Your recipes often call for kosher salt. Do I really have to use it?—Jordan Richard, via email
Well, no. But, as you probably have figured out, recipe developers often prefer it over table salt. So do chefs.
“I tell my students not to use table salt,” says Paul McGreevy, a chef and instructor with the Culinary Arts program at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary. Why? “Table salt generally contains more than just salt. It has anti-clumping agents, and sugar, believe it or not.” It also, of course, contains iodine; a diet deficient in iodine is the most common cause of goitres—enlarged thyroid glands. “But I don’t use table salt, and I don’t have any goitres,” says McGreevy. (For the record, you can get iodine from natural food sources too. And if you’re concerned about goitres, consult a doctor.)
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Kosher salt, unlike table salt, is typically only sodium chloride, with no additives. It’s coarser, with larger grains. The name kosher comes from the fact that it has often been used when “koshering” meat or poultry, a.k.a. removing blood before cooking. Kosher salt is useful for seasoning food. It’s easier to control how much you’re adding, because the grains are easier to pinch, pick up, and sprinkle.
You didn’t ask about sea salt, but occasionally, CL recipes call for it. McGreevy is a fan for its flavour and its texture (it can be used as a “finishing” salt). “I’ll buy a 10 kilogram bag of it,” he says. “I put it in a mill and grind it if I want fine, and I have coarse if I want coarse,” he says. “But I’m a chef, and I nerd out on things like salt.”
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You probably nerd out on other stuff. McGreevy gets that. “If all you have is table salt…it is what it is.” That said, on average, kosher salt is less dense than table salt, so, depending on the recipe, if you swap one for the other in a one-to-one ratio, it could make your food either more or less salty.
Got a question for Cottage Q&A? Send it to answers@cottagelife.com.
This article was originally published in the May 2025 issue of Cottage Life.
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