KOSHER SALT IS ACTUALLY JUST BIG SALT

How did it become so popular?

- BY ELLEN CUSHING

When I was a child, in the 1990s, there was only one kind of salt; we called it “salt.” It came in a blue cylindrical container—you probably know the one—and we dumped it into pasta water and decanted it into shakers. I didn’t know that any other kind existed, and the women who taught me to cook didn’t seem to, either: Joy of Cooking, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and Moosewood Cookbook all call, simply, for “salt” in their recipes.

But about a decade ago, I started buying coarse kosher salt instead of the fine, uniform, iodized table salt I’d grown up with. I do not remember why. As my friends grew up and started building their own pantries, many of them also made kosher salt their default. These days, The New York Times calls explicitly for kosher salt in nearly all of its recipes, as does Bon Appétit. Two of the most influential cookbooks of the past decade, The Food Lab, by J. Kenji López-Alt, and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by Samin Nosrat, both devote paragraphs to the benefits of kosher over table salt. It is now “the lingua franca of restaurant kitchens”—as Mark Bitterman, who has written four books about cooking with salt, put it—and a cheffy shibboleth in home kitchens, too. You can find Diamond Crystal, the coolest brand, in the background of the famously verisimilitudinous restaurant show The Bear, and on cooking influencers’ beautiful countertops; in 2023, when Trader Joe’s started carrying it, chef Reddit exploded in enthusiastic all caps.

Pretty much everyone eats salt, every day, and it’s different now. Yet even kosher salt’s most fervent converts may not entirely understand how it’s different.