Ingredients · Salt

Sea Salt

Sodium chloride

Sea Salt
Seawater, evaporated. It is in twenty-five products here, which understates it — salt is the ingredient that makes every other ingredient taste like itself. Fine sea salt dissolves on contact and is the everyday cooking salt: a teaspoon in a soup pot, half a teaspoon per cup of flour in bread. Coarse is for a grinder, a brine, or a crust. The nutritional difference between sea salt and table salt is essentially nothing — both are sodium chloride — so the reason to choose it is the taste and the texture, which is reason enough.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partMineral
KindSalt
CaffeineCaffeine-free
TasteClean salinity with nothing else in the way

How to use it

Fine salt for baking, sauces, soups, brines and marinades — anywhere it has to dissolve evenly. Coarse for the grinder, for a salt crust, for a brine you can see dissolving, and for finishing, where the crystal is the point. Salt pasta water until it tastes of the sea. Salt meat ahead of time, not at the pan.

With food

Everything. Particularly: butter, chocolate, caramel, tomato, watermelon, cucumber, eggs, bread and any fat that needs waking up.

With spices

Black pepper. Every blend in this shop that is not salt-free is built on it.

With tea

Not a tea ingredient, though a salted bite alongside a tannic black tea does soften it.

Its story

Where it comes from

Made by evaporating seawater; modern production concentrates in the Mediterranean and other warm, dry climates, while cooler salt coasts historically burned fuel to do it. Our shop notes name no sea and no country, so lot origin is unconfirmed.

What happened

Sea salt is named in the Buddhist Vinaya Pitaka, compiled in the mid-fifth century BC. Its most famous handful is more recent. Under the Salt Act of 1882 the British held a monopoly on collecting and making salt in India and taxed it; salt lay free on the shore and Indians had to buy it from the government. Gandhi called the salt tax the most iniquitous of all from the poor man's standpoint, and said that next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life. On 12 March 1930 he left Sabarmati Ashram with seventy-eight marchers and walked some 385 km to the sea at Dandi, arriving on 5 April. At half past eight the next morning he picked up a lump of salty mud. By the end of that year about sixty thousand people were in jail. One footnote worth stating plainly: the persistent claim that Roman legions were paid in salt is baseless, whatever the word salary looks like.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

Every ingredient in the shop

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