Salt 101: A Pro Cook’s Complete Guide to This Essential Seasoning

Season with salt and pepper. Salt your cooking water. Season to taste. If you’ve ever encountered a written recipe, you’re probably somewhat familiar with these phrases. Salt is omnipresent in cooking, and in food at large as well. Though it’s everywhere, there’s also a ton of conflicting advice when it comes to how much salt to use, which salt is best, and how much salt you should *actually* be having daily.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) suggests no more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day. This equates to about one teaspoon of table salt (or iodized salt). But here’s the thing: Table salt is just one of many salts Americans use on a daily basis to flavor their foods, and those salts all vary on crystal size and how “salty” they taste. For example, coarse Kosher salt has 1,920 milligrams of sodium per teaspoon. So off the bat, sodium levels per different salts are fundamentally different.

This also doesn’t take into account how much table salt (a tiny, fine-ground salt) can fit into one teaspoon versus something flakier like a sea salt. Additionally, a pinch of salt—which you would add one to two times per recipe when cooking—is less than one-eighth of a teaspoon, far less than the suggested maximum. Basically, we as a society haven’t been giving salt a fair chance, and I’m here today to defend its honor.

Salt versus sodium

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Salt and sodium are not the same. Usually when you hear about salt or sodium, the words tend to be tossed around interchangeably, which can be confusing at best, and detrimental at worst when seeking out nutritional advice.

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