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What the heck is ... fleur-de-sel
 Salt is salt, right? Wrong! There are probably as many different kinds of culinary salt available as there are all other spices combined. Everything from the 50 cents per pound stuff in the round, blue box, up to the most expensive $60 per pound Fleur-de-sel ... and everything in between. So, just what is this mysterious and expensive stuff called fleur-de-sel (flowers of salt)? Basically, it is a special type of "sea salt", containing all of the minerals and impurities found in sea water. Furthermore, the most famous and expensive fleur-de-sel is produced in a very small area of salt pans (tidal ponds used to evaporate sea water down to its salt) located along the Brittany coast of France near the village of Guérande. There, when the dry summer breezes are just right, the summer temperatures are just right, and the planets are properly aligned with the stars, fine crystals of salt form a thin film on the surface of the brine in the salt pans (instead of all the crystals settling to the bottom of the pond as usual).  This "flowers of the salt" is carefully skimmed off from the surface by hand with wooden skimmers, dried in the sun, sacked up, and sold to places like Tapino for really big bucks! Fleur-de-sel from Guérande is the most expensive culinary salt in the world. Is it really that much better than other sea salts? Nah, probably not. But, it is all produced by hand, there isn't much of it, and the hype factor is huge! At Tapino, we like to give our guests opportunities to try out things that are not usually available with "regular restaurant food", so we use fleur-de-sel to season our seared foie gras. It might not really be worth the $60 per pound that we pay for it, but a pinch of it is just perfect for a special dish.
 Salt is an essential dietary element because, although it is necessary for human survival [All of your internal body fluids have about the same salt content as sea water], the human body does not have the ability to produce or store salt for the long haul. We are constantly losing our salt through ... um ... ah ....Oh, you know! As a result, we must replenish our internal salt supply through regular consumption of dietary salt. Luckily, the commercial, processed-food industry provides more than enough salt to keep us alive, and maybe even enough to kill us! [Did you ever taste chicken-noodle-soup concentrate, right out of the can? Gaaaggg!] Other uses for salt include food preservation, chemical production, water softeners, and de-icing highways. [not often seen in Scottsdale, Arizona]
 Used as a preservative in the days before refrigeration, salt was a highly prized commodity. In the early 1800s there was no canning industry, and no chemical preservatives to help keep food fresh and edible. Food was preserved either by smoking, pickling, drying, packing in sugar syrup, or salting. Salt was used to pickle vegetables and cure hams.  About 40 pounds of salt per person per year were used for preserving food. Today, with refrigeration commonplace, it seems that all the extra salt is now packed into that one can of chicken-noodle-soup!
 In the Roman Empire, soldiers were paid their wages in the form of salt blocks which they called "salarium". Thus, the English word for "pay-for-work" became "salary". In the Middle Ages, salt was such as precious commodity that one's status was denoted by one's position at the dining table in relation to the location of the salt. The salt was always placed close to the king and important nobility. To be "beneath the salt" meant you were not seated close to the king and were therefore, of lesser stature. However, to be "worth your salt" meant that your contributions to society were worth more than the value of the salt (very expensive in those days) you consumed.
The nomadic Tuareg tribes in North Africa have been mining culinary salt from shallow deposits in the Sahara desert, and toting it all over the near East for thousands of years. It is said by gourmets, to have the subtle, but complex flavors of camel sweat, dirt, goat manure, and dry leather.
Before we get too much deeper into culinary salt, maybe we need to pause, and have a short chemistry and physics lesson. [Hey! Alton Brown is my personal hero!] Everybody knows that table salt is "sodium chloride" (NaCl in chemo-speak). In the world of chemistry, sodium (in its pure form) is a metal, and chloride (in its pure form, called chlorine) is a "halide" (any one of the elements in group VIIA of the period table of elements; fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine, & astatine). [By the way, pure sodium and pure chlorine are both deadly poisons and will do-you-in quite handily - combined, however, they become common table salt.] Therefore, sodium chloride (table salt) is a member of a class of chemical compounds called "metal halides". All "metal halides" are "salts", and all "salts are "metal halides". Simple, huh? Potassium Iodide is a salt, Magnesium bromide is a salt, Ferrous (iron) chloride is a salt, just like sodium chloride is a "salt". In fact, any associated ionic bonding between any metal and any halide produces a "salt". [not all salts taste salty, though] However, one of the rules of nature is that all salts (any metal halide) are very-very soluble in water. That is how the oceans got to be so salty. As rain water (pure distilled water) falls onto the earth over a period of millions of years, and flows over & under the dirt and rocks on its way back to the sea, it dissolves any metal halides that it comes in contact with, and carries them into the ocean. There, the water evaporates once again (distillation), to create clouds and more rain. But, the salt stays behind and slowly builds up in concentration until we now have oceans full of salty "sea water". When the concentration of a salt solution reaches a point that the available water can no longer hold all of the salt in solution, it precipitates out into small crystals of solid salt (which are heavier than water, and so, fall to the bottom of the pool of water). If all of the water gets evaporated away, we end up with a layer of dry salt laying on the ground where the water used to be.
