground, some at the surface and some obviously remains in the sea. It is the harvesting and processing that determine the differences.

The crudest is rock salt, least refined, containing mud and debris. It is not for human consumption and is used in ice-cream makers and for melting snow.

Table salt is mined by pumping water to dissolve the salt, bringing the brine to the surface, settling out the impurities and vacuum evaporating the clear brine.

Sea salt is obtained by allowing sunshine and wind to evaporate the water from shallow ponds. At least that’s what it is supposed to be; however, as long as “sea salt” satisfies the FDA’s purity requirements, manufacturers don’t have to specify its source because technically all salt once came from the sea.

In “What Einstein Told His Cook”, Robert Wolke says, “according to industry insiders ? two batches of salt may have been taken from the same bin at the mine plant and one of them labeled for sale as ‘sea salt.’ ”

There are many kinds of sea salt, grey and pink from Korea and France, black from India, black and red from Hawaii.

Fleur de sel is sea salt that is harvested by hand off the marshes and low lying areas that form salt fields in the months of July and August when there is no breeze and the crystals stay on top of the water. The crystals are hand raked off the surface. The slightest breeze causes the crystals to fall into the clay. These fallen crystals are called grey salt (sel gris). For every 80 pounds of grey salt that are harvested, only one pound of fleur de sel is yielded.

Plain table salt is almost entirely sodium chloride, while sea salt contains a higher percentage of trace minerals. There is some controversy about whether these minerals make the salt healthier.

Many sites on the Internet tout the health benefits of some particular sea salt it sells. For instance, Shirley’s Wellness Cafe extols the “profound life-giving qualities of Himalayan crystal salt.” Conversely, Wolke says, “You’d have to eat two tablespoons of sea salt to get the amount of iron contained in a single grape.”

Another claim made for the trace minerals is that they affect the flavor of the salt. Fleur de sel aficionados profess to taste violets. The fact remains that once any salt dissolves in liquid, the only taste is saltiness.

The factors that most affect salt’s taste are coarseness and texture, flakiness. The expensive and unusual salts are composed of flakes and should be used as finishing salts, not for cooking but for sprinkling on food at the last minute. The flakier crystals cause bright little explosions of saltiness on the tongue. As to any other flavors, decide for yourself.

Margarita salt is nothing but coarse salt. Popcorn salt is nothing more than fine-grained salt. Rather than pay a premium for these, use kosher salt for your margaritas and grind up some table salt in your blender for popcorn.

If you are cooking with salt, we recommend Morton’s kosher, a coarse salt that is very inexpensive. We’re not exactly sure why, but most all fairly serious cooks we have spoken to prefer it to table salt because it seems to be easier to control the amount of salt that you are using when not measuring.

If you have to measure, you should know that since Morton’s is not compacted, 1 1/4 teaspoons of kosher salt is equal to 1 teaspoon of table salt in a recipe. When you have oversalted a dish, most of the quick fixes you have heard of don’t work, i.e., adding potato slices. The addition of sugar, lemon juice or vinegar may help a little because they may mask the salty taste a bit, but the only thing that really works is dilution.

Humans have a vital and interesting relationship with salt. We cannot live without it. We need a daily intake of salt to survive. Our blood, sweat and tears bear the taste of salt. It is a nutrient that regulates the balance of bodily fluids, plays a part in muscle contractions (especially the heart), and in the transmission of electrical nerve impulses. It maintains the normal volume of blood and helps digest food. Every cell in the body contains salt.

Thousands of years ago, animals created paths to salt licks. Men followed seeking game and salt.

By 200 B.C., people discovered that adding salt to food kept it from spoiling. The Egyptians used it for mummification. They traded slaves for salt, thus the origin of the expression “not worth his salt.” The Romans partially paid their soldiers with salt, hence the derivation of the word “salary.”

One of the first taxes was levied by the Emperor of China in 2200 BC Profits from the sale of salt financed the Great Wall. The buying and selling of salt became one of the most important trading activities in the world. Today, salt has more than 14,000 commercial applications, including making paper, setting dyes in textiles, producing soaps and detergents, and making roads safe in winter.

We highly recommend a book called “Salt, a World History,” by Mark Kurlansky.