Tips & Tricks: Kosher Salt

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Kosher salt—or kitchen salt—is a coarse salt used for seasoning meats and vegetables but also, more and more, in baking. Because its crystals are much larger than table salt, a teaspoon of kosher salt has less salt in it than teaspoon of fine salt, which means kosher salt and fine salt—whether it's table salt or sea salt—aren't interchangeable. If a recipe calls for kosher salt, you better use kosher salt.

That's pretty obvious. But what isn't obvious is that different brands of kosher salts can have different densities. That means one kosher salt might actually be saltier than another, and this is where we get into trouble. I use Morton kosher salt; Diamond Crystal—another popular brand—is much less salty in comparison. That means if I'm following a recipe that was developed for Diamond Crystal kosher salt, I'm going to end up using more salt than intended because a teaspoon of Diamond Crystal salt might be just right, but a teaspoon of Morton salt is going to be too much.

In savory cooking, this is less of a problem if you're familiar with how much salt you need and you're salting by feel—like salting a chicken before roasting, or a bunch of veggies. This is one of the things kosher salt is really good for because you can grab some and actually hold onto it, unlike fine salt, and over time you get a feel for how much salt is enough. The Salt episode of Samin Nosrat's Fat Salt Acid Heat on Netflix goes into this in detail. It changed the way I use salt while cooking, and I recommend watching it if you can.

But any time you're following a recipe that calls for a precise volume of kosher salt, there's a chance things could go wrong. Maybe it'll just be that your chili isn't salty enough, but that's easily fixed at the table. It's much harder to fix a lentil loaf that could double as a salt lick. And in baking, the amount of salt can be crucial, particularly in yeasted breads, so not only will your bread be salty, you could kill your yeasts and suffer structural failures as well.

So what can we do? If you use kosher salt in a recipe you're sharing here, be sure to tell us what brand you use, or even better, give us a weight in grams. If you're reading a recipe online and it calls for kosher salt, check the comments to see if anyone's complaining it's salty. If you're developing a recipe you plan on sharing, avoid the problem entirely and use a fine salt, like table salt or sea salt. Unless, of course, the kosher salt is being used as a finisher. Coarse salts are great on top of things like brownies, fudge, or cookies. And this is where it pays to know the salt you're using, because if a recipe tells you to sprinkle your brownies with coarse salt, you'll know the right amount to use to give your brownies just enough of a salty bite.

Here's a good article on the problem: The Kosher Salt Question, by Mari Uyehara.