h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

what kind of salt do you use?

the plain refined one?
Some say that´s not a good idea, instead we should use salts like the hymalayan pink, maldon?, non refined salt... etc.

Does it make any difference one kind of salt or another?

Ah, glad you asked.
Don't know... except what I have is crystals, in a grinder which is getting low - and I can't find a refill packet.

What I do know is that
1. we need salt
2. we need all sorts of other things, too, in the way of trace elements/compounds.
3. when it comes time to refill the grinder, I'll be looking for the kind of stuff that you lot are going to tell me about...

I don't use much salt, really.

I never use it as a condiment (sprinkled on food on the plate etc).

I only use in cooking where required; mainly, for me, this is in bread making, and I use a fancy one, that doesn't have any of the added anticlogging agents, anticaking agents, etc., etc., in it, as my yeast wouldn't like those nasty chemicals... Not entirely sure what the current salt is, it comes from the hippy organic shop n nearby and wasn't wildly expensive, but is just* salt, without the added stuff in it

We have been using 'Sea Salt' for the last several years, one of my wife's doctors said it was better.

I don't use a great deal of it myself, but it seems ok. It comes in both course and fine granulation.

F S

It depends on whether I am wanting the texture of sea salt crystals. I cant taste the difference, but crunchy lumps of salt on top of bread is lovely.

PP.

My doctors have steered me away from salt of any kind since about 1982. When I cook, I use chicken bouillon cubes [which are mostly salt], and a tiny bit of added salt to make the food taste good.

If I'm eating out, and the chef cares to use sea salt or celery salt or garlic salt, I'm fine with that.

There's a modern tendency to be afraid of food. I have no idea where this phobic mindset came from, but it complicates the job of finding food that can be enjoyed. At some point in the late 1980s, a leading nutritionist was presented with evidence that carbohydrates might contribute, via insulin, to cancer. The nutritionist is supposed to have said that too much protein is bad for your kidneys and too much fat is bad for your heart. You've got to eat *something!*

My mother was one of the most food-phobic people I've ever known. Over the last 15 years of her life, it was a struggle to get her t eat much of anything. My father became frequently frustrated with her, because she was so thin and frail.

I think that the concept of balance has become lost. The ancients would be ashamed of us! One of the best-known Latin proverbs is "mens sana in corpore sano" [a sound mind in a sound body]. The Greeks had Homer, who gave Odysseus the task of steering a middle course between Scylla [on one side of a channel] and Charybdis [on the other side]. Obsessions with conformity were dealt with through the tale of Procrustes, an evil highwayman who waylaid passersby and made them lie in his bed. If their legs hung over the edge, Procrustes would chop them off. If the passerby was too short for the bed, Procrustes would stretch him/her to fit. In the 18th century, Haydn and Mozart attempted to write music that would appeal to both experts and the general public. By the 1930s this philosophy was dead, and music tastes splintered into numerous competing camps. Meanwhile, in science, reductionism was the big obsession: chopping up organisms to see what the parts looked like. In nutrition, this meant examining individual nutrients to see what effect they had on health. Vitamins were a big challenge, because initially they would seem to be beneficial for particular purposes [Vitamin C against the common cold], but if you gave someone a vitamin pill with just the one vitamin in it, havoc might be the result. What? Vitamins are supposed to work together in the body, along with all the other nutrients that are taken in? That's just too crazy for our modern world!

I don't care what kind of salt anyone uses, with one small exception: If you live far from the sea and don't eat seafood, you *might* eventually get an iodide shortage. Iodized salt might help. if you need it. Or, you could eat more seafood.

NaCl, I think.

*giggle* I'm with you there, Icy

However... Normally, a table salt with some Iodine for cooking. But people complain I don't use enough. At the table, there's the same kind in a small shaker, but also some fancy pyramid shaped crystals, just because they're pretty. And we have some Hawaiian traditional salt - sun dried in shallow pits on the ground, and therefore slightly orange/pink. Also mostly because it's pretty, and some nostalgic reasons.

I like the taste and texture of undissolved crystals, but not on every meal. Now and then only.

So what's the carbon footprint of Himalayan yeti salt?

Must be huge - there's nothing apart from the footprint.

I will ask the Tibetan Navy to get me some.

Saxo table salt in cooking. Potatoes, scrambled eggs, rice, some baking recipes - that's all. I keep it in a jar by the cooker and I'm just now getting to the bottom of the jar, so that's about 400g of salt over 5 or maybe even 10 years. Shared among five of us.

Sea salt crystals on the table. I don't think I've topped up the dispenser in 20 years though. It's just there because it matches the one for the pepper.

I also have a greasy caff type salt cellar, containing Saxo, for sprinkling on chips only. With malt vinegar, obvs.

It's possibly worth mentioning here that when governments and health experts bang on about not adding so much salt to cooking, the people they are really directing this at are the older generation (ie older than me, I'm 44). I know this because I used to help out at a luncheon club for the elderly. And where I add perhaps a quarter of a teaspoon of salt to a large pot of boiling potatoes, the helpers there (all old enough to be my mum) automatically added around a tablespoonful (which is, what, sixteen times as much?).

I mean, it tasted delicious, but that's Too Much Salt.

Mol

How much of that salt would really be consumed, though? Most of the salt added to potatoes in the put is presumably poured away with the cooking water.

...in the *pot*.

When cooking pasta, I lean towards doing as (I believe) The Italians say they do. Cook it in water as salty as the sea.

That's about a fistful so far as I can see. So actually, I doubt that I ever really reach THAT amount.

PP.

When I'm cooking a recipe good for three or four meals, I usually add one small bouillon cube [which is mostly salt] and about a third of a teaspoon of salt. Then I add no more salt ever. Various government agencies recommend not ingesting more than 2,000 milligrams of salt a day. I probably stay below that level.

How much salt is in a saline drip?

>> I used to help out at a luncheon club for the elderly. And where I add perhaps a quarter of a teaspoon of salt to a large pot of boiling potatoes, the helpers there (all old enough to be my mum) automatically added around a tablespoonful (which is, what, sixteen times as much?).
I mean, it tasted delicious, but that's Too Much Salt.

And yet if they've managed to become elderly, perhaps that level of salt in the water hasn't done them any harm?

In the past I've seen a few people advocate salt in water as being a Good Thing for bringing out the flavour, without it contributing hugely to your salt intake.

I take *all* Official Advice about health with a pinch of salt, and they were all around 70 so yes, maybe it helped to preserve them. Although most of them were widows so possibly not so good for their other halves. They also used to sprinkle salt liberally over the plate before eating.

But they probably never ate processed food.

Mol

the only problem we have with salt is if we have guests and they reach for the salt grinder before tasting anything. my gets really really

(Lenny Henry did it brilliantly in Chef! that time - totally over the top, and my was nodding and saying "he's very restrained")