WHAT ABOUT GOITERS?:

Great Shakes?: Do expensive salts really make a difference? (Dave Faries, 2/13/03, Dallas Observer)

Dish "Why not have a salt party?" asks David McMillan, holding a plate piled with a gray-white substance.

The executive chef of Nana apparently doesn't get out much. Either that, or he thinks of tame suburban gatherings--Tupperware parties, for instance--as wild, wicked affairs. In the 1960s, shindigs lauding plastic containers were all the rage. Instead of flopping around bra-less and engaging in free love, suburban women marveled at Tupperware's patented "burp" and its ability to preserve hot dog buns for an extra day or so. "This," McMillan says, still holding a plate of ground salt, "is the new Tupperware."

His fascination with the condiment is understandable. There are 14,000 uses for salt, or so we're told. It can be sprinkled on fries, employed as a preservative, dumped on icy roads or rubbed into open wounds; vengeful gods sometimes turn malefactors into pillars of the stuff. [...]

Most chefs spurn iodized table salt, at least in the kitchen. They cook instead with kosher salt, a coarse-grained product familiar to all margarita aficionados. "Kosher is easy to work with since you are grabbing it with your hands," says Chris Svalesen, executive chef at 36 Degrees, "and it's not as salty." The lighter flavor makes kosher salt a little more forgiving. Table salt, McMillan explains, "is slow to dissolve, and there's a fair amount of collateral chemicals." It generally contains iodine as well as an anti-caking agent to prevent clumping. Gilbert Garza of Suze refers to iodized salt as "disgusting stuff." The Green Room even removed salt shakers from its dining room.

"A dish should go out seasoned just right," explains Marc Cassel, executive chef of the Deep Ellum institution. "If they are used to eating at Applebee's, they automatically reach for the salt shaker, then complain that it's oversalted."

Beyond these two basic salts, however, little agreement exists. "Americans just get on a fad and buy things because they're supposed to," scoffs Brian C. Luscher, executive chef at The Grape. "It makes a difference in certain situations, but mostly you have people who spend 20 bucks on salt but don't know what to do with it."

"They season things," Garza says of the high-end salts. "That's what they do. It's interesting for five minutes."

The kosher definitely seems to work better in a cast-iron skillet. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 14, 2003 10:28 AM