We like Sea Salt. I often use it to season my food, along with Sea Pepper.
Seriously, I’ve seen a great many “natural” salts from around the world. Some people I know sell them. But the differences in color are due to trace contaminants that do more to prove the salt’s origins than to change its properties. I can’t taste any difference myself, and would expect any unless the source was some odd mineral spring like the one at Epsom that gives Epsom Salt its name.
Read Mark Kurlansky’s book Salt: A World History to get an idea of how the problem of obtaining enough salt for human needs has been addressed around the world and throughout history.
Try some “Grey Salt” aka Fleur de sel aka "Sel Gris De Guérande ", there is a definite taste difference. Take two pieces of grilled chicken breast, no skin, dip lightly in each, and yes, there is a difference. I like mine on steaks.
But in actual cooking, as in adding to soups, etc? Other than a slight “off” or “metal” in Iodized which can be detected in light broths, there is no difference.
I am familiar with items such as garlic salt and the like. But I always assumed that was just powdered garlic/celery/whatever mixed with regular ol’ table salt and poured into a spice shaker. Nothing fancy.
Is there such a thing as “marinated” salt – IOW, salt allowed to soak in some kind of solution that will impart a tasteable property into the salt once dried? Kind of artificially doing what a lot of people think sea salt does.
There is also something called “black salt” or kala namak or “Himalayan black salt”, which is actually pinkish when ground. It has a very distinct flavor that even those with hardly working taste buds can detect. It is quite sulfurous/eggy and I’ve come across it mostly in Indian cooking, especially as part of a spice mix called chaat masala, which is used to season a lot of snacks. It’s not a sea salt, but it definitely shows you how certain impurities can dramatically change the flavor of salt.
I don’t know what people expect sea salt to do, but there are salts with other flavoring added. Smoked salt is common, it is often just salt with Liquid Smoke added. I’ve heard of others that are marinated as you suggest, but no particular flavor is coming to mind at the moment.
And it doesn’t take long to find out, just search on ‘Flavored Salt’. There’s a lot more out there than I knew about.
Yeah, you can flavor salts with wine or whatever the heck other liquid you want. You basically cook up some wine, add salt, then spread it on a sheet to dry.
You could change this whole thread to "Comparing water from the mountains of Peru to the water from Charleston S.C. and you’d get the same same type of answers.
“I like telling foodies they’re eating the chemical equivalent of rust.”
Which is a kin to asking a foodie what Gluten is.
I love telling my waiters at work to ask the snob at the table What is Gluten?
Gluten is not a snobbery thing. As far as I know, “foodies” have nothing against gluten. There are people who are averse to gluten due to woo, and there are those (in the vast minority, like my sister-in-law) who do have a medical condition where they should avoid gluten as much as possible.
As for the rust thing, I don’t see why a “foodie” would care. If rust tastes good, have at it and eat it.
Dissolved in water, there is no difference in flavor. The grain does have an effect, but most chefs use coarse grained salt like sea salt and Kosher salt because it’s easier to pick some up with your fingers and drop it into the dish. And different grains do have different effects: pickling salt is very fine, so there’s more of it in a teaspoon.
As for flavor, no one can actually tell the difference. The extra minerals in sea salt make up, at most, 1% of its composition.
A long, long time ago, The Great Salt Lake was the size of 3 states. It was an inland sea. Caves in the region filled with the sea water. As the sea evaporated, these caves are now salt mines.
A company, RealSalt has a web site. All you ever wanted to know about sea salt.
