THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

Some of the most respected names in food have variously praised sea salt as tasting clean, pure, fresh, rich, bright, subtle, delicate, saline, sweet (!), sharp, gentle, refined, balanced and well-rounded. (One cannot help but marvel at the human imagination.) In contrast, granulated shaker salt has been scorned as tasting acrid, bitter, tinny, harsh, nasty, metallic, acidic, shrill, characterless and "like a mouthful of chemicals." (News flash: All salt is chemical, and if you're filling your mouth with it, no wonder you don't like it. And a special note to West Coast sea-salt fans: The shaker salt that you condemn so vehemently has most likely been taken from the sea.)

There is no denying that some of the finer (read more expensive), genuine sea salts--and they may sell for more than 100 times the price of shaker salt--have unique flavor characteristics. But to paraphrase an infamous presidential parsing, it depends on what you mean by "flavor."

A food's flavor consists of three components: taste, smell and texture. With salt, we can eliminate smell, because salt has no odor. (People who claim that sea salt has "the fresh aroma of the sea" undoubtedly also hear voices.) That leaves taste--what the taste buds actually detect--and texture--how it feels in the mouth.

First, the taste. As I pointed out in my previous column, most food-grade salt is close to 99 percent pure sodium chloride. Whether it came from land or sea, pure sodium chloride tastes like pure sodium chloride: salty. Period. The remaining one percent of impurities is a mere one-hundredth of the fraction of an ounce of salt that a person consumes in a given dish. It's simply too far-fetched to expect that to make any difference. In short, specifying sea salt as an ingredient in a recipe is just plain silly. Those sea-loving recipe writers should put their palates where their mouths are, so to speak.

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