If you’ve got a sweet tooth like I do, surely you must have come across some sort of sea salt-enhanced dessert in the last few years? Just last week, I ate a caramel sea salt mocha cupcake from Dreamcakes which was good but didn’t make me want to marry it. It was the kiss of death: too sweet frosting. You need just the right amount of sugar.
Anyway, there was a sprinkling of sea salt on the frosting. And I’ve used sea salt for some health reasons, mixing it with warm water for sea salt soaks or nasal rinses. But what’s the big deal about it? Why is it popular? And most importantly, what is it?
Well, one thing is that we’re in the midst of that whole “Natural is good! Processed is bad!” food movement. Sea salt, as the name suggests, is salt from oceans or other salty bodies, the result of good old-fashioned evaporation. From ocean to table, as it were. Sea salt also tends to be coarser than table salt, and sometimes it can be colored. This is because minerals may be included with the leftover salt.
Table salt comes from beneath the earth’s surface. After it’s mined, iodine and anti-caking agents are often added while minerals are stripped away. Grinding down table sodium chloride makes it easy to dissolve into food.
Sea salt and table salt contain the same amount of sodium! Some chefs say that sea salt can taste different. That’s for you to judge.
Wikipedia mentions how different taste sensations have different mechanisms. Sweetness is detected by G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) while salty utilizes ion channels. I haven’t studied GPCRs and ion channels in years, but in general, that’s pretty interesting. Sourness is also sensed by ion channels. Hmm, maybe that explains why sweet-sour and sweet-salty are so popular. Sweet and salty/sour use different mechanisms so both can be detected at the same time? Maybe this is why sour salty never took off.
Writing this up is making me crave chocolate covered pretzels, my favorite sweet-salty combo dessert.
References
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