I actually meant to post this in GQ, because I thought there might be a factual answer.
The vast majority of the time I measure salt, it’s not for a brine, it’s for baking and other recipes that call for like 1/2 tsp. How are you supposed to measure that? You have to fill the 1/2 teaspoon to overflowing, then level it off with a knife. With other dry ingredients, you can do that and scrape the excess back into the container. With salt poured from a spout, you can’t, and you waste salt every time.
The amount of salt called for in a recipe is just rounded off to the nearest 1/2 or 1/4 or full teaspoonful in the first place. The recipe isn’t going to be scaled to the amount of salt, so the amount of salt is just going to be the nearest approximation. You really don’t have to be that precise in your leveling off with a knife. Just pour as close as you can eyeball it and jiggle it level. Unless you’re massively over or under, you’ll be fine.
It’s always really humid here, so salt storage and usage is an ongoing problem. Salt pigs are utterly out of the question; even the old trick of putting rice grains in the salt shaker doesn’t work. I pretty much have to empty my salt into a container and pinch or measure out the wet-sand-textured amount I need.
It’s okay, though. It’s a minor price to pay for living in such a lovely place.
OK, well, if you want to MISLEAD PEOPLE with your username when you actually live a world away, how can we trust you? :)
I live in (arid) Southern California and have problems with salt clumping. I only use sea salt or kosher salt and I do use the dried rice “trick,” which doesn’t actually work.
I know, right? My only defense is that I actually did live in Cairo, Egypt (driest of all dry places … salt flowed smoothly, and cake decorating was easy) when I started posting. But yeah, in retrospect my user name was a poor choice.
The salt shaker I use for cooking has a pop-out spout for pouring, if needed. I can’t imagine using a salt pig, too easy to contaminate or spill. Although I do keep my large-grain koshering salt in a plastic tub with a lid. I scoop that out.
I remember someone daring my cousin to eat a teaspoonful as a kid, he could barely swallow it and nearly threw up afterwards. I can’t imagine anyone eating a handful.
The salt boxes used through much of Europe to keep cooking salt are straight. And if you want to verify how high does the pitch of a Spanish cook’s voice reach, propose buying salt with additives (inc. anti-caking agents).
Morton salt in the cylinder container is easy to open up the top of. If you run a finger a bit below the top of the blue main label, you feel where the cylinder that makes up the sides meets the top. Drag a knife around the label at that point, and you can take the top off, and put it back on.
Way back when, when I was making a couple of loaves of bread a week in a bread machine, I decided to put all my main ingredients into containers with their own measuring spoon/cup. I didn’t bother washing them, just tucked them back into the salt/yeast/flour/sugar container. It was way easier to scoop out a 1/2 t of salt and put the lid back on, instead of pouring out a bit into my hand each time.
Forcing salt water down a child was once considered a method to induce vomiting if the child swallowed poison. This recommendation was abandoned when too many kids were poisoned BY THE SALT because they didn’t throw it up (and ipecac too, but that’s a thread for another day).
One of my FBFs, a high school classmate, has 3 grown children, and she said she called Poison Control on each of them; one ate Vicks Vapo-Rub, another a similar nonfood product, and the third, table salt that she had spilled all over the kitchen floor and was licking up. :eek: Guess which one was the only one she had to worry about? You guessed it - the table salt. They told her to try to get her daughter to drink as much water as possible, and described the symptoms of hypernatremia. Fortunately, that didn’t happen and her daughter was fine.
To me, the argument that a spout is more desirable because of filling up salt shakers is absurd, unless you use one hell of a lot of salt on your food. My wife and I don’t need to refill the salt shaker on our kitchen table more than once every 2-3 months, and we rarely eat out. But we need to measure out salt (in quantities of a teaspoon or less) for a recipe maybe twice a week.
You may be right, but no freakin’ way I’m gonna take a chance on over-salting a recipe. And conversely, I want to be sure I have enough salt in there to do its job of bringing out the flavors in food.
If I pour, I will be massively over or under, >90% of the time, with ‘over’ being the Markov absorbing state, of course. So I’ll level with a knife and throw away more salt than I put into the recipe.
For soups and stews and such, I use kosher salt and just sprinkle some onto the dish. For baking, I use a canister with anti-caking qualities.
I bake regularly. I pour salt into the measuring spoon until it’s just over, then shake gently to remove the excess. Salt is cheap, I don’t mind wasting a tiny amount every time i need a teaspoon of salt.
My cooking salt does flow freely, and this is quite accurate.
Pouring into a measuring spoon is a pain - you will spill and waste a significant percentage of what you need.
We use little enough iodized salt that it isn’t an issue. We’re likelier to use kosher salt for cooking (and we use large-crystal salt in grinders for table use).
We solve the OP’s problem by tearing the box open and pouring it into a plastic container for storage (Tupperware’s Modular Mates are great; the Oval 3 is about perfect for a box of kosher salt). We have a smaller container for the iodized salt. And we have a still smaller one for the kind of things where we want a little pinch here or there for cooking. We use little enough like that, that something like a salt pig would not be all that useful.
I’d guess I waste about 5%. That doesn’t feel significant to me.
That being said, I have canisters or glass jars for sugar, several kinds of flour, brown sugar, white and brown rice, quinoa, barley, and all the spices I buy in bulk. So I completely endorse the idea of buying canisters for kitchen staples. I just happen to find the cardboard salt box (with spout), the baking powder box (with the handy flat bit for leveling a spoon) and the baking soda box (with a flat cardboard side that is good enough to level a spoon, although not as nice as the baking powder box) convenient enough that I’ve never wanted to buy a special container for them.
