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Comment by gattilorenz | Hacker News Reader

Everything else makes perfect sense, but

> I also use Himalayan pink salt, because table salt has no nutritional value

It’s… salt. Himalayan pink salt also has no real nutritional value (it is probably lacking iodine tho), it’s just salt with inclusions of other mineral that you get in much larger quantities with regular food. Unless you literally eat large chunks of salt every day, I guess.

Pink salt is a fad/marketing thing, exactly as margarine was…

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Then why does pink salt taste so much better in my de-ionized water and colloidal silver smoothies?

Is it the silver chloride precipitating inside your tastebuds? ;)

Try a double blind tasting. I don't knjow people who can tell pink salt from plain kitchen salt by taste, and I am familiar with a number of professional wine sommeliers.

You can totally tell the difference between sea salt, Himalayan salt and table salt.

They change the flavor profile of many foods drastically.

Even though table salt is probably better for you sure to the iodine content, pink salt is just so much better for the taste buds.

I would love to meet someone who can do it in a double blind test with distilled water.

Flavour is highly influenced by color. Tasting happens in the brain.

A lot of the taste difference with salt comes from the size it’s ground to, or at least that’s what I was told in the one cooking class. Hence why you might want to sprinkle a steak with large chunks of salt, but use finely ground somewhere else.

Did you know that professional wine sommeliers confuse white wine and red wine if tricked by visual cues?

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...

This is why tasting should be at least blind.

It’s interesting because personally I find pink salt lacking in taste and never use it in my dishes

99% of the time we are using salt for flavor, not for the nutritional value. So the inclusion of a small amount of minerals has value in changing the flavor of the salt. Also, iodine adds a bad metallic taste, so that's another reason to choose something besides standard table salt.

Sure, if you can notice such a “different taste” (I don’t, and certainly not in a dish, but maybe that’s me) and this has value for you, go ahead.

Iodine, tho, it’s something you actually need depending on where you live, so I’ll keep buying iodated salt until I move to the seaside…

I find myself reaching for the pink one more often than not. Taste has a lot more going for it than the concentrated white dust natrium chloride. It's also interesting that you cannot taste the difference. Do you usually consume lots of the stuff?

> Do you usually consume lots of the stuff?

I mean… it’s salt? I use it to salt stuff, I don’t eat it alone. I use moderate (normal?) amounts, mostly in dishes.

For the most part it is not a topping or something that stays unmelted on top of a very bland food… but maybe it depends on what you cook and eat.

Coarser-grained salt, if it's sprinkled on top of something, can give you more of a salt taste sensation which can often be desirable. But that's the effect of the size of the grains, not any trace mineral or other elements.

Indeed, I do use coarser salt or fleur de sel, but only on few things (e.g. on top of a steak, fish, or on oven-baked potatoes), and I do notice the difference. To me, pink salt just doesn’t taste different to comparably-sized white salt in a noticeable way.

Salts definitely have different flavors

Ever blind taste taste it on food where it’s not visible?

Yes, and it's noticeable. Most people don't feel the difference probably because the food they are adding it to is already extremely tasty. But trust me, put some salt on an unseasoned fish and you'll immediately taste the differences

Yeah but could you tell the difference in a blind tasting between salt A, salt B, and salt C, on food? That was the question.

What part of my reply did not answer that question? I said it depends on the food

> iodine adds a bad metallic taste

I cannot disagree more! Iodine is an essential part of sea salt. Rock salt is bland and boring in comparison. That said, I agree that refined salt is much worse.

"Iodine is an essential part of sea salt."

Naturally occurring iodine (in sea salt) does not compare in dosage to fortified (table) salt.

IIRC, fortified salt is recommended because iodine is uncommon in normal diets.

>iodine adds a bad metallic taste

"Iodized salt in the U.S. contains 45 micrograms of iodine per gram of salt." [1]

There's no way anyone can taste that. If the iodide ion even has a distinct taste independent of its cation.

[1] https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-q-...

> There's no way anyone can taste that.

Hmm I'd check the last 'things i won't work with'.

Unless you want goiter and cretinism, iodising salt is (for inland populations, at least) a big public health win.

(tangentially related: I once heard a story that there was some deficiency disease that was only diagnosed after WWII: it turns out allied officers in japanese POW camps got white, not brown, rice — and were massively affected by the disease in question while the enlisted men in the same camps were barely affected)

I think that's Beriberi or thiamine (B1) deficiency.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e...

Depends on the diet. These days it doesn't matter if you're inland or not. Seafood and seaweed are shipped worldwide.

Iodized salt was responding to a regional deficiency that was discovered 100+ years ago. The data that the decision was based on is completely obsolete.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodised_salt#In_public_health_... > Worldwide, iodine deficiency affects two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of intellectual and developmental disabilities.

It is not a problem that can be fixed "forever". Iodised salt solved it, so moving away to non-iodised salts can make it resurface. One should evaluate their own personal iodine intake - if you are not getting it from salt then you should be getting it from somewhere else.

> Pink salt is a fad/marketing thing, exactly as margarine was…

Only if you believe microplastics are harmless (you really shouldn't).

Sea salt consistently has far more plastic in it than rock salt. If I'm reading this study [0] right, it's about 10x more microplastics than rock salt, which makes sense if you think about it.

0 - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b04180

Even though I don’t care for micro plastics (e.g. I don’t look into it), I also buy (perfectly white) rock salt by chance. They dig it up 10 km from here, not on the Himalaya.

> If I'm reading this study [0] right, it's about 10x more microplastics than rock salt, which makes sense if you think about it.

Yes, it does make sense, but that’s because micro plastics are everywhere we bother to look. In the air, in the water, in the fish, in animals, etc. However, that is no evidence that the micro plastics we get from salt are significant in any way compared to other sources, particularly considering how little of the stuff we actually eat. From an ecological point of view, getting it from the sea is much better than ripping mountains apart to extract it.

It looks like you are equating pink salt, and mined salt. Mined salt usually colored in white-gray spectrum.

Given the inorganic nature of sea salt, I believe it should be feasible to remove most microplastics from it, by applying intense heat briefly, in an oxygen atmosphere, so the microplastic particles would just burn away.

In The Netherlands, if you want your iodine dosage, all you need to do is eat bread once a day (I don't know if it counts for all bread like gluten-free). Because it is fortified with iodine. Other countries solve it differently, but you don't have to normally make up for it in The Netherlands.

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