Grains of truth

When did we all become salt snobs? In May, a lavish cookbook called Sea Salt will arrive, a celebration of what is, after all, a simple chemical compound, Nacl, with a sodium atom for each one of chlorine. Superficially, there’s no room for variation. When I was growing up, salt was salt, a commodity that came in a plastic bag from the supermarket or (in my smarter friends’ houses) in a yellow and red Saxa tub.

Then, in the 1990s, it all changed. Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, in the tome that epitomised ’90s cool, The River Cafe Cookbook, declared, ‘You must use Maldon salt.’ The flaky crystals, made by a family company in Essex, became the ultimate culinary accessory, found sparkling atop Nigel Slater’s hummus and nestled in Nigella’s handbag.

Other salts found fame in the wake of Maldon. Our own Mark Hix favours Cornish sea salt. Northern Ireland-based butcher Peter Hannan made Himalayan salt the sine qua non of aged steak. Welsh company Halen Môn gained the only British ‘Protected Designation of Origin’ status for salt, guaranteeing that the sole ingredient is Anglesey seawater, with no additional brines from other waters. The family behind it, the Lea-wilsons, are the ones who have written the cookbook, telling the story of their prized product and how to use it. Rarer still, new kid on the block Sark sea salt is made purely by solar evaporation in the Channel Islands.

These salts are unarguably beautiful, from the flattened glassy pyramids of Maldon to the fat crumbly crystals of Sark. As a crunchy topping to focaccia, say, or as points of saltiness through a chocolate mousse, they are exquisite too. But while the textures vary, do they really taste different? Perhaps, mixed into purified water, you might taste a hint of citrus in one, or a softer flavour in another, which is down to the traces of other minerals they contain. Dissolved in a dish, the variations are all but indiscernible.

So when a recipe for a brine, say, requiring handfuls of salt, calls for expensive sea-salt flakes, you can safely ignore it. Choose rock salt or easy-to-dissolve fine sea salt instead, but avoid any salt that contains anti-caking agents, which can add a bitter note.

In fact, fine salt without any of those free-running agents is easier to pick up between finger and thumb too – an important point when many recipes call for salt by the pinch. A small pinch is as much as you can hold between your thumb and first finger; a large pinch is held between your thumb, first and middle finger. As for salt snobbism, you can take that with a pinch of salt too.