Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.   

According to Samin Nosrat, the James Beard Award-winning author, those are the four elements of good cooking. James Beard himself once asked, “Where would we be without salt?”  

There is a transformative power in salt. It has a complex relationship with flavor. While salt has a taste of its own, it also balances and enriches the flavors of other ingredients. It’s multivalent—it combines with nearly everything.  

When dishes fall flat, more often than not, salt, or the lack of it, is the reason. The word insipid, which we usually use to mean dull or flat, comes from the Latin words for lack of flavor, or lack of salt.  Food cooked with just the right amount of salt has a gratifying zing. Each vibrant bite pops with flavor. Not enough, it’s insipid. Too much and the food is nearly inedible. So how to get it right?

Samin Nostrat’s three essential salt questions are: “When? How much? In what form?”   

For now, let’s stick with form. The three main categories are table salt, kosher salt, and sea salt. Table salt has very fine, uniform crystals and usually added iodine. It’s very, well, salty. Kosher salt is a pure salt and comes in coarse and fine crystals and is great for everyday cooking. Sea salt has a range of textures, and if processed naturally, often contains minerals from the source. It has a sense of place.  

Our favorite sea salt at DeLaurenti is local: San Juan Island Sea Salt. Located in one of the most pristine and beautiful parts of Washington state, this sea-salt farming company uses greenhouses and sunshine to slowly and naturally evaporate filtered water from the Salish Sea to extract the sea salt. Their evaporative process retains the mineral wealth of the sea, resulting in wonderfully wild and briny-flavored salt. They grind the salt to a consistency similar to fleur de sel. The irregular crystal size, lots of minerality, and a slight moisture content make it a perfect finishing salt.  

At DeLaurenti, we use standard kosher salt for salting pasta water and seasoning soups. But when we’re sprinkling salt on pretty much anything else—eggs, salads, baked goods, meats, vegetables, chocolates, caramels—especially after the food has been cooked, we turn to flaky salts with excellent texture like those made by San Juan Sea Salt.   

Not only does San Juan Island Sea Salt produce fabulous sea salt, but they’ve created a line of go-to seasoning salts that are anything but insipid. The flavors range from the Italian-influenced Roman Blend to spicy Sriracha Salt to the playful Popcorn Blend.  

So, next time you’re cooking something special, remember it’s not just when and how much, but which type of salt to add to each particular dish. They’re not all created equal.