Yeah, for me it’s Vermont Creamery’s butter, followed maybe by Kerrygold (preferably the unsalted, which is cultured, with a little salt added at the end), followed by Plugra, Finlandia, Lurpak. I’m just sticking to what I can find at my supermarket. So no Bordier or anything like that. That’s where I like my butter the best: on plain toast. With baking, I give less of a damn (but it still needs to generally be butter. Except for my snickerdoodles: those are half butter, half shortening. Yesterday I made them all butter, as I didn’t have any shortening, and, while good, not quite right.)
I tried it, but I didn’t really care for it.
-whoop whoop whoop whoop-
The FoodSnob Police have arrived. You eat WHITE bread? That isn’t a subvariety of sourdough, rye, caraway, multigrain, sprouted, et al? You have the right to remain silent on ‘bread’ toppings forever!!!
Nah, I’m being silly. Homestyle while loaves are fine, and I won’t judge you too harshly for eating many sliced white store loaves. People like what they like. But I personally find that most ubiquitous white, sliced, plastic wrapped cheap white sandwich bread to be pretty darn terrible, and anything that covers that ‘taste’ up is to be admired. And of course, it tends to be sweeter, very neutrally textured, and incredibly bland, so often appeals to younger palates.
On the subject of butter, I love it, but rarely splurge on the expensive stuff. Normally it’s just a big pack of Kirkland butter, thrown in the freezer, and defrosted one stick at a time so it’s reasonably fresh rather than sitting around in the door of the refrigerator picking up other smells and flavors. Although for the holiday season of Thanksgiving → New Years I treaded myself to some Kerrygold since we’ve been baking a lot and it’s my choice for home-baked fresh bread.
Ya know, it’s got its place. Sometimes you want that light, cottony texture. I’ve been baking 100% hydration loaves for the kids the past couple of weeks (this goes in spurts – don’t think I do this year-round), and they love them, but – sometimes you want that cottony, tight-crumbed-yet-light goodness of just your Aldi white loaf bread.
Company salad bar, which is sold by weight, offers salad dressing before weighing, or olive oil and vinegar after weighing. The free olive oil is clear. There is some taste to it, but not much.
I went through a short period were I decided to use Delicato olive oil for baking. I think I stopped after two small bottles, as I prefer to have fewer ingredients at home.
My standard oil selection is olive oil (sold by the liter), rapeseed oil (also sold by the liter) and fancy olive oil (sold by 100 ml) for annointing bread.
And after reading this thread, I sliced up some bread, put some of the fancy oil oil on a plate, added salt, and enjoyed. We tend towards olive oil for bread rather than butter. If we do eat bread and butter, we add salt, as the butter we buy is always unsalted.
Which is another point. In the U.S., I think salted butter is the default. Here (Switzerland), unsalted is the default.
And now my husband’s muttering about homemade bread. I think we have yeast.
It’s not so much a flavor gain as a meltability gain. I make very simple nachos, and shredded cheese melts as a glob, not evenly. My kids might see a tastability difference. And I use supermarket cheese, same brand shredded as block, and there is a difference.
OK, I have been reading and searching the web. You are right: Crystal Diamond Kosher Salt™ is much less dense than other salts. We don’t have that in Europe, and reading your links, it seems to fulfill the criteria the OP sets for BS-food-snobbery. Do you think I should miss it? If I ever come across a sample, perhaps in some market where they sell US products, I will give it a try. The other normal salts are all in the same range of densities, if you add a pinch or a spoon to a cup as in your conversion tables it will not change the outcome dramatically.
Now back to your question: “What cite specific to cooking are you relying on to challenge the idea that table salt has significantly greater mass by volume than kosher salt?” [bolding mine] Your own link: kosher salt is not a thing, it is at least two very different things.
At the supermarket, you’ll likely see two brands: Morton’s kosher salt and Diamond Crystal kosher salt. Although both are labeled kosher, these two salts are actually different. Morton’s salt is made by rolling cubes of salt (evaporated in a closed container) into thinner flakes, while Diamond Crystal’s salt is evaporated in an open container, yielding hollow, pyramidal flakes. As a result of the differences in crystal structure, Morton salt is about twice as salty by volume as Diamond Crystal. [bolding mine]
The different thing is not kosher salt, it is this one brand of kosher salt, which seems to puff up their crystals to make “hollow, pyramidal flakes” (one of the reasons I want to buy it when I see it is to check that assertion, sounds like BS to me). Further reasons why I believe this Crystal Salt makes BS assertions:
Kosher salt dissolves quickly, it doesn’t have the off flavors and excessive saltiness associated with table salt, and it’s affordable and readily available.
Because table salt dissolves slowly, has off flavors, is too salty, unavailable and too expensive.
weight refers to how heavy an ingredient is, regardless of the container. (Note: the metric standard is grams, while the United States relies on ounces. The former is a bit more precise, so use that whenever possible.)
Grams are more precise than ounces! I knew it!
Fine sea salt 15 grams Morton kosher salt 15 grams
Again: The difference is kosher vs non kosher, it is Diamond vs all other. Diamond is the über-food-snobbery, not fleur de sel, as I thought!
fleur de sel is almost exclusively used as a finishing salt.
