When Did Salt get So Confusing?

Dear Tricia, What's the difference between regular iodized table salt, kosher salt, and sea salt? Is one better than the other?


Salt has become this thing in the culinary world that, all of a sudden, went from being a really boring and every day ingredient to this gourmet item that you have 3 million options to choose from at the grocery store. Its insane. I partially blame the Food Network, but I know its not only their doing.
First off, all salt is the same chemical makeup, sodium chloride, or NaCl on the good old periodic table of elements. No matter where you go on the planet, and how much you're paying for that gourmet salt that was harvested from magic waterfalls by Aboriginal midgets in Croatia, it all looks the same under a microscope: perfectly square molecules made up of sodium and chloride.
Table salt is what most of us probably grew up with: the blue container of Morton's with the little girl holding the umbrella on it. Table salt is harvested from underground mineral deposits. It is heavily refined into small, fine grains, and has an anti-caking agent added to it so that it doesn't clump together. It also usually has iodine added to it, which is a necessary mineral to keep you from being retarded. (Hey, I didn't make that up: google it. Go on. Do it. See?) Because of the need for iodine in our diets and a huge population of people who are deficient in it, iodine was added to salt to sneak it in to our diets and prevent the R-word. The same goes for enriched flour, but that's another blog for another time.
Kosher salt is harvested from underground mineral deposits or from the sea, and doesn't have any additives. The biggest difference between table salt and kosher salt is clearly visible, unless you need to go back to eyeball school: kosher salt is super coarsely ground so that the grains are much bigger. Its name isn't because its kosher (all salt is kosher, by the way), but because its the salt used in koshering meats, or drawing the blood out of them. Vampire salt.
Sea salt is harvested by evaporating sea water. Duh. It also is usually more expensive than kosher or table salt because its more labor-intensive to harvest, and it can be fine or coarse grain. Its just as refined as table salt and can contain additives, so if you're looking for something additive free, make sure you read the label.
Okay, now here's the big question: what's the real difference between them? Is one saltier or better than the other? Well consider a spoon full of table salt and a spoon full of kosher salt. The spoon full of table salt is going to taste saltier simply because you can fit more grains of salt in it. By weight, that spoon of table salt is going to be heavier than the coarsely ground kosher salt. What that means for cooking is that if the a recipe calls for a teaspoon of table salt and you want to use kosher, you're going to need roughly two teaspoons to get the same flavor. In reverse, if a recipe calls for a teaspoon of kosher salt and all you have is table salt, use half a teaspoon. The same rule can apply for sea salt, depending on how coarse the grain is. In every kitchen I've ever worked in, we've used kosher salt. Its pretty universal in the restaurant world.
I posted a question on my What the Bleep facebook fan page (have you checked it out yet?), "Do you have a salt preference?" Some of the replies I got... Hawaiian, Fleur de Sel, Cypress Flake... I wasn't sure if they were types of salt or types of weed. But depending on which region you get certain salts from, the ocean water has different mineral contents that affect the color and flavor of the salt. In a blind taste test where you're tasting the salt by itself, you might notice some differences in flavor. But are you going to be able to taste it once its on the food? Probably not. And unless you have a wad of cash burning a hole in your pocket, I wouldn't worry about spending a lot of money on gourmet salt in hopes that its going to change your cooking. You'll have much better luck in doing that by reading my blogs. Then you can just give that wad of cash to me.

Silicone and Cindy Crawford: How it Relates to Your Tart

Dear Tricia, I've recently acquired a silicone dish for baking pies, tarts, cheesecakes, etc. I must say, it works pretty well, but I've noticed a big difference concerning the crustiness of some of the things I bake. For example: I like to make a kind of salty tart out of a crust (pâte brisée), tomatoes, mozzarella and dijon mustard. With the tomatoes, you can imagine that I have a hard time keeping the "wateriness" to a minimum. When I use the silicone dish, the tart comes out pretty darn watery, but with a glass or metal dish, the water seems to disappear! The question is this really: What is the real difference between silicone dishes and normal baking apparatuses (I know that's latin based, so it's gotta be apparati or something stupid like that)? Are the pros and cons for each one aside the obvious "crustiness" that comes from using normal baking dishes?

Ooooh, I love this one. Mostly, because it involves physics and I'm always trying to up my game in that department. After much research, I couldn't find the information I needed in relation to baking dishes, so I emailed my favorite chef, Peter Greweling, who is my mentor, my former instructor, and author of Chocolates & Confections, and the recently released Chocolates and Confections at Home. He also loves martinis, so we share that priceless connection.
A baking dish basically serves two purposes: to hold the batter or dough, and to transfer heat from the oven to the product inside of the baking dish. When its transferring heat, that's called "conducting." Lets talk about conducting heat: remember that topic in elementary school? Everything conducts heat. Good heat conductors are metals: think aluminum foil, iron, steel... things that baking dishes are often made out of. Glass? Eh... its okay. Silicone? Not awesome. Imagine holding a two cups of super hot coffee, one is made out of aluminum, and one made out of silicone. Which one is going to burn your hand faster? The aluminum one, because it conducts heat better, or transfers the heat to you faster.
Lets apply that to baking dishes. An aluminum or steel tart pan is going to take the heat from the oven and transfer it to the tart dough super fast. That, in turn will caramelize the sugars in the dough really well, brown the proteins in the flour like a champ, and give you a brown and crusty finish. Because your silicone baking pan, though convenient to use (we'll get to that in a minute), doesn't conduct heat very well, its going to give you a less crusty and lighter colored tart if you baked it at the same temperature. The same idea applies to the watery tomatoes inside the tart. The heat is being transfered throughout the entire product and the idea is to make the water in the tomatoes evaporate, but if its not getting enough heat to do that, the water will just hang out and create a sog party. Gross.
Silicone baking dishes are a newer revolution in the baking world. For gazillions of years, we've been baking things in metal pans. But this new idea of silicone pans is great because they're flexible and things don't stick to them, so you can literally peel the cake pan off a cake without having to bang it on the counter top to get it out. Tart pans are notorious for being little assholes. You put all that work into your gorgeous tomato tart creation, but if the crust sticks to the sides of the pan, it breaks and cracks and disappoints everyone and ruins dinner. So I get why silicone tart pans are ideal. It may give us cancer 50 years down the road and we end up with PVC pipes as intestines, but oh well... it's FDA approved and they know everything about everything, right?
So, back to your dilemma. All you really need to do is turn up the temperature of your oven to create more heat. If the recipe says 375 degrees, go up to 425 and see how it does. If the tart fillings start to dry up too much, put a piece of foil over them to keep them covered until the crust is finished... or you could just turn the oven down a little at that point: whatever works for you.
Lets summarize today's physics lesson. Metal baking dishes are like the Cindy Crawford of baking dishes: if heat was makeup, she don't require a lot of it to be smoking hot. Silicone baking dishes are like Sarah, Plain and Tall: sure, she's practical and efficient, but she needs a hell of a lot more makeup to get to Cindy Crawford's level, doesn't she?

Uncle Sam Wants You to Vote for Me!

In hopes of expanding my blog networking skills, I'm entered in this month's pin up photo contest on www.pinuplifestyle.com. Got a few seconds? Do you think I'm totally adorable? Go check it out and vote for my photo so that I can win some cute aprons. :) New blog post coming in the next couple of days!

Here's the address for the voting: http://wildfireapp.com/website/6/contests/17010/voteable_entries