This year we’re writing a series of blog posts dedicated to sharing with home bakