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Generally speaking, salt by any other name is still salt, and whether you used large flake sea salt or plain table salt, your food will still turn out well. This is especially true of savory foods. In things like sauces and soups, all kinds of salt will dissolve due to the heat of the dish and produce equally flavorful results. When adding a spice rub to meat or simply adding a sprinkle to food already on your plate, the salt will not only add flavor, but a small amount of texture and a bit of crunch. You might find that while the saltiness is the same, you prefer to use larger, flaked salt for that extra edge. Salads, too, are usually enhanced by adding a bit of salt and using a coarser salt will really enhance the veggies in your bowl.
Baking is a different story, however. Unlike in more savory meat and vegetable dishes, where the salt acts as flavoring only, the end results are actually affected by the presence of salt in baked good. Adding any salt at all will still produce a reasonably good product, but there can be noticeable flavor differences depending on what type of salt you use. The finer salt granules are, the more evenly they can be distributed throughout the batter or dough, so there will not be a noticeably "salty" taste, just an enhancement of the other flavors. Fine salt is always a good choice for baking. On a scale of size, table salt is the finest, followed by kosher/flaked salt and sea salt. You can always grind up coarser salt to achieve a finer texture.
Lately, there has been an increase in the number of baked goods that combine salty and sweet flavors, usually by adding a coarser salt to their recipe. For example, Fran's salted caramels and the Salty Oat cookies (recipe here) both get an extra layer of flavor from their less-traditional use of salt. If a slightly salty baked good doesn't sound tempting, consider that there are many foods in which the combination of salty and sweet works well: kettle corn or even toast with salted butter and jam. Taking a cue from this trend, you can experiment with using other salts in your baking at home, adding flaked salt to a chocolate chip cookie recipe in the place of table salt, for example. Just remember that it is always best to use unsalted butter for baking, though, since you can control the amount of salt - no matter what kind of salt you end up using - that goes into your recipe that way.
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7-24-2006 @9:56PM cynthia said... I beg to differ... Different types of sea salt add different flavors to foods - especially when added at the table. I LOVE a certain salt from Utah... which is mined from ancient salt beds. Try different salts and see what I mean.
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7-25-2006 @9:12AM Laura said... I agree with the above poster. Salts from different regions are all the rage right now. I myself am an avid kosher salt user. I find the distribution by hand to be much easier with the large flakes that kosher salt offers.
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7-25-2006 @11:13AM Myron said... Does it matter what kind of salt you use in a recipe?
A big difference is that they measure differently.
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7-25-2006 @1:01PM suburban misfit said... I'm sorry, I completely disagree that "salt by any other name is still salt". The kind of salt used makes a big difference, as does when in the cooking process it's used.
Sea salt shoud *not* be used for cooking, unless it's added just at the end of the process. Cooking destroys the delicate flavors of sea salt. Kosher salt is the best salt for cooking, hands down. Table salt isn't even a decent subsitute for Kosher salt. Even in baking, Kosher salt is still the best thing to use.
The only thing table salt does is make things salty. As you stated, the purpose of salt isn't to make food taste salty, it's purpose is to enhance the flavors of food. I substitute Kosher salt for table salt in every single baking recipe I use and they all turn out just fine.
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