Do I have the correct salt for preserving fish?

Factual Questions
1

It has been quite a while since I made up a bucket of salted salmon for the winter. When we still lived in the village there were not any problems, as everyone salted up salmon, cod and herring, and the essential ingredient besides salmon was always available.

I sent my husband to the store with the instruction to be certain that he bought food grade rock salt, not the stuff we use to melt snow and ice. I noted that my preference was for kosher salt. He brought home a forty pound bag of extra coarse salt (sodium chloride) which has a notation that it was “prepared especially for home water softeners”.

Is this a food grade rock salt? I have googled and am finding all kinds of information except for the answer to my question, and the fish aren’t getting any fresher. I need to get this salted and in the bucket before it’s good for nothing besides the flower beds.

I know that this is probably a very simple question, and I thank any/all with helping me.

2

As long as it’s just pure salt (i.e. it doesn’t include any weird anti-caking agents or anything like that), then it can’t really fail to work. Ordinary rock salt or sea salt is not just sodium chloride - it also contains salts of potassium, magnesium, etc, which will alter the flavour.

But if you have coarse crystals of pure sodium chloride, that’s going to work just fine for preserving stuff - just read the small print to make sure there isn’t anything else mixed in.

3

Thank you, I just double checked and it is pure sodium chloride.

I truly appreciate the answer, the fish will be salted in the morning, and in three weeks I will make a batch of pickled fish. If that’s something you would enjoy I would happily send you a jar!

4

I’d love to try it and I greatly appreciate the offer, but I live in England and I suspect it would be problematic sending it here. I think I’d like to try replicating your method though, so I’d love to hear all about how you perform the pickling.

As a footnote, the only thing that might be a little different about your salt is that ‘food grade’ would perhaps have been handled differently during production, perhaps being stored in clean plastic bins instead of a big heap on a factory floor somewhere. Can’t imagine this is going to be a big problem - if contamination were an issue, I don’t think they could sell the salt for use in domestic water softeners, as some people drink tapwater after it has been through the softener.

5

Well, when I was a kid I used to eat that stuff from the big plastic bags in the barn - never did me any harm that I noticed. I think it’s just bog-standard rock salt and should be OK provided no diesel, grease or similar got on it while they dug it out and bagged it up. Probably not worth economising on though, since food salt is dirt cheap anyhow.

6

I’m sorry, I know that you are in England, it just slipped my mind. It’s been a busy day.

I would happily share my process and recipe, I’ll check to see if your email is in your profile tomorrow as I need to go to sleep. If it isn’t my address is in my profile, please feel welcome to drop me a line.

The pickled salmon is so good I have a difficult time keeping my husband out if it for it to completely, well, pickle! The salt cures the salmon sufficiently that it doesn’t need any cooking, but it needs at least a week of refrigeration to fully absorb the brine and pickling spices.

7

NaCl is NACl. There is also no difference in taste for cooking, despite what dudes claim. However, in the mouth, when still whole, different types of salt dissolve in differnt ways, leaving some to think there are different flavours.

(Note there is some sea salt from europe with the impurities stil in it, sometimes called “grey salt”- clearly this is no longer pure NaCl thus the taste is slightly different)

8

I absolutely agree with you that “NaCl is NaCl”, and even that a lot of the fuss in gourmet circles over salt of diffferent origins is overblown (based on double blind taste tests conducted by some cooking shows). However, food grade salt is rarely purified with much care and isn’t “just NaCl”

Rock/sea salts of different geographic origins have different trace contaminants, and the primary “purification” is simple rinsing: if you rinse 99% NaCl, the rinse water will quickly saturate with NaCl, but can still dissolve e.g. trace Mg[sup]++[/sup], NO[sub]3[/sub][sup]-[/sup], and other ions. Since there are usually only trace amounts of these present, rinsing removes a disproportionate amount of them –but that’s usually not the main intent! The main commercial benefit of rinsing is a cleaner-looking (by removing surface inclusions and impurities), clearer-looking (by smoothing crystal surfaces) and more uniform-appearing product.

Similarly, while crystalization in vats is used as an industrial purification process, the vat process used in salt-making is distinctly not optimized to enhance purity, and may actually enrich certain minerals. Other preparations may leave algal inclusions, “smoke” (sometimes deliberately) and other ingredients that may modify flavor.

As I said, I agree with you that most of the mystique of salts of varying origins is overblown, I just feel your remark was a little overstated as well. Almost all salt (even straight rock salt meant for roads, though I might not recommend it today) will work for salting fish: our ancestors late on salted foods for thousands of years without our modern options, and even low quality salt was valued trade good throughout history-- but there are situations where I would choose not to use, e.g. “table salt”, which has added sodium silicoaluminate (etc.) to prevent caking, or certain natural sea/rock salts that are high in iodine or other substances that can cause off-flavors in a given dish – while being desirable in others.

That doesn’t mean I encourage rushing to buy pricey gourmet sea salts (IMHO, it’s rarely cost effective for, at best, a subtle flavor difference). It just means that (e.g.) iodized/brominated or other salts may not always be best for *salting, where the salt plays a huge chemical role.

There are of course, potential health issues as well. For example, while dolomite (a mined mineral, like salt) was a common mineral supplement not too long ago, it is no longer sold inthe US, because it often contained trace natural lead. Divalent cations like Mg[sup]++[/sup] can have a laxative effect, to which people have varying susceptibility at the dose in salted fish. etc. etc.