Pairing Herbs with Gourmet Cooking Salts

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt, which is where salary comes from. Photo by Howard Lee Puckett

Chart: Our Guide To The Best Gourmet Salts
Resources: Buy Your Artisan Salt From These Companies 

Wars have been fought and won over salt. Mahatma Gandhi famously launched his first nonviolent protest by taking a pinch of salt from the sea, breaking the law that made it illegal to acquire salt from any source other than the British government. During the American Civil War, the Union army strategically destroyed the salt mines of the South in an effort to cripple the Confederacy. And lately, government health agencies have declared war on the salt in our nation’s beloved processed foods.

Yet at the same time, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in consumer interest in expensive gourmet salts. Even with the economic problems of the last couple of years, HimalaSalt, the leading seller of the popular pink salt from the Himalayan mountains, expects to see a 130 percent growth in sales this year. The company’s founder, Melissa Kushi, attributes this phenomenon to that “part of America that is beginning to look at food the way Europeans, Japanese and other cultures have for hundreds if not thousands of years. Where food comes from and in what season, how it’s produced, how far it traveled, who grew it or made it, and all the gorgeous ways to prepare it—the deeper the education, the higher the quality of ingredients to be found in their cupboards,” she says. “Artisan salts are a natural extension of that education—they’re flavorful, sensual and transforming to any dish.”

She’s not alone: The upsurge in the popularity of healthy, sustainable, local and artisanal foods in recent years has resulted in a mind-boggling array of colorful, chunky salts at specialty food shops throughout the country. Keith Berner was a member of a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program in Vermont that supplemented farm-fresh produce with sea salt harvested in New England. “It tasted richer and had more depth than the other stuff, and it taught me how artisans can be involved in providing something as prosaic as salt, which I had never considered before,” Berner says.

But is the higher price tag worth it? And is there really something special about these salts of many colors?

The Four Basic Salt Types

There are four basic types of salt: table salt, mined salts, sea salts and kosher salt.

About 100 years ago, the Morton Salt Company fixed its place in our kitchens by adding an anti-caking agent to table salt, creating a perfectly pourable, uniform product, hence the slogan, “When it rains, it pours.” They also included iodine, because many people were deficient in this natural element. (Hardly anyone is anymore.) And to mask its mineral aftertaste, they added a form of processed sugar. Mark Bitterman, co-owner of The Meadow, an artisan food shop in Portland, Oregon, never uses common table salt. “The salt shaker filled with artificially refined, chemical-laden table salt is the ultimate symbol of the chemical industry’s triumph among industrialized food producers,” he says. Even if you don’t take his hard-line approach, mixing salt with sugar might not be the way to go, particularly now that there are so many tasty options.