Gourmet Salt for a Healthy Green Lifestyle Leicester
Gourmet Salt for a Healthy Green Lifestyle
Gourmet Salt for Healthy Eating
Can gourmet salt add to our green living lifestyle? For me, the answer is definitely "Yes"!
There's no doubt that salt adds something to many dishes and prepared foods.
But not all salt is the same.
There are lots of regional salts available now, with their different tastes and characteristics. Not surprisingly, these arise from slightly differing constituent minerals. Increasingly, they are attracting the tag "gourmet salt".
Picture: Maldon Sea Salt is highly rated by many chefs.
What's here?
This page looks at salt as an ingredient, explores the differences between gourmet salt and table salt, and looks at what is added to table salts.Then we search out some of the best salts on the market - the gourmet salts. Scroll down towards the bottom of the page to view them.
There are details of gourmet salts from around the world and the eco-friendly production methods used to harvest them. Natural gourmet salts may also contribute to your good health.
How does gourmet salt contribute to a greener lifestyle?
While there is nothing wrong with using plain table salt, using some gourmet salts may contribute a little to your green living efforts. Most gourmet salts are from low-scale eco-friendly companies which have a vested interest in protecting the environment. See Halen Mon and The Maldon Crystal Salt Company, below for particularly good examples of this.
What is salt?
Pure salt is the mineral sodium chloride (Na Cl). It occurs in nature in certain rocks and of course in seawater. Gourmet salt is the same - though there may be a higher proportion of other valuable minerals included. Human blood contains 0.9% salt, so it is an important element in our diet.
Salt is present in many natural foods so we do not generally need to add a lot of extra salt to our foods. Nevertheless, a little gourmet salt is both valuable and delicious whether added at the table or in cooking.
Salt - a very brief history
Humans have been eating foods with added salt forever and a day. Back in Roman times salt was a part of a soldiers pay (hence our word for "salary" which comes from the Latin.)
Salt was valued by early societies for its role in preserving foods. Mediterranean salt was dried in "salt pans" and was exported all over the ancient world, some even travelling across the Sahara desert to the African gold coast.
The Egyptians were extracting salt as much as 1450 years BC and more than a thousand years earlier the Chinese described 40 different types of salt and their medicinal properties.
Salt with bread was traditionally offered to visitors in many cultures.
The gabelle, or salt tax was one of the factors which led to the French revolution. In India, the salt marches of Mahatma Gandhi and his followers are legendary as they were instrumental in breaking the stranglehold of the British Empire upon the subcontinent.
Salt features in US history, ...
