(ARA) – Holiday celebrations often revolve around food rituals, with family members gathering together to lovingly prepare festive feasts and create time-honored favorites. Yet your best kitchen helpers may actually be two essential salts of top chefs – kosher salt and sea salt.
That’s the recommendation of Alton Brown, a professionally trained chef and the award-winning host of popular television shows, whose love for cooking with kosher and sea salt is second only to his love for food. In addition to being an expert educator, entertainer and eater, Brown is a longtime kosher and sea salt enthusiast and the host of Salt101.com, a fun, interactive primer on the proper use of his favorite salts.
According to Brown, kosher and sea salts are must-have ingredients for creating flavorful foods, especially during the holidays when you want to pull out all the stops. “The ability to use salt is critical to good cooking. It allows you to turn up the volume on certain flavors, fine tune others and create culinary harmony,” he says.
But cooking with kosher and sea salt doesn’t have to be complicated to create great taste. “Seasoning with salt is best done throughout the cooking process,” says Brown. “That doesn’t mean more salting; it just means smart salting.”
Great flavor, precise measuring
Kosher salt allows you to create restaurant-style flavors in the foods you prepare at home. You can use it to bring out the flavor in everything from main dishes to dessert.
“As salt dissolves in the mouth, it winds its way into your taste buds and electrically stimulates the many taste receptors found there. If the right amount is used, the result is an amplification of flavors. My favorite is Diamond Crystal kosher salt because it is born as a pyramid-shaped crystal. It’s ideal for cooking because its multifaceted crystals offer exceptional texture and precise measuring and control,” Brown says.
To watch an easy demonstration on mastering the perfect “pinch” of kosher salt in cooking, visit Salt101.com.
Authentic, all-natural flavor
The use of sea salt in prepared and premium quality foods is another trend influencing the way people cook with salt. Use this salt at home to recreate the distinctive sea salt taste as found in gourmet foods.
“Sea salt’s flavor is pure and clean, but what makes it the perfect finishing touch is its unique texture, which manages to be coarse and delicate, crunchy and melt-on-your-tongue at the same time. Personally, I like Diamond Crystal 100 Percent Pure California Sea Salt because it’s completely all-natural with no additives,” Brown says.
Alton Brown’s tips for cooking with kosher salt and sea salt
Use these easy tips from Alton Brown when planning meals for holidays or anytime:
“Tossing a russet potato in a bit of oil and plenty of kosher salt before baking, unwrapped of course, will produce what I feel certain is the best baked potato on earth,” Brown says.
Vegetables sauteed with a few pinches of kosher salt will have a better texture than unsalted and they won’t require as much salt at the table.
Sprinkling a steak with kosher salt several minutes before cooking pulls out water soluble proteins, which aid the searing process.
“The last thing I add to fruit salad is indeed sea salt … a mere pinch can bring out the natural sugars and help to underline the complex, aromatic compounds,” Brown says.
“By themselves, most radishes are, how shall I say … boring, undimensional, all sharp and no play,” Brown says. “But bring a bit of sea salt to the party and radishes bloom … flavor-wise.”
For more information call (888) 385-SALT, or visit www.Salt101.com.
