I found twowebsites that both say their recipes use Diamond Crystal unless otherwise specified. One also says you are less likely to oversalt if you use Diamond Crystal so you should always assume Diamond Crystal - after all, you can add salt later.
I’m not sure if this was mentioned already - but the need to know if the recipe used Diamond Crystal or Morton’s only applies if the recipe uses volume measurements . In terms of saltiness, three grams of salt is three grams of salt whether it’s Morton’s or Diamond Crystal , kosher or table. It’s when you are measuring in teaspoons that it makes a difference.
Not sure you can easily buy Diamond salt in Canada. Yet we still use recipes and cookbooks. I always taste for salt, but find the recipes generally give a reasonable estimate.
I am a Jewish person who adores rumaki. Soooo much better than the “Jewish” chopped liver crap with onions and stuff in it.
But i wouldn’t serve it to anyone who keeps kosher. And yeah, kosher is very much about the letter of the law, and the more observant someone is, the more this is true.
50 years ago my father bought olive oil in steel gallon tins. He mostly didn’t cook Italian.
On the theory that they put the iodine in it because it’s good for you, i usually use iodized salt. I can taste the difference, barely. No one else in my family can.
I do use kosher salt for making broth. Or when recipes call for it, because i don’t want to muck with converting the volumes.
My kosher salt is diamond , not because i was looking for diamond brand, but because that’s what’s available. It’s a common brand here in the northeastern US.
Thank you, that’s really helpful! I noticed one of them also said that the majority of their Twitter respondents use Mortons, though, so I still don’t think it’s safe to assume that folks are using diamond. It really sounds like recipe authors should be specifying.
And better yet, they should be using table salt when salt is dissolved in water.
What they probably should be doing is writing the recipe using weight (like the rest of the world does) , in which case brand doesn’t matter. But I don’t see that happening any time soon.
I wouldn’t serve anything to anyone who has dietary restrictions against it.
To a non-Jew, it sounds very complicated. Maybe we need a thread to explain it. By the ‘letter of the law’ (Exodus 23:19, Exodus 34:26, Deuteronomy 14:21), ‘You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.’ By the letter of the law, it’s perfectly acceptable to eat a kid that was grilled and have some goat cheese melted on top of it, because it wasn’t boiled in its mother’s milk. Technically, it could be boiled in another goat’s milk because it’s not it’s mother’s milk. And those passages say nothing about other animals. But from here:
The Oral Torah explains that this passage prohibits eating meat and dairy together in any form. The rabbis extended this prohibition to include not eating milk and poultry together, even though birds do not produce milk. In addition, the Talmud prohibits cooking meat and fish together or serving them on the same plates, because it is considered to be unhealthy. Most opinions hold it is permissible to eat fish and dairy together, and it is quite common (lox and cream cheese, for example), though some Sephardic communities prohibit this, for the same health reason as fish and meat. All sources permit eating dairy and eggs together, so enjoy that cheese omelette!
I don’t want to hijack this thread further, nor engage in ‘rules lawyering’. It’s just very confusing, especially with regard to ‘the letter of the law’ and the interpretations of that which is not stated. I’ll read a new thread though, in the interest of fighting my ignorance.
(That prohibition of cooking meat and fish together really puts the kibosh on my Jambalaya! Not that it would be kosher anyway, because of the Andouille and the shrimp.)
Yeah, here in Chicago, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Diamond. It’s mostly Morton’s or store brand. Hell, I never even heard of Diamond until maybe ten years ago. In most recipes, especially stews and broths, you can just taste as you go along. I never use salt measurements for this. I just add enough at the end so it’s salty enough. If I have to add before (like when sweating vegetables), I just sprinkle enough that it looks right and go from there, tasting at the end, erring on the side of under salting. My mom likes dishes under salted for my tastes. My wife likes dishes over salted for my tastes, so if I’m cooking for all three, I just aim for my mom’s taste and adjust at the table. There’s no one “right” salt level, so I don’t care what a recipe says. Taste and adjust.
