Joy of Cooking

by Irma S. Rombauer

Fine sea salt or Morton’s kosher salt can be used without having to make any adjustments.

We made the strategic decision to call for table salt in the recipes in Joy (in spite of the fact that we prefer to use Diamond kosher salt in our own kitchen). There are a few reasons for this. One, Joy’s recipes have always used table salt. Two, table salt is a particularly salty salt (it has tiny crystals, resulting in more salt by volume than, say, Diamond kosher salt). If someone were to substitute Diamond kosher salt for table salt in a recipe, the dish would be under-salted, which has an easy fix (just add more salt to taste!). The other side of the coin is if we were to call for Diamond kosher salt, but someone substituted table salt, they would end up oversalting their food, which can be unsalvageable. But most importantly, the vast majority of American home cooks use table salt. The subject of salt is a sticky one in recipe writing because the kind of salt you use can dramatically affect the outcome of any dish. For this reason, we wanted to clearly outline how to substitute other kinds of salt for table salt. You might notice that a few of our recipes specifically call for Diamond kosher salt, pickling salt, or fine sea salt. When salting meat, it is easier to get an even distribution of salt with Diamond kosher salt—it has a lighter, flakier crystal structure and is less salty by volume than table salt or sea salt. This makes it much easier to evenly distribute on the surface of foods. For fermentation recipes, we use Diamond kosher salt, fine sea salt, or pickling salt because these salts do not contain additives (such as anti-caking agents or iodine) that might interfere with fermentation or affect the flavor, texture, or color of the ferment. In pickling recipes, we call for pickling salt for a similar reason—it contains no additives that may discolor pickles or result in sediment in the bottom of the jar.