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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

Water dissolves salt, and some of it gets sucked back into meat via osmosis

WTF is wrong with people and osmosis? This is diffusion. Osmosis is diffusion of water and nothing else.

Also, "table salt tastes like shit" is quite true. I've been buying an unrefined sea salt for a while now, the difference is incredible. Flavor in foods, where before was mere saltiness.

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You're noticing the difference in the texture of the salt, not the flavor of the salt. You'll do just as well with kosher salt, which is significantly cheaper than sea salt (and, more importantly, comes in bigger containers).

I have a small bag of fleur de sel (we call it "crunchy salt") which I use to finish things, but again, it's for the texture. I wouldn't say I've found any incredible difference in salt flavor.

No, the flavor. Unrefined salts tend to carry loads of random minerals from the source, which lend their flavors to whatever you use it on.

I'm not a big salt-flavor fan, so I effectively never have salt pieces on anything. The texture doesn't exist in any salt I use, as it's all dissolved.

edit: finally found it. Redmond RealSalt, all the big grocery stores near me carry it. ~6.50 for 26 oz, so for my uses that's 6.50 for a year of salt usage, if not more.

Unrefined salts carry a miniscule amount of trace minerals from the source and this small amount of contamination is almost imperceptible. If you do not actually salt after cooking (and all of the salt is therefore dissolved into the food) then you are not tasting the so-called "flavor" of the salt, it is all in your head. A specialty salt can be mildly effective as a finishing agent but if you are adding it to the dish more than five minutes before it hits someone's mouth you are wasting your money.

In the case of the salt you mention this is just kosher salt with a particular bit of marketing spin on the package. What makes kosher salt the go-to choice for most chefs is the size of the crystal -- it is large enough that you can use a "pinch" in your fingers and get some control over distrbution and these large crystals also take a little while to completely dissolve so it is much better than standard table salt when you are doing something like salting a piece of meat prior to cooking. Another reason you may like it (given your stated aversion to salty flavors) is that because of the large crystal size a given volume of kosher salt has only half as much actual salt in it compared to table salt. If you have a recipe that calls for one teaspoon of salt and you use one teaspoon of kosher salt you are actually only putting in a half teaspoon of NaCl (the other half of the teaspoon is just air.) This is not bad for most cooking, but you should go out an get a bit of regular table salt if you do any baking at all, that is one area where cutting down on salt can ruin a recipe if you don't know what all of the other components in the recipe are doing and compensating appropriately.

Try some unrefined salts before claiming it's identical to table salt. In the stuff I have, there are clods of red & grey minerals. Sticking your finger in & tasting a bit, you can extremely easily taste a difference. Dissolving it in water, you can see the precipitates, and easily taste a difference. Double-blind in all cases, compared against two other kinds of "regular" salt. I'm careful with what I eat. It's even easily detectable in clear soups.

It's the flavor. Really. There is a difference. There's a definite marketing spin to try to sell it, but that doesn't imply there's no difference.

Mass-market sea salt and kosher salt are the same thing. Buy whichever is cheaper. You're right that it's better for cooking than table salt (except in baking, where you cannot use it). This is otherwise not worth arguing about.

A lot of people say they can detect an "off" flavor in table salt, maybe because of the anticaking agents, maybe because of the iodine. I wouldn't write off the difference between table salt and kosher salt, even if you're salting before you cook.

Using expensive salt before/during cooking though sounds crazy to me.

Cut her some slack. She did confess to sleeping through chemistry and otherwise wrote and illustrated a good article, while pounding bourbon.

It's not the article writer in particular, the article is basically fine in other respects, it's people in general. I see far more people using "osmosis" more often than "diffusion", despite almost never using it correctly.

For example, those "Learning through osmosis" signs in libraries, articles, shirts, etc. absolutely abound. It clearly isn't working if you think that's osmosis. Or there are tons of services with quotes like this: http://www.languagetutoring.co.uk/LearningThroughOsmosis.htm...

Evidently they aren't tutoring science.

Osmosis vs diffusion is not difficult to understand. It just seems people use it to sound smarter, and thus fail miserably 99% of the time.

"Osmosis vs diffusion is not difficult to understand. It just seems people use it to sound smarter, and thus fail miserably 99% of the time."

They fail 99% of the time with you, but if the vast majority of the people don't know the difference (as you said they don't), then the misusers aren't failing with the vast majority of listeners. :)

Incorrect statements are incorrect, whether or not anyone's around to hear the tree fall in the forest. I'll accept ramchip's explanation through simile, but quite literally that's the first time I've heard it (I may live under a rock in that, though).

Are you then implying that anything that the majority believes - heck, lets make it 99% - is true, and should be accepted?

Lets put it in geek-friendly terms, dating it back a number of years, so it strikes a chord with yc users: "Windows is the only operating system."

I was replying to your statement: "It just seems people use it to sound smarter, and thus fail miserably 99% of the time."

I'm saying they fail to sound smarter with you but perhaps succeed in sounding smarter [not at being right] with the vast majority.

I wouldn't say "learning through osmosis" is necessarily wrong. Knowledge is like water. Throw a human in an environment with concentrated knowledge and he will absorb some. Of course, this isn't strictly the same, but it's just a simile...

> table salt tastes like shit

What's the chemical difference? Doesn't the mined salt just come from old dried out seas?

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