From land or sea, salt is salt; little difference

Why do some recipes call for sea salt instead of reg­u­lar salt? Is it health­ier? What about kosher salt?

There’s very lit­tle dif­fer­ence, chem­i­cally speak­ing, between these types of salt. All are at least 97.5 per­cent sodium chlo­ride and have a sim­i­lar amount of sodium by weight.

Sea salt, which comes from evap­o­rated sea­wa­ter, often has a dif­fer­ent tex­ture than reg­u­lar table salt, which is the pri­mary rea­son you’ll see it rec­om­mended in some recipes.

It can come coarsely ground or in flakes, offer­ing a bit of flair when sprin­kled on top of a dish. Some peo­ple say the fla­vor of sea salt is softer than reg­u­lar salt, or that the minus­cule amounts of other min­er­als in sea salt pro­vide a dis­tinct fla­vor, but that’s debatable.

Table salt comes from under­ground salt deposits. It’s nor­mally more heav­ily processed than sea salt to remove other min­er­als, and it con­tains an addi­tive to pre­vent clumping.

Most table salt also con­tains iodine, which helps pre­vent goi­ter, a thy­roid gland con­di­tion. Even if you go easy on salt, you’re prob­a­bly get­ting enough iodine from the iodized salt you do use.

Kosher salt is a coarse-grain salt used to pre­pare kosher meats. It con­tains no iodine, so it’s often rec­om­mended for use in can­ning and pick­ling because iodine can cause an adverse reac­tion with some foods dur­ing those processes.

A tea­spoon of any coarse-grain salt will actu­ally con­tain less salt, and there­fore less sodium, than smaller-grain salt. There sim­ply are larger air pock­ets in a mea­sure of coarse salt. That’s evi­dent if you com­pare the weight of a tea­spoon of coarse salt with a tea­spoon of reg­u­lar salt: The reg­u­lar salt will be heav­ier because it’s more densely packed.

One tea­spoon of reg­u­lar table salt con­tains 2,325 mil­ligrams of sodium, or about one day’s worth. But most sodium peo­ple con­sume isn’t from the salt shaker. In fact, many high-sodium foods don’t even taste salty. A pack­age of fla­vored oat­meal can have more sodium than a bag of chips.

Fresh poul­try is often sat­u­rated with a high-sodium solu­tion to ten­der­ize the meat. Get into the habit of check­ing sodium con­tent on Nutri­tion Facts labels.

Health pro­fes­sion­als rec­om­mend lim­it­ing sodium to 2,300 mil­ligrams a day, or 1,500 mil­ligrams for peo­ple who are likely to expe­ri­ence health prob­lems from high sodium. That includes any­one 51 or older, African Amer­i­cans of any age, and any­one with high blood pres­sure, dia­betes or chronic kid­ney disease.

For ideas on how to cut back on sodium, see the “10 Tips Nutri­tion Edu­ca­tion Series” on http://www.choosemyplate.gov and down­load the “Salt and Sodium” fact sheet, or learn more at http://www.cdc.gov/salt.

Chow Line is a ser­vice of Ohio State Uni­ver­sity Exten­sion and the Ohio Agri­cul­tural Research and Devel­op­ment Cen­ter. Send ques­tions to Chow Line, c/o Martha Fil­ipic, 2021 Cof­fey Road, Colum­bus, OH 43210–1044, or filipic.3@cfaes.osu.edu.

Posted by Martha Filipic on Nov 1 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.