The conversion table does not even list what a table spoon of fleur de sel weighs! Guess it was too expensive 
But Crystal salt must have a genius in the marketing department if it has managed to become the standard salt to be used by chefs, professional cooks and restaurants in the USA. The rest of the world does not seem to miss it. But I will be on the lookout. Is it expensive?
Our table salt is usually iodized, and our kosher salts usually are not, so that may explain the “off flavor” claim. Personally, I can’t tell the difference, but some people seem to taste the iodine.
Well, what the hey, I’ll give that a try, but it will be an uphill test, because I DO purchase that block cheese, it’s always in my reefer for eating out of hand, on crackers, so on, and it has a pretty noticeable flavor deficit.
Maybe it’s the brand - my available is the same stuff you buy at Giant. Or maybe you aren’t forced to buy at Giant. Remember - end of the supply chain, here. As a tease, they once had a handful of Wyke Farms ched - I bought as much as I could afford; but not enough.
Thanks for the nudge.
Dan
Maldon and I think it’s easily worth the money, which isn’t too much anyhow. They have it at a local Kroger grocery for $8 for a little over half a pound. It’s by far my favorite finishing salt and has the little pyramids. Affordable approachable snobbery is the best kind.
Edit: Links below aren’t previewing properly, disabling.
https://www.marianos.com/p/maldon-sea-salt-flakes/0084797200000
https://www.amazon.com/Maldon-Sea-Salt-Flakes-ounce/dp/B00017028M
Maldon and Crystal Kosher are two different things, are they not? I live in Germany, where these brands are not usually available, it’s a honest question. Should I buy both if I ever see them in some speciality shop?
Though, talking about crap, from your first link
Gluten Free Vegan Dairy Free Average Shelf Life from Manufacture date: 999.0
Yes, eternal shelf life is correct for salt, and the rest is somehow true too. Strange they did not include “fat free”, “low in cholesterol” and “biological”.
ETA: BTW, the salt I mostly use (apart from a couple of fancy stuff for flaking, or seasoned with hybiscus, which is funny, but not worth the price) is a French product to which I have grown accustomed to: La Baleine. I don’t know whether it is the same in Europe and the USA, what I like most is the dispenser, where I can judge the amount needed by experience. It has an anti caking agent which I don’t taste at all, no iodine. I don’t believe I need extra iodine, as I eat plenty of fish and seafood and sea weeds (mostly mehijiki, but kombu for dashi too).
Not all the recipes are that bad. I’m very happy with almost everything I’ve made since I subscribed to their cooking newsletter, and can attest to the fact that there are plenty of recipes you can make with ordinary items you can buy in the less-than-gourmet groceries we have here on the Big Island. But I take your point. I thought I knew every spice and spice blend out there until I saw some of the things they call for.
The one thing that makes me roll my eyes (and I am far from alone in this, based on the comments) is the frequent call for “kosher salt such as Diamond Crystal.” And what the hell is wrong with Morton’s, I ask?
I had come to the conclusion that NTY owns Diamond Crystal (and that’s only partly a joke) until I read up on the topic on line. Turns out that Diamond Crystal (which indeed you cannot easily buy outside of NYC) is the snob salt favored by chefs, because reasons. As @solost indicates, there is a difference in salt level between the two salts due to crystal size/density. Apparently if you substitute the same amount of Morton’s for Diamond Crystal, it’ll be too much salt.
Like many readers, I don’t know why they don’t at least say, “if you are substituting Morton’s, use 2/3 tsp” or something similar.
I know that the NYT Cooking site has a very active reader base which is very active in commenting on recipes. And their readers are all over so I assume the recipe writers are sensitive to what’s available. That said, I recently followed a recipe from the Times for a mango pie. It required a thirty ounce can of Alphonso mango pulp, which I was OK with obtaining but also had instructions for making the graham cracker pie crust from scratch. That bit I cheated on by buying premade pie crusts.
I got dessicated and preserved reading about the “salts” in this thread.
I ordered an bag of Fines Herbes and got a free, fancy grey salt.
Stupidest crap I’ve ever put on my tongue.
Tastes like a wet rock. Salty, a bit, at the end. Aroma of a gravel pit.
I ain’t losing no sleep over brands, styles, or types of salt. Jeez!
At one time it “probably” was(can’t prove it one way or the other by what I know so…there’s that), but now both salted and unsalted butter are pretty standard, you just have to pay attention to the label. I prefer unsalted butter myself and I also enjoy olive oil and herbs (basil, oregano, black pepper) on bread, bagels, baguettes…
I agree with that. Both salted and unsalted butter are commonly available in American supermarket. Most brands are available in both varieties, so you’d just need to be sure to pick the right one.
(Once at Safeway, two women were standing in front of the display looking for butter but confused by the display of margarines. So they asked me if the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” was butter. I told them no, that it was margarine. They seemed to be European so I tried to be helpful by telling them it was oleo but they didn’t recognize that word.)
Leave it to the SDMB to take a thread ostensibly for complaining about food snobbishness and turn it into a lengthy and occasionally heated argument about the benefits of various types of salt. 
although, the excursion into packing-factors was surprisingly short, I expected more in-depth discussion of cristal structure vs. packing-factor, with links to some obscure website run on some japanese-university’s server.
I feel somewhat underwhelmed and shortchanged.
It’s not 2003 any more bud.
But a graham cracker crust is so easy. I wouldn’t trust the pre-made crusts to not be on the stale side. I’ve had a few bad ones. Hope yours was o.k.