Designer salt? It can look beautiful--and taste a little different--but salt is salt.(REPORT: Salt)

Publication: Choice (Chippendale, Australia)

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Australian Consumers' Association

All the celebrity chefs have their favourites: Jamie's is Maldon sea salt (from his beloved Essex); Nigella seems to go for Maldon or other sea salt too; Stefano di Pieri has tied his gondola to Murray River salt; Maeve O'Meara and her Food Lover's Guide say Australian sea salt is "as good as you can get"; Neil Perry favours sea salt too, but despite their surfing theme, Ben and Curtis mostly go with plain old salt. So what's with the celebrity salt?

A QUICK COURSE IN DESIGNER SALT

However designer the salt, it's still about 99% sodium chloride. Impurities and trace amounts of other minerals can give it a slightly different flavour, but whether you'll really still taste a difference after you've added it to the food and cooked it all together is a very open question. However, fancy salt does look good while you're cooking. As Maeva O'Meara told us, "It's an aesthetic thing--these salts are lovely on the table and they feel lovely between the fingers."

The slight differences in looks and taste depend on the minute traces of various minerals and on how the different salts are made.

Sea salt is made by evaporating seawater. If it isn't refined it contains traces of magnesium, calcium and other minerals that add a slightly bitter flavour (and it can also have a few algae, salt-tolerant bacteria and other bits and pieces).

* MALDON Sea Salt comes as large, flaky crystals. It's made from seawater "using only traditional natural methods" and claims to be "a completely natural product, retaining valuable seawater trace elements such as magnesium and calcium".

* HALEN MON Pure White Sea Salt comes from "the fresh Atlantic waters around the Isle of Anglesey" off Britain. Its label (in Welsh as well as English) claims, "Sea salt crystals provide a balance of minerals and trace elements such as magnesium, zinc, potassium and calcium."

* MASTERFOODS Sea Salt helpfully tells you that it "contains sodium, an essential trace element. Our bodies need it for healthy cell functioning." All true--but no mention of how little sodium we in fact need.

* MURRAY RIVER Gourmet Salt Flakes are also flaky crystals like MALDON, but they're a pinkish-brown colour. They're made from "underground saline waters" in the Murray-Darling Basin that have "been lying dormant for thousands of years".

* HORIZON Crystal Salt Flakes is another Australian product, also from an underground source of saline water (in northern Victoria). It claims to have "a full-bodied natural...

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