The types of salts in cooking – sea salt, kosher salt and table salt

Question

I’ve heard of the various types of salt and I assumed that sea salt was mostly marketing.

But I keep hearing and seeing references to each type to salt when on a wiki-walk or google search.

– what do the various types of salt “bring to the table” (pun intended).

In: 5

Answer 1

Other than very minor differences in taste, they are all NaCl, salt. In cooking, if you use them in a way that they get dissolved in a liquid, then the same weight of salt will produce the same result, regardless of variety. Sometimes salt is left undissolved on the surface of food. In this case most recipes will specify kosher salt as the larger grains are more appealing.

Kosher salt is about half as dense, by dry measure. So a recipe that calls for 1 tsp of kosher salt dissolved in water could just use 1/2 tsp of table salt.