Salt Varieties and Uses

Featured Pro: Curtis Stone
Category: Cooking
Time: 1:59


CURTIS STONE: Hey, I’m Curtis Stone. And if you’re feeling salty, then I’ve got a great GMC Trade Secret for you.

We’ve been using salt for centuries. We used to use it to mainly preserve food and then to add a bit of flavor and to draw out some moisture from different things. And now we use it for those very same reasons. We’ve got a bunch of different stuff to use.

Now, down this end of the table, I’ve got a few sort of what we call table salts. Now, here I’ve got an iodized sea salt. Now, we used to have an iodine deficiency in the 1920s, which we don’t have anymore. So this has become a little bit redundant. The kosher salt’s got those nice big granules, and great just for an everyday table salt.

This is one of my favorites. It’s straight out of the sea, so it’s fleur de sel. It usually comes from the Guerande region of France and it has these beautiful big crystals. So it’s a really nice one that also adds a little bit of texture. And you don’t need to use too much.

We’ve got flake salts. And we’ve got all these different varieties of what they call gourmet salts or finishing salts. Now, there’s a couple here from Hawaii. They’ve all got their own little flavor. This one’s black, which is really interesting. And the reason it’s black is because it’s also known as a lava salt. It gets that color, a little bit of the charcoal and some of that mineral content from where it comes from; also this sort of orangey sort of pinky salt from Hawaii, also great mineral contents.

We’ve got a smoked salt down at the end, which is an incredible flavor. So if you’re thinking about meats and you just want to finish a little steak or piece of lamb or something with a smoked salt, you can incorporate a bit of that smoky flavor too.

I’ve got a tomato here. I’m going to cut it up, because I just love really simple flavors. Down at the end I’ve also got a saffron-flavored salt which comes in big chunks like that, so you could grate it at the table if you wanted to be a bit fancy or maybe just bump and grind it up like this so it sort of goes into more of a usable sort of a powder.

What am I going to try on my tomato? I’m going to try the smoked salt. There we go.

So that’s your GMC Trade Secret. I’m Curtis Stone. And it was brought to you by the GMC Yukon hybrid.

Go on, get salty. Mmm.