Is Sea Salt Any Better Than Plain Old Table Salt?
Sarabeth Matilsky August 24, 2002 Sea salt is often purported to be as healthy as it is tasty. But in reality, all the salt we eat is from the sea—either evaporated directly from sea water, or mined from salt deposits left over from extinct oceans. In “What Einstein Told His Cook,” Robert Wolke writes, “There are gray and pinkish-gray sea salts from Korea and France, and black sea salt from India, all of which owe their colors to local clays and algae in the evaporation ponds, not to the salt (sodium chloride) that they contain. Black and red sea salts from Hawaii owe their colors to deliberately added powdered black lava and red baked clay. These rare and exotic boutique salts…have undeniably unique flavors, of course; they taste like salt mixed with various clays and algae.” The FDA requires that all U.S. table salt, “sea” or otherwise,” to be at least 97.5 percent pure sodium chloride, although it’s usually much purer. The evaporative crystallization process (used to manufacture “
