The Best Salt for Cooking: Which Salt to Use for Which Job

Kosher, table, sea, pink, fleur de sel: the salt aisle makes this look like a big decision. It mostly isn’t. Every cooking salt is basically sodium chloride, and once it dissolves into a dish the type makes little difference to taste. For most kitchens, the best setup is one kosher or table salt you know well for cooking, plus a flaky or coarse sea salt for finishing. What does differ is crystal size, and that decides how much salt lands in a spoonful, how easy it is to pinch, and how it looks and crunches on top of food.

Quick answer by job

Why the type matters less than people think

Chemically, the salts on a supermarket shelf are the same thing. In its most basic form, salt is sodium chloride, whatever the source. The Codex Alimentarius standard for food-grade salt, which covers salt from the sea, rock deposits and brine, requires at least 97% sodium chloride on a dry basis.⁵

A Swiss government survey of 25 salts found all of them were 83% to 99% sodium chloride. It concluded that specialty salts “do not possess any advantages over standard salts” and lack nutritional properties that would make them a recommended choice.⁶ Look how narrow its sodium figures are:

The American Heart Association puts table salt at about 40% sodium and says table salt, kosher salt and most sea salts all have about that much.⁷

Taste tests agree. ATK found that sea salts vary only slightly in flavor and taste no different from table salt once mixed into food. It also couldn’t detect any difference in taste between iodized and noniodized salt.³ So the popular claim that table salt tastes bitter from its iodine doesn’t hold up against that test.

What does matter: crystal size and measuring

The same teaspoon holds very different amounts of salt depending on the crystals. ATK weighed a teaspoon of table salt at about 6 g regardless of brand, Morton kosher salt at 4.8 g and Diamond Crystal kosher salt at 2.8 g.¹ That gap is why swapping salts by volume goes wrong, and the published conversions don’t agree:

What to do with that: weigh salt when a recipe gives grams. When it names a brand, use that brand. When it just says “kosher salt,” start low and taste. Morton’s chart treats its own table salt, fine and coarse sea salt and canning salt as equal by the teaspoon,⁸ but that only holds for Morton products.

The main salts, one by one

Table salt

Fine, uniform crystals made by rapid vacuum evaporation, usually with an anticaking agent. Morton’s iodized salt, for example, lists salt, calcium silicate (an anticaking agent), dextrose and potassium iodide.⁹ The small, even grains dissolve fast and measure consistently, so it’s a good default for baking. Iodized table salt is the main salt source of iodine, which your body needs to make the thyroid hormones thyroxine and triiodothyronine.⁴ See table salt and iodized vs. non-iodized salt.

Kosher salt

Named for koshering, the process of drawing blood from meat under Jewish dietary law, which is what its coarse grains were first used for. The bigger crystals are easy to pinch and spread over meat and vegetables. The two big US brands behave very differently (see the table above). Diamond Crystal’s light crystals are forgiving; Morton’s denser flakes pack more salt into each spoonful.¹ Kosher salt isn’t usually iodized.⁴ See kosher salt and cooking with kosher salt.

Sea salt

Salt from seawater, one of the sources the Codex standard names for food-grade salt, sold in everything from fine grains to flakes and coarse crystals. Sea salt may carry trace minerals like magnesium, potassium and calcium, but the AHA says total sodium intake is what matters for heart health.⁷ ATK found sea salt tastes no different from table salt once it’s mixed into food, and recommends it as a finishing salt.³ See sea salt, cooking with sea salt and Maldon sea salt.

Fleur de sel

The thin layer of crystals that forms in sheets on the surface of seawater salt pans and gets skimmed off by hand. The best-documented source is Guérande, on France’s Atlantic coast, where “Fleur de sel de Guérande” is a protected geographical indication. Its specification requires the salt to be hand-harvested, unwashed and free of additives, with moisture no higher than 12%.¹⁰ It’s a finishing salt. Stir it into a pot of soup and you’ve wasted the texture you paid for. We found no sourced price data. See fleur de sel.

Sel gris (gray salt)

In Guérande, gray salt crystallizes on the clay bottom of the same pans that yield fleur de sel, and it’s harvested by hand separately. The gray comes from fine clay particles, not extra minerals, and the specification allows up to 1% insoluble matter, against under 0.20% for fleur de sel.¹⁰ “Celtic Sea Salt” is a brand, founded in 1976,¹¹ not a general term for gray salt. The coarse, damp crystals are good for finishing meat and roasted vegetables. See Celtic sea salt.

Himalayan pink salt

Rock salt mined in Pakistan, which produces Himalayan pink salt for commercial distribution. The state-owned Pakistan Mineral Development Corporation runs the Khewra mine. The pink comes from traces of iron oxide. An Australian study of 31 pink salts found that the minerals in a normal 5 g serving made no clinically significant contribution to nutrient intake. To get a meaningful amount, you’d have to eat over 30 g a day, with far too much sodium.¹² Use it for color and crunch, not health. See Himalayan salt and cooking with Himalayan salt.

Canning and pickling salt

Salt sold specifically for canning and pickling. The National Center for Home Food Preservation recommends it because the anticaking agents in table salt can make brine cloudy and iodized salt can darken pickles. You can still make pickles safely with either iodized or noniodized table salt. Flake salts vary in density and aren’t recommended for pickling.² See pickling salt.

Health and sodium

Whichever salt you pick, the sodium is the same by weight, give or take a few percent.⁷⁶ A larger-crystal salt has less sodium per teaspoon only because fewer crystals fit in the spoon. The FDA’s Daily Value for sodium is less than 2,300 mg a day,¹³ and the World Health Organization advises adults to stay under 2,000 mg a day, naming raised blood pressure as the main health effect of high-sodium diets.¹⁴ If you count on salt for iodine, keep iodized table salt around. Sea salt, kosher salt, Himalayan salt and fleur de sel usually aren’t iodized.⁴

Related pages

Comparisons: kosher salt vs. table salt, kosher salt vs. sea salt, table salt vs. sea salt, Himalayan salt vs. table salt, fleur de sel vs. sea salt and pickling salt vs. kosher salt. Other salts: rock salt, smoked sea salt, black salt and truffle salt. If a dish is already too salty, see too much salt.