 One last chemistry lesson, and then we will move on to something less boring. Each different "species" of metal halide (salt)- sodium chloride vs magnesium fluoride vs potassium chloride, etc., will precipitate out (as crystals of that species of salt) at different levels of overall salt concentration in the brine solution. That means, that when some ancient sea got land-locked and dried up to nothing, it left behind a thick layer of dried salt on the bottom of what had been its sea floor. If you look carefully at that layer of salt, you will find that it has horizontal stripes in it. Different layers of different kinds of salt, each laid down at a different time as the sea slowly evaporated away. One layer of "sodium chloride" - [by far the vast majority of the total salt bed] (mined for table salt and road salt), another thin layer of "potassium chloride" (potash - mined for fertilizer), another even thinner layer of "sodium fluoride" (mined for toothpaste additive), and on and on. Also, if the sea completely dries up, other minerals that were dissolved in the sea water will also precipitate out in layers when it is their turn to do so. Many of these minerals that form their own layers in the salt bed are not salts at all, but are called "carbonates" or "sulfates" or "hydrates". The most common one is Calcium Carbonate, which eventually turns into Limestone. Another is Calcium Sulfate (think soggy sheet-rock, or plaster-of-paris). Today, those ancient salt beds, sometimes thousands of feet thick, have been buried in sediment and just lay there under the ground, along with their layers of different kinds of salts and minerals, waiting to be mined. Which, thankfully, brings us back to culinary salt. See, that wasn't so bad, was it?
All culinary salts are derived by evaporation. Common table salt (that stuff in the round blue box with the picture of the cute little girl holding her umbrella) is made by pumping hot water into the underground salt deposit's layer of "almost-pure-sodium-chloride", carefully avoiding the other salt layers and the soggy sheetrock. This process forms a brine which is then pumped to the surface, filtered, and evaporated, leaving dried "cube-like crystals that look like granulated sugar". The salt is then sifted, mixed with a little calcium silicate and dextrose (to prevent caking in the box) and some Potassium Iodide (another one of those crazy salts!) because the government demands it, and then packaged and sent to your supermarket. Kosher salt is made in a similar fashion except the brine is stirred continually during the evaporation process, and there are no additives. The resulting product has a large-grained, light and flaky texture.
 Culinary "sea salt" is just evaporated sea water. All culinary salts are nutritionally about the same. The main difference is that sea salt has trace amounts of minerals (any of the other "stuff" that gets dissolved into the ocean plus some of the dirt from the bottom of the salt pan where it was evaporated) and tiny quantities of all the other different "metal halides" - salts, that were deliberately avoided in the mined version of salt. So, basically, "common salt" is almost pure sodium chloride, whereas "sea salt" is almost pure sodium chloride with a very small amount of other salts and dirt mixed in. Sounds yummy, doesn't it? It is!
 If all salt is mostly sodium chloride, then how is it possible that some salts effect food differently than others? Could it be that combinations of the other salts and trace mineral elements make one salt taste differently than another? Sure, that's one reason. But trace mineral elements aren't the main reason one salt might be considered different or better than another. The main reason has to do with each salt's crystallization, which, in essence, is a salt's texture.
Texture is critical to all good cooking. It's why a baked potato topped with butter and sour cream tastes differently than mashed potatoes made with the very same ingredients. Salts have unbelievably varying crystalline structures, depending on where and how they were produced, no differently than a snowflake from Colorado differs from a snowflake from New England. Except, in the case of culinary salt, that difference is not only clearly visible to the naked eye, it's often distinguishable on the palate too! My favorite analogy has to do with Caesar salad: Imagine you've prepared a Caesar salad. Half the salad you toss in a bowl with finely-grated Parmigiano Reggiano; the other half (same ingredients) you toss in a separate bowl with shaved Parmigiano Reggiano. Each salad will be decidedly different from the other - most people will swear that they taste different, in spite of the fact that the cheese in both came from the same wedge. It is all in the texture. That's the way it is with sea salt, too.
