Artisanal salts are available and laboriously made from many regions of the world, each with their own unique influences, crafting styles, and substance from their terrain.
While industrial salts are near pure to their sodium-chloride (the primary mineral we seek for salinity and taste enhancement), artisanal salts, often hand-made and created in traditional methods beyond centuries of age can be around 85% sodium-chloride and lower, with care taken to preserve fluctuating trace minerals along with magnesium and potassium salts, irreplaceable factors for the health and fullness of a product that dates back before even the origin of humans' ability to provide and consume meat products. Salt is not an unhealthy substance itself, and even has a long-standing grounding in medicines along with its culinary vitality. Iodine added into salt is not a process that supplements lost iodine, an essential mineral that is lacking in both refined white salts and artisan, solar or fire evaporated salts. The addition of iodine intended to repair a larger lacking in common diets that can lead to severe disorders and malnutrition is an otherwise generalized solution. Iodine can be and was formerly added to many other food products, such as milk, and, according to Mark Bitterman in Salted, is actually less viable in salt because of its reactivity and volatility, making iodized salt an inconsistent method for providing this nutrient, batches and brands varying threefold in their useful iodine, while reduction of salt in the diet, itself, is not a correlated method for placating health problems that arise from improper nutrition.
Artisanal salt often has higher moisture contents, cullings from the forming or receding terrains that link us to the bio-available minerals of the sea, and are not subject to the over-refinement, purity-stripping, and even mechanical, diesel pollution of widespread, industrial salts that are intended to reduce a product to its bare minimum, highest yield. Artisan salts, in their natural and environmental delicacy, vary on a chemical level in structure, size, color and content. The time, care, and focus required to create these "crown jewels of great food" are represented in our buzz of taste at the sense of these essential digestive electrolytes.
There are many styles and regions of artisanal salts available, quality ingredients that should not be underestimated.And from Salted by Mark Bitterman, "Using all-natural salts is fun, easy, and satisfying on many levels."
