Are you confused when you come across kosher salt, iodized salt, sea salt and regular salt on the shelves? Do you find yourself clueless when recipes talk about distinct salts and you have no idea why a particular salt is being recommended instead of another one?
You are not alone. Cooking or understanding food ingredients is always a gradual uphill learning exercise. The more you know, the more you would want to explore. Very few people in the world actually know about every food in every nook and corner of the planet. Before we talk about the difference between kosher salt and iodized salt, let us understand the ways salt is obtained.
You could extract salt from rock formations occurring naturally, such as halite. You could process sea water, by evaporating the water and having the leftover salt. You can also create salt in a lab but you would be spending much more money than the other processes.
Salt obtained from sea water is more nutritious because there are more minerals. Salt obtained from rocks would be basic but they would still be rich in sodium chloride. It must be understood that there is more than one variant of sodium chloride in salts. Also, depending on the manufacturing, extracting or further processing methods, salt can have many or no additional minerals.
Do They Differ?
Now, technically there is no difference between kosher salt and iodized salt because any kosher salt can also be iodized salt and vice versa. The difference lies in the composition or the type of salt it is. Kosher salt has larger grains than the ones you would find in regular table salt or sea salt. Iodized salt is any salt that has added iodine. In effect, sea salt or regular table salt can be iodized. Kosher salt can be iodized as well. Normal salt is not obtained in iodized form. One has to add iodine during the distillation or in a specific phase of the manufacturing process.
Kosher salt can be obtained in many ways but the most popular way is to use sea water and then during the extraction of the salt, methods are in place to obtain larger grains or crystals. You would find kosher salt to have much larger grains than ordinary salt. If the kosher salt is iodized, then it would be known as iodized kosher salt.
There are many brands of kosher salt out there and they are not the same. From the sizes of the grains to the minerals present in the salt, there is substantial difference across brands. The same applies to iodized salt.
