Why the world is besotted with salt

The culinary world, unlike that of medicine, embraces salt, whether to preserve, tenderise, or simply to enhance taste. So for a moment, we will ignore the curt voice of the cardiologist about how Indians are OD-ing on the stuff, and pop out to buy the pink Himalayan Salt Cooking Block. Available all over the internet (along with many food blogs that have walked the path before most of us), the block is actually affordable (₹3,300 at Foodhall and ₹3,650 upwards online). It’s blush-pretty and a great party-conversation starter (even if you have to scrub and clean later and cannot leave it out in the humidity). So why is the world besotted with salt already? In a word (overused albeit): artisanal.

As the world moves away from all that is processed and looks towards what is locally-produced and unprocessed, it makes sense that we are looking at the most basic of ingredients. “Today, it’s all about healthy living, and minimally-processed salt is loaded with minerals, unlike table salt,” says Moser, Executive Chef, Andaz, Delhi. That’s why, he feels, local foods work best when combined with salts from the region, though he’s not averse to bringing in the occasional black salt from Iceland or Hawaii (both marketed as lava salt, but in reality blended with activated charcoal). He recalls a five-course meal in Europe, with each plate fashioned around a particular salt.

Right on time

Capitalising on this salt crush, Foodhall, a gourmet store with locations in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi/NCR, has, from its beginnings over five years ago, had a salt bar.

A sort of library of salts, it focuses on it as an ingredient in cooking, serving and finishing. Here, you get to choose from a variety of salts created in-house, under the brand name Arqa. “Himalayan pink salt (from the North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan) is our hero product,” says Sanaa Absar, the brand manager of Arqa.

Worth its salt From pink rock salt to the Japanese gomashio, the market today is flooded with options  

Most of their sea salt comes from Cyprus, hand-harvested from the waters of the Mediterranean, and this, along with Himalayan pink, forms the two bases for most of their flavoured and hand-blended products. She speaks of sun-dried tomato and basil salt that’s great for a cream cheese. Next month, they’re introducing gomashio, a Japanese variant with toasted black sesame, and smoked paprika and basil, that goes perfectly with mangoes.

Rahul Gladwin Massey, Founder and Culinary Mentor at Culinarté, Delhi/NCR, takes it a step further. “Imagine bacon salt on pizza or a shiitake mushroom-flavoured one on popcorn,” he says.

The sweet and the snobbish

There are also vanilla bean ones — perfect for dark chocolate, and even a wine-infused variant that’ll work on Veronique fish. But the most outrageous, says Massey, is Fleur de sel or flower of salt, the height of French salt snobbery that is topped with 24-carat gold flakes.

Ironically though, our own kala namak, or black salt, harvested from a type of rock, is often sold in gourmet shops abroad, but isn’t really making the kind of comeback that other traditional foods, like millets, are.

In fact, Ayurvedic practitioners use it as part of medicines, along with sea salt and saindhava (rock). They’re just three of the 15 that find mention in the Charaka Samhitha Vimana Sthana that describes dietary regulations and disease. So the stream of medicine actually sees salt as a good thing. “It aids in digestion, imparts moisture and softness to the body, and increases digestive strength,” says Dr Zankhana Buch, medical superintendent and senior physician at AyurVAID Hospital in Bengaluru. But take too much, and it can cause anything from inflammation and depletion of muscle tissue to gastritis, gout and hair loss! Well, sometimes, we just do need to go back to the doctors.