I haven’t read every post in this thread, so maybe someone has already said this.
Kosher salt crystals don’t have the same shape as table salt crystals. Morton brand kosher salt has flat crystals, sort of like flakes. Diamond brand has conical crystals. Ordinary table salt has cubic crystals. These differences in shape have far more to do with density than crystal size does. If the crystals are more than a couple of orders magnitude smaller than the container, crystal size should have almost no effect on packing density.
Perhaps I am being whooshed, but are you sure you don’t mean the silica gel pack added to keep the herbs dry? You are not suppsoed to eat that. And keep it away from the cats!
And just to keep on flogging a dead horse in true Xmas Spirit™: there is no such thing as a conical crystal, and a pyramidal crystal is more than dubious. Perhaps a cube that grows irregularly with three sides stunted can be interpreted as a pyramid, but a hollow one? Here is the reference to the crystal families in the crystal system, unfortunately not from an obscure japanese server, but plain vaniwikipedia: triclinic, monoclinic, orthorhombic, tetragonal, hexagonal (that is the system, with trigonal and hexagonal families) and cubic, that is all there is. Six systems, seven families. Conical? Nope.
It’s hard to tell scale, but that looks more like what would be sold as pretzel salt around here.
I should also add that we have pickling salt here, as well, which has no anti-caking agents or iodine and about the same grain structure as table salt, perhaps a bit finer.
It’s interesting - there’s no such thing as “kosher salt” in Israel. While we have all the fancy sea/black/Himalayan salts you do, the two basic types of salt sold in every grocery store for about $0.50 per 1 kg bag are “table salt” and “coarse salt.” I always assumed that coarse salt (also known as cooking salt) and kosher salt were the same thing, but now I’m not sure.
What I think I learned in this thread is that kosher salt does not exist: it is a concept used for two completely different things, Morton salt and Crystal Diamond salt, both ™’ed, but one one double the density of the other. Completely different stuff.
But nobody has answered @Jaycat.again’s question yet (#61):
Can you put Kosher salt on a pork chop?
I guess the answer is yes, you can, but beware who you serve it to!
Yeah…I mean, I would say kosher salt here is just a coarser type of salt, and also is not iodized. (I don’t know for sure if this is a rule, but with Morton, that is true.) The texture is a bit different than what I mentioned as pretzel salt up there. It’s flakier and more brittle. Not quite as “rock”-like to the teeth. But it’s not flaky like sea salt, which is melt-in-your-mouth flaky.
None of this really matters when it’s dissolved, except possibly for the presence of iodine, which some people say they taste and others (like me) do not notice.
So, from my perspective, in terms of normal salts, here in the US we have:
popcorn salt - fine version of table salt, not iodized
pickling salt, aka canning salt - basically same sized grains as table salt, maybe slightly smaller, but main difference is no caking agents, no iodine
table salt - in the US usually iodized. Small crystals, fairly regular, like sugar
kosher salt - larger and irregular grains than table salt, non-iodized
pretzel salt - large grains, usually fairly regular, not iodized, more of a crunchy texture to the teeth when bitten into.
rock salt - huge grains, not edible, used for making ice cream (in the machine to keep it cold, not the actual ice cream part) and de-icing sidewalks and roads
Now, this is with my experience with the salts and brands I’m familiar with. There may be a contiuum there.
In US parlance, so called “kosher salt” is really “koshering salt” intended for the blood-drawing salt crust commonly placed on kosher-butchered meat as part of the process of making it ready to cook in a kosher fashion.
Lots of it used by non-kosher cooks as simply a courser, non-iodized salt.
No no. No whoosh.
It was separately bagged, as a free gift. It purported to be imported from Greece as grey salt from some specific place. Especially tasty on steak and seafood.
I threw into the fire place. Made purty colors.
(As far as crystals they were cubical looking with the naked eye. Kinda largish)
If you’re looking for ultra-artisanal, ultra-rare, ultra-expensive, ultra-snobby salt, forget Himalayan pink salt or French fleur de sel. IMHO, nothing beats asin tibuok (aka dinosaur egg) from the small island of Bohol in the Philippines. It’s made by soaking coconut husks in sea water, drying those in the sun then burning down to ash. The ash is then used to filter sea water which is dispensed into small clay pots. These pots are slowly heated over a wood fire. As the water evaporates, more brine is added to fill the pot. When the process is complete, you’re left with a largish egg-shaped lump of salt crystals with a distinct smoky flavor.
The process is very labor-intensive and almost died out until a few hardy souls revived the process.
I bought something kind of similar for my brother on his birthday as a part of his gift, except it was a purple Korean bamboo salt where the salt is roasted over a bamboo fire a number of times. I bought him the 9x version, which was like $80 for an 8 oz container. He said it was interesting, but nothing really to go out of your way for. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much, but thought it had at least novelty value to a food lover and cook, and it wasn’t something he would probably buy himself.
Bacon salt is vegan, and should be fine, but there are nuances.
Way back when the company was just starting, and I was living in Egypt, I had a conversation about marketing with one of the founders (the J, if I recall correctly). They were wondering if they should go full-on into Islamic markets where pig is forbidden. I told them that “bacon salt” would not be appealing in places where there is visceral prejudice against consuming pork products. What I said was, “imagine if you tried to market ‘dog salt’ in the US, explaining that it was vegan and contained no actual dog, but just tasted like dog. No one would buy it, because the idea of eating dog is repugnant.”
Apparently that aligned with what one of the two founders thought, while the other had thought bacon salt would be welcomed in Islamic countries. AFAIK, I helped the cautious person win the argument - I don’t think they tried to move into Islamic country markets under the name “bacon salt.”
Good argument except that Americans happily chow down on millions of pounds of hot dogs every year. There are even competitions to consume as many hot dogs as possible.
Very true! But consistency is not our national strong suit. I still think a new product called “dog salt” would bomb. And in Egypt, they don’t eat hotdogs (or hamburgers, a term avoided by McDonald’s in Indonesia and Egypt, and doubtless other Muslim countries as well).
At the extreme opposite pole from “food snobbery”, I had pan fried scrapple with my breakfast this morning. I buy one small block of the stuff each year around xmas. My gf finds it disgusting.
I am not Jewish, but I’ve been told that turkey burgers with vegan cheese are not kosher because it gives the appearance of eating a beef burger with cheese; as if you’re trying to pull a fast one on God. I just assumed that bacon salt violated the spirit of the law.
My understanding is that the "appearance of " issue has nothing to do with pulling a fast one on God. It’s something more like " eating kosher food in a non-kosher restaurant might lead someone else to believe the restaurant is kosher, or else why would you be eating there? "
