Sea Salt

Essential to great cooking, salt is a basic ingredient that should never be taken for granted. Properly used, the right kind of salt brings out the best in food and can make all the difference between a dish that’s just okay and one that’s very good. The most commonly available variety is table salt. It’s been iodized, which tends to give it a bitter flavour; phosphates or starch are added to keep the salt free of clumps, so it pours freely.

Replacing table salt with sea salt is a simple way to improve your culinary experience. Because it’s full of minerals, it has a much more interesting flavour. Sea salt comes in coarse or fine grind or in flakes. It’s easy to find, and most brands are reasonably priced. For all the recipes in this book, I recommend using sea salt. It’s actually my secret mission to rid all the kitchens I visit of table salt and relegate it to the garage, ready for melting snow off the driveway.

The ultimate sea salt is fleur de sel, which comes from the Guérande region on the west coast of France. Because it’s handharvested, it’s still slightly damp when you take it out of the jar. Although fleur de sel is expensive, it’s exquisite as a condiment or finishing salt. If you have the opportunity to buy some, give yourself a treat – it’s worth the price. The best way to use it is as a garnish on sliced vine-ripened tomatoes, on roasted potatoes hot out of the oven, or on a steak straight from the grill.

Salt has become such a darling of the culinary world in the past few years that all sorts of exotic varieties are now available. In red sea salt from Hawaii, volcanic clay is actually added to give it colour. or try black sea salt, which has a strong sulphuric taste that works well in Indian cooking. C restaurant in Vancouver smokes sea salt and packages it for retail sale across the country. A pinch of it on grilled tuna or salmon is sublime.