Salt as cooking ingredient

Almost 80% of the sodium consumed comes from processed food. Salt has been used to preserve food since human started cooking. Salt performs many culinary functions, and one of them, is to enhance the flavor of foods.

Different people have such widely different tolerances for salt in their food that no recipe can guarantee to please every palate.
Salt is harvested from sea and rocks. Sea salt is more expensive and can be found in many high, expensive grades, colors.

Sea salt is much preferred in cooking by professional chefs for its more delicate flavor. Harvested from evaporated seawater, it contains useful trace minerals, including some naturally occurring iodine.

Rock salt is literally minced from earth, from dried up sedimentary lakes and seas. It is refined to produce pure sodium chloride. Iodized slat is rock fortified with iodine and has noticeably metallic flavor.

Expanding the concept of salt to include seasonings such as miso, tamari, shoyu, umeboshi, and even olives and sauerkraut can give much more inventiveness to the cooking.

Most of these salt seasoning have extra power, not just seasoning power; because they have undergone a fermentation process, beneficial are part of their essence.

It should be used with great care. It assist in the color and finish pastry. If using salted butter or margarine, less salt is required.
Salt as cooking ingredient