White table salt?
How predictable.
If you really want to perk up your foods, try something unusual from the world of specialty salts: lingerie pink from Peru. Oyster gray from France. Rust red or jet black from Hawaii. Brown-sugar amber from Denmark. And many more.
These specialty salts from around the globe are a culinary craze. Chefs, home cooks and foodies fork over as much as $36 per pound for designer sodium, even though an equivalent amount of table salt costs about $1. They contend that the flavor is superior and that the coarse-grain crunchiness adds an interesting texture to all dishes: salads and sirloins, chicken breasts and chocolate pastries.
“Generally, specialty sea salts are unrefined and hand-harvested. Trace minerals as well as natural crystallization make them more flavorful and fun,” says Rob Seideman, owner of Salt Traders, a business that sells an international selection of salts, and the Cooking School of Aspen in Colorado.
Thomas Keller, chef-owner of the renowned French Laundry in California’s Napa Valley, places an arrangement of colorful imported sea salts on each table for his customers to enjoy with their meat courses. In the kitchen, he puts swanky Maldon salt–a delicate, soft sea salt from Essex, England –on salmon. On super-sweet tomatoes mounded on delicate strands of capelli pasta, he adds a just-right sprinkling of fleur de sel, an opaque white sea salt whose name means “flower of salt.”
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Victoria Rodriguez ([email protected])