A teaspoon of salt is between 5 and 6 grams. Most kitchen scales aren’t accurate enough to measure amounts that small.
I looked up some recipes on British web sites, like bbcgoodfood.com and greatbritishchefs.com. For small amounts of ingredients like salt they use volume measurements. Here’s one that calls for a teaspoon of salt (along with volume measurements of other ingredients):
For other recipes, the same web site uses weight measurements for larger amounts of things like butter:
Note that the cottage pie recipe uses volume measurements for liquid ingredients like milk and wine.
The recipes I found on the BBC website don’t call for measured amounts of salt, but they do use both weight and volume measurements for other ingredients:
I tried to find recipes on French websites, but all I could find were recipes for French food on English language websites.
Damn, Home economics teacher for pushing them measuring cups and spoons on me.
Not to mention The Joy of Cooking and about a gazillion other cook books.
FYI, here is a gift link to a twelve-year-old New York Times article suggesting that measuring ingredients by weight is more accurate and easier than doing so by volume. For one thing, a “cup of flour” can vary by several ounces. It might be easier as well.
“The greatest feat the kitchen scale accomplishes is that it turns almost any recipe into a one-bowl recipe,” said Deb Perelman, who writes the blog Smitten Kitchen. “You’re not hunting for six cups and six spoons to make a cake.”
Instead, you place a bowl on the scale, then pour the flour straight from the bag until you get to the desired weight. Most kitchen scales let you bring the readout back to zero after each ingredient. Do that, then pour your next ingredient — and so on. With a scale you can get away with using nothing more than a bowl and one spoon.
Where’s the fun in cooking if you haven’t gotten to play with 100 of your carefully curated and matched designer utensils? Most of which need to be hand-washed afterwards so the dishwasher doesn’t “ruin” them in some unspecified and unidentifiable way.
As you might have gathered, I’m a one bowl one spoon guy. My new wife is … not. She does however, make a very tasty mess and considers clean-up her job, not mine. So it’s OK.
Ooh, I use my kitchen scale every day, but I’ve never had the courage to do this. What would happen is I’d measure out the flour, sugar, butter, and whatever else just fine, then when adding the salt my hand would shake and I’d add half a cup, ruining everything else already in the bowl. (This applies whether it’s Morton’s or special dodecahedronic crystals or ice cream rock salt, which by the way is totally edible provided you have fresh ice cream to wash it down with.)
Instead I do mise-en-place with little bowls of everything individually weighed. The exception is Nestle’s Toll House Cookies, where the recipe on the back of the package must be slavishly followed. It has no weights indicated, but 2 1/4 cups of flour is ALWAYS the correct amount, whether it happens to weigh one pound or ten that day.
Prior to the 1920s, endemic iodine deficiency was prevalent in the Great Lakes, Appalachians, and Northwestern regions of the U.S., a geographic area known as the “goiter belt”, where 26%–70% of children had clinically apparent goiter. During the draft for World War I, a Michigan physician, Simon Levin, observed that 30.3% of 583 registrants had thyromegaly (including both toxic and nontoxic goiters), many of which were large enough to disqualify them from the military, in accordance with U.S. Selective Service regulations. Subsequent surveillance studies in the following year by Levin and R.M. Olin, Commissioner of the Michigan State Department of Public Health, demonstrated that the prevalence of goiter reached as high as 64.4% in some parts of Michigan.
David Marine, a U.S. physician in Ohio, and his colleagues initiated an iodine prophylaxis program in over 2100 schoolgirls in 1917. Over the next few years, he and colleagues published a series of papers reporting a significantly decreased frequency of goiter in children treated with iodine (0.2%), compared to children who did not receive iodine supplementation (>25%). In 1922, David Cowie, chairman of the Pediatrics Department at the University of Michigan, proposed at a Michigan State Medical Society thyroid symposium that the U.S. adopt salt iodization to eliminate simple goiter. His work with the Society over the next few years, through the development of the Iodized Salt Committee, was instrumental in the history of the U.S. iodine supplementation effort.
.