“Use more salt,” extolls Randall Doetzer. That might sound antithetical to what we often hear from doctors and nutritionists who warn against too much sodium, but there is some serious consideration behind his advice.
Randall Doetzer of Nota Bene (Photo by Kate Feucht Photography)
Think of salt as a gateway drug. “Salt,” says the Nota Bene executive chef, “is a baby step to controlling your food: taking back your cooking and controlling what you’re bringing into your house and putting into your body.”
You see, it’s highly unlikely you’ll be adding salt to your food if your food is overly processed and from a can or a box; fresh ingredients, or those minimally processed, benefit and shine with the addition of salt, especially when it’s the right kind and administered in the right amount and at the right time.
And Doetzer has experimented with salt. A lot of it. Mined salts. Harvested salts. Fine and flake salts, salts smoked and flavored. At times he’s had more than 30 varieties of salt in his personal collection, playing with them for home and work. The main lesson he’s learned? “Most of them are marketing scams.”
From left, Maldon flake salt, French gray salt (sel gris), Diamond Crystal kosher salt, Trapani sea salt (Photo by Kate Feucht Photography)
A Good Foundation
Chef Randall Doetzer's recommendations for salts every cook should have in their cupboard:
- Maldon flake salt
- French gray salt (sel gris)
- Diamond Crystal kosher salt
- Trapani sea salt
Many salts are of “dubious origin,” at least according to Doetzer, who says production is dominated by a handful of corporations that peddle many of the landscape’s expensive artisanal salts. With little regulation or labeling requirements, it’s hard to discern if your $10-an-ounce salt was actually harvested by hand in a quaint little seaside village or churned out by the same factory producing the variety that melts snow on wintry roads.
A little due diligence can go a long way when tracking down your favorite brand’s source, but even then, you should approach with a critical eye. “That trendy Himalayan salt may claim [it's] creating good jobs, but it’s in Pakistan and there’s no way to verify working conditions,” Doetzer warns. There’s a reason why working in a salt mine carries negative connotations. Likewise, salts from Africa or Central America are often produced by burning trees, which often leads to deforestation. Sure, jobs are created, but what’s the long-term cost?
To the conscious consumer, salt can be a nightmare. If you want to follow the chef’s advice and use salt to reclaim your cooking, what can you do to avoid the scams, be conscientious and find the right salts to enhance your food properly? Doetzer recommends you experiment to identify four salts that fulfill your various needs, and research them. Heavily. Then, when you’ve found the right salts, buy them in bulk to keep your costs low, but remember to store the salt properly — in a dry, airtight container — to maintain the minerals' natural moisture content.
Two “workhorse” salts should be reserved for seasoning during cooking, preferably fine sea salts. Avoid salts with additives; chemicals that prevent clumping or trace minerals can seriously affect the flavor of your food in a negative way, and the trace minerals, sometimes touted as a health benefit, often appear in quantities too small to be of any benefit.
For cooking, Doetzer likes Trapani sea salt, harvested naturally from salt flats in Sicily, which imbue the ideal moisture and create a flavor that’s not too aggressive in the final dish. When curing or salting water, even adding salt during baking, he turns to Diamond Crystal kosher salt, a mined salt free of chemical flavors. While Diamond is factory-produced, its consistency and low cost make it perfect for methods that require large quantities of the mineral.
The other two salts every home cook should own are finishing salts, usually coarse or flake. Finishing salts differ from cooking salts in that they not only enhance flavor but also add texture and visual appeal. Maldon, and most other flake sea salts, offer a low moisture content that maintains texture, from a little to a big crunch, and it’s especially pleasing when sprinkled atop finished food. Some flake salts even retain vibrant colors, such as the black volcanic or red alaea, both from Hawaii, and can be used to create pleasing, vibrant contrasts on your finished plate.
To round out your finishing salts, purchase a good sel gris, a French gray sea salt. Higher in moisture content, sel gris is nearly wet. Traditionally harvested by hand, it has a slightly briny undertone that matches well with seafood but isn’t so strong that it can’t be used on more delicate ingredients such as eggs. If you’ve never used finishing salts before, do experiment before rolling them out at a dinner party. Often they aren’t as strong as your workhorse salts, so you run the risk of under-seasoning your dish. Also avoid adding finishing salts during cooking; their slightly higher cost, coupled with the risk of burying the taste that makes each finishing salt unique, defeats their special purpose.
Noticeably absent from Doetzer’s recommendations are spice-salt mixtures and smoked salts, and for good reason: He finds too many of these blends rely on chemicals and artificial flavors, which negatively affect both the salt’s flavor and how it enhances your food. Better, and cheaper, to make your own garlic or herbed salts, easily done using garlic powder or fresh herbs. Smoked salts are a little more difficult to make at home, and are often the most chemically laden if produced commercially. When needed, Doetzer tries to source his smoked salts from Scandinavia, where there’s a long tradition of cold-smoking salt using birch woods instead of liquid smoke.
Salt is the oldest of humanity’s seasonings, used to enhance and preserve food for thousands of years. Today’s sodium-laden, mass-produced food products, where “industrial salt is the flavor, not the enhancement,” concern Doetzer greatly. It’s time we reconnect with this ancient mineral to enhance and reclaim our own ingredients, one pinch at a time.
