How is sea salt any different from industrial salt? Isn’t it all the same compound? Why would it matter how fancy it is? Would it really taste they same?
In: Chemistry
Geochemist here. There are some complications that I will get to at the end but here’s the ELI5:
Salt, in the eating meaning, not the chemistry meaning, is the mineral halite, NaCl, sodium chloride. There are generally 2 common ways to get salt. The first is by evaporating sea water until the salt crystallizes and then scooping up the crystals. This could be done in big open ponds using the heat of the sun or by taking the seawater and running it through industrial evaporators. When you do this you get a lot of the trace elements in seawater along with the salt. If you evaporate it far enough you get other “salts” forming like potassium chloride or magnesium chloride (you might also get some calcium sulphate or gypsum).
The other main kind of salt is rock salt. This is from beds of sodium chloride salts that were formed in ancient seas then buried and compressed into, well, rock. When this happens trapped evaporated seawater is squished out and you usually end up with quite pure salt. This salt can be mined or sometimes pulled out of the ground by pumping water in and dissolving the salt. The salty water is pumped out and then evaporated to for the crystals you get from the store.
The different processes can make the salt taste different and you may or may not think the impurities in the sea salt are a good thing.
The complications are that the exact process to make sea salt is variable and that some rock salt can contain more of other minerals depending on how it formed, like Himalayan pink salt. Also there is a lot of marketing so that people will bend the description of their product to whatever they think will sell best.
Latest Answers