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Comment by davidcelis | Hacker News Reader

> In fact when most recipes specify a volumetric measurement of salt they mean table salt

That’s really not true. Most food writers would tell you that the standard is kosher salt, and many would specify diamond kosher

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Maybe, just maybe, in the last 10-20 years when this trend for flakey salt has taken off. Any recipe you see older than 10 years I would safely bet that they meant table salt, and I would still recommend using table salt unless otherwise specified on anything more recent, that goes triple for any baking recipes. Again, unless for finishing.

Of course if the recipe specifies weight rather than volume, the point is moot.

And speaking as a former fine dining line cook, any food writer specifying kosher for anything other than fininshing/curing is a dolt IMO :)

Flakey salt is not the same as kosher salt. I just flipped through my four most used cookbooks and they all say "salt measurements are for kosher salt" in the preface somewhere. Three of them specify diamond crystal.

I've also got a coffee table book written in 1999 that says the same.

Agreed. Kosher salt is mainly not flaky, it just has slightly larger granules than table salt. I think the poster above might be conflating some of the flakier salts you can get which might also be kosher with standard kosher salt.

I think the main reason people go for kosher salt in recipes, cooking, and even baking is that it doesn’t taste of iodine. Table salt with iodine tastes slightly metallic, which will basically make your food taste worse. I’m an amateur cool, but you can simply taste the difference, so why make food taste worse/weirdly metallic?

I defy you to taste the difference between iodized and not in a blind test. All else being equal of course, size and shape differences would be a giveaway. So equal mass dissolved in water.

You can taste a slight difference between iodized and non iodized salt on its own but I very strongly doubt anyone would be able to detect that difference once the salt has been added to anything.

In America perhaps.

In the UK the term isn't used, iodine is not (or it's so rare I've never seen/heard of it, and can't find an example now) added ever, and anti-caking agent is only added if it's marketed as a table salt.

In the UK, iodine is added to cattle feed instead of salt, so it's contained in dairy products. No idea whether this can be a problem for vegans.

"Kosher salt" isn't a thing this side of the pond (at least in Germany). Even regular coarse salt is not something you can expect to find in an average kitchen.

In Switzerland, I never was able to find kosher salt. Coarse yes, table yes, but flaky kosher salt? Nope

Exactly, same here (also Suisse). It boggles my mind why would anybody use any other type of salt for anything, I guess lessons from primary school about iodine and its roles are long forgotten.

I never ever felt any bad taste from iodized salts. Had to actually google what kosher salt means, the connection with real kosher food is 0 and it seems purely US term.

There are whole articles about why you should never use iodized salts... seriously wtf

Table salt is so fine that it is hard to sprinkle over food evenly and in controlled amounts. The taste isn't the issue.

You typically use different types of salt based on the size/shape of the grains. You want something larger and hollow for finishing, because it gives a nice texture, as an example.

Every time I get the chance, I take a small amount of kosher salt (which is just salt used for koshering, not salt that is kosher) and a small amount of iodized salt and have visitors do a taste test. I've never had someone prefer the iodized salt, and they can always tell the difference between the two.

Maybe they have different labels in different countries, though.

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