Fleur-de-sel de Guérande, from France, is known as 'the caviar of salts' and is acclaimed by connoisseurs (especially French connoisseurs) as the best of all the world's sea salts. Literally translated as 'flower of the salt', this premium sea salt gets its name from the delicate aroma of violets that its producers claim develops as the salt dries (few persons, other than the producer's marketing agents, can actually smell these violets).
True "Fleur-de-sel" can only, by law, originate from the salt pans near the town of Guérande in Brittany, just as authentic champagne can only, by law, come from the Champagne region of France. (Those French laws are pretty clever little self serving pieces of legislation!) This extraordinary salt only forms during certain times of year and under very special weather conditions. Gentle, dry winds blowing from the east forms fine, downward growing crystals on the very top surface of the salt ponds. A special rake that barely skims the surface is used to harvest these unique crystals. Pale pink when harvested (due to the algae in the water), fleur-de-sel dries to small flaky crystals with a moist texture and a slight gray/pink cast. The taste of Fleur-de-sel is a delicate, complex balance of the minerals that naturally occur in seawater. This premier sea salt is used only to finish dishes rather than as a cooking ingredient. (it is far too expensive to dump it into a soup pot, and even if you did, it would dissolve and lose all of its special textural character - which is why you paid a fortune for it in the first place.)
Some people (mostly your new-age, homeopathic, organic, granola-crunchy types) claim that "sea salt" is very healthy, and much less harmfull, than "regular" salt. However, several doctors and researchers who have studied the issue say that the health benefits of using sea salt are vastly overblown. "In the quantities you use salt, either in cooking or at the table, the amount of these trace minerals you would get is utterly negligible," say the reasearchers. "You'd have to eat a quarter pound of ocean solids [sea salt] to equal the amount of iron in a single grape or two pounds to equal the amount of phosphorus in that grape." There are, however, significant amounts of calcium and magnesium in unprocessed sea salt--enough so that you shouldn't even consider them "trace" minerals--but you can get even more of these essential elements simply by eating green vegetables. Even the best sea salt is mostly sodium chloride, and too much sodium is bad for you, no mater where it comes from. So, in the end, we choose sea salt and/or its crowning glory, fleur-de-sel, not because of some imagined health benefits, but because we like its crunchy texture and unique taste. But, even that is suspect; Good Housekeeping magazine reports that in blind tests, only two of eight tasters could tell the difference between expensive "fleur-de-sel" and plain old domestic kosher salt. However, nobody confused it with the blue-box stuff.
Wanna know a bunch more trivia about salt?
Here are some ideas about how to use salt:
Bake with fine salt. Baking can be very exacting, and all recipe measurements, unless otherwise noted, are geared toward fine salt (the kind that comes out of the ubiquitous round, blue box), not kosher or hand-harvested sea salt, which, because of their coarseness, give inaccurate readings in the measuring spoon.
Season while cooking with kosher salt. Most chefs season with kosher salt, because it's much easier to see and feel how much you're adding. If you season with kosher salt, you're much less likely to over-salt. It's a waste to use hand-harvested natural sea salts for cooking, because what's wonderful about them is lost during the cooking process.
Finish a dish with hand-harvested natural sea salt. Or, keep the natural salts always available at the table for your guests. What's wonderful about these salts is their crystal texture, their crunch, sometimes their color, and the pure élan of showing-off by serving something elegantly special ... and, with a French name.
 Crunchy Sprinkles: To get Fleur-de-sel, salt farmers living along the Brittany coast allow their shallow salt pans (ponds) to fill with fresh salt water. As the water evaporates, a thin layer of salt crystals forms on the surface, but the slightest breeze will cause them to sink. If the crystals do sink, they pick up a grayish color from the clay and minerals at the bottom of the pond. The resulting coarse sea salt at the bottom of the salt pan, called Sel Gris, is highly regarded, but its really just sea salt - like all of the other sea salt you can buy. However, if the salt farmers are very lucky, on a very clear and sunny summer day with virtually no wind, the salt layer remains floating on the surface, and is harvested by skimming it off with a wooden rake-like implement at the end of the day. Voilà: Fleur-de-sel. Because conditions must be just right for Fleur-de-sel to form, the yield is only about one pound for every 80 pounds of regular Sel Gris.
Fleur-de-sel is composed of irregularly shaped grains of salt that are slightly moist and form flake-like clumps. This gives it a much different texture from ordinary salt. It's crunchy and perhaps slightly less salty than ordinary salt. Most people can't detect any other flavors, though some people swear it has the aroma of violets. It is almost always used as a garnish just before food is served; once the salt is dissolved and mixes with other flavors, the difference is impossible to detect.
 So, what about all those other culinary salts that we keep hearing about?
