Sea salt portions: same as regular salt?

[Labrador_Deceiver]

Pretty much the only difference between any of those salts is texture, or size. All of them are around 98% sodium chloride, and the trace minerals are practically nonexistent.

[pulykamell]

@Labrador_Deceiver

Pretty much the only difference between any of those salts is texture, or size. All of them are around 98% sodium chloride, and the trace minerals are practically nonexistent.

I’m not going to necessarily argue the taste of salt, as I’m not that well-versed on it and base my choice of salts on grain structure, but you’d be surprised at how little you need of certain trace elements for them to have an impact on flavor. I mean, coffee is like 98% water, but there’s no doubt it tastes like coffee, not water. Once, when I was brewing 5 gallons of beer, a floating thermometer shattered and, unnoticed by me, the little iron pellets that provided it with buoyancy spilled into the wort. That was a total of about a half teaspoon of pellets in 5 gallons of beer. That’s less than 1 part in 7000. Everybody who tasted the beer, unprompted, noticed (negatively) its metallic taste. It was pretty much undrinkable (although I didn’t have the heart to dump it out, so I saved it for myself.)

Now, I have no idea how much of a difference it makes in terms of salt, but 2% trace minerals sounds like a lot to me.

[Labrador_Deceiver]

@pulykamell

I’m not going to necessarily argue the taste of salt, as I’m not that well-versed on it and base my choice of salts on grain structure, but you’d be surprised at how little you need of certain trace elements for them to have an impact on flavor. I mean, coffee is like 98% water, but there’s no doubt it tastes like coffee, not water. Once, when I was brewing 5 gallons of beer, a floating thermometer shattered and, unnoticed by me, the little iron pellets that provided it with buoyancy spilled into the wort. That was a total of about a half teaspoon of pellets in 5 gallons of beer. That’s less than 1 part in 7000. Everybody who tasted the beer, unprompted, noticed (negatively) its metallic taste. It was pretty much undrinkable (although I didn’t have the heart to dump it out, so I saved it for myself.)

Now, I have no idea how much of a difference it makes in terms of salt, but 2% trace minerals sounds like a lot to me.

The difference between salt, a very strong mineral, and water, a neutral liquid, as backdrop flavors is rather large.

If you took some sea salt, kosher salt & iodized salt & placed each separately in a food processor until they were the same texture, I would bet my next paycheck that nobody here could pair them up in a blind taste test. I’ve seen it done. It wasn’t pretty.

[Chefguy]

@Ferret_Herder

I think what he means - and what I think I’ve read in sources like Cook’s Illustrated - that a large salt grain has a larger surface area to itself so it provides a larger salt-taste “burst” when your tongue touches it. Also, small salt grains are more likely to quickly dissolve into any fluids on the food and thus disperse and dilute their flavor.

In a nutshell.