At work I had a woman ask me if the salt was “fresh”.
I wasn’t sure I heard that right so I asked her to repeat. She wanted to know the salt was fresh and not stale. She couldn’t find a “best by [date]” on it, or anything of the sort, so she wanted to know it was fresh. Also, how long would it remain good to eat.
:smack:
It’s a freakin’ ROCK, lady! I’m not sure what she wanted here: “Yes, ma’am, this was mined by barefoot monks last new moon, you can’t get fresher than that!” or “Ma’am, this salt will remain wholesome until the heat death of universe.”
It’s a rock!
I was expecting her to ask if it was organic next, but alas, she disappointed me…
And Himalayan pink salt is pink due to impurities in the sodium chloride deposit from which it is mined. It’s about 95-98% sodium chloride i.e. “salt”, with the remainder being mostly potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, oxygen, hydrogen (I’m guessing those two are mostly in the form of water), fluoride, iodine, and a lot of “traces” of just about everything else in the periodic table although I’m guessing that anything listed as <0.001 ppm in that link can probably be translated as “not in the sample”.
I doubt very much that it’s any better or worse for you health wise than pure white table salt, and possibly a lot better than some of the dodgy ways salt has been obtained in the past.
salt is hygroscopic (absorbs moisture from the air) which is what causes it to clump. but I highly doubt it could absorb enough for anything to start growing on it.
Kosher salt is for removing the blood from meat. I’ve always suspected most Leviticus diatary laws were invented by someone with OCD who was just easily skeeved out by food. “The peas shalt not touch the mashed potatoes. it is abomination to you.”
I think food producers are now legally required to stamp some sort of date on things, but in some cases it’s quite arbitrary - canned goods, for instance. Most of them seem to have a 2-year expiration date but really they’ll stay good longer than that. Some of the Mountain House freeze-dried foods have a thirty year shelf life, which is hilarious when a customer comes up saying “there must be some mistake… this says it’s good until 2045…?” Yes, yes it is as long as the packaging is intact.
There probably is some extremophile critter that can survive in (nearly) pure salt, but if so, it probably couldn’t survive the normal, relatively un-salted interior of you so no health hazard there.
Yeah, kala namak (literally, “black salt”) is used in South Asia, especially salted snack foods, where it imparts a distinctive eggy taste because of its sulfur content. As far as salts go, this one does need be treated as quite different from normal NaCl. It’s like the difference between filtered water and sulfurous well water (if you’ve ever experienced it.)
It’s basically “eggy.” There’s plenty of sulfurous foods that are delicious: onions, eggs, garlic, cabbage (the brassicas in general), etc. Kala namak is definitely more on the eggy side of sulfurous, but all those others have a sulfur flavor to them, as well.
I suppose that would explain why that salt container my customer had lacked a date…
Still, people in the US have come to expect them, whether they are required or not. One thing working retail teaches you is that there are a lot of not very smart and not very informed people out there.
The size of the grain won’t affect packing density at all, but the shape can.
Neither the size nor the shape of the grain will matter at all if it’s dissolved, but not all salted foods have the salt dissolved. A big pretzel wouldn’t be the same with small-grained salt as with large-grained.