Black salt named Kala Namak in India, is really a blend of a little bit of salt mixed with a lot of other minerals characterized by a strong sulfur odor. It is commonly used in snack foods in North India.
 Sel gris (sometimes sold as "gray" salt) is claimed to be "organic" sea salt from the coastal "natural sea salt" salt pans [actually, this is mostly marketing hype. No salt (sea or otherwise) is "organic". All salts are inorganic ionic crystalline compounds, precipitated from an aqueous solution by the thermodynamically induced phase-change of the primary solvent.] Never-the-less, Sel gris is moist and unrefined, and tastes pretty good. It remains a light gray color because of the clay from the salt flats where it is collected. The salt is collected by hand. It is available as coarse crystals or as stone-ground fine grained "salt-shaker salt". It is considered by many to be the best quality culinary salt available.
 Hawaiian sea salt is produced from the Pacific waters off the Hawaiian islands. A natural mineral called "Alaea" (a red clay from Kauai rich in iron oxide) is added to the salt to add beneficial trace elements to the product. This natural additive is what gives the salt it's distinctive pink color. It is said to have a more mellow flavor than regular sea salt. These people are deliberately dumping rusty dirt into their salt before they sell it to me! Sheeesh!
 Kosher salt is an additive-free coarse-grained, flaky salt. It is not itself, "kosher", but is used in the production of Kosher meats to draw blood out of the meat. The salt is also preferred by some chefs because its flaky grains disperse more readily. By nature of it's "flake" texture it dissolves easily and is lighter (less dense) than table salt.
Lite salt is a mixture of "sodium chloride" salt and other substances such as potassium chloride (also a "salt", but one that does not contain sodium). Read the label. Don't bother using these products unless you have a medical reason to do so. They generally taste like you stuck your tongue to a battery.
 Pickling Salt - Pickling salt is fine-grained salt that does not contain iodine or anti-caking preservatives which cause darkened pickles and cloudy brine.
Popcorn Salt - This is just a superfine, flakier crystal version of table salt. There is not any real good reason to use it.
Pretzel Salt - A large-grained salt that does not dissolve quickly. The preferred salt for pretzels and salted bread sticks.
 Rock Salt - Is a large-crystal salt that is a slightly grayish color. It is less refined and still contains minerals that are removed from normal table salt. Rock salt has a few culinary uses such as in mechanical ice cream makers and is sometimes used as a bed for serving shellfish. Mostly, it is used for de-icing roads during the winter. You probably should avoid eating it. Because the manufacturers consider it to be an industrial chemical instead of a food product, they don't pay much attention to sanitation while making and packaging it.
Salt substitutes, are available for people on low-salt diets. They contain little or no sodium and are normally made of potassium chloride. (See lite salt, above.)
Sea salt is produced by evaporating sea water. (See sel gris, above) This process is more expensive than salt produced from mines. Sea salt comes in fine-grained or larger crystals. Many of these salts are refined and use some of the same additives as table salt. Read labels carefully. The large-crystal variety can be crushed in a mortar and pestle or in a salt grinder - a real impressive thing to do in front of your friends!
Seasoned salt is regular table salt blended with other herbs such as celery, onion, and garlic.
Sour salt is not salt at all but it is citric acid. It is used to add an extra tart flavor to sour dough and rye breads. It can be used in canning to prevent fruit from turning dark. (so can lemon juice, aspirin tablets, vitamin C pills, and vinegar)
 Table salt - you know, the old blue box, is the most commonly used salt. It is almost pure sodium chloride and is fine-grained. It usually contains a few additives to keep it from attracting moisture out of the air, and clumping up in the box. If the additives don't quite do the job, you can always add a few grains of dry rice or a saltine cracker to your salt shaker to keep the salt flowing. The reason we don't do that at Tapino, is that it would make us look like a cheap road-side diner. Besides, we live in a desert!
Iodized salt is just plain old table salt with Potassium Iodide added to provide a ready source of dietary iodine.
Why is iodine added to salt?
The health of your thyroid gland is dependant upon iodine which occurs naturally in foods via the soil foods are grown in. Back in the 1920's there was a region of the U.S. referred to as the "goiter" belt, around the Great Lakes and in the Northwestern U.S. It got that name due to the high incidence of "goiter", the thyroid disease caused by the lack of iodine in peoples diet. These regions were far from the ocean (all seafood is rich in iodine) and natural iodine was depleted from the farming soil. So, the government decided to solve the problem by passing a law that mandated the addition of iodine to table salt. Good ol' government. They know what is best for us ... even if it does make our salt taste like a rusty nail.
Will somebody please pass the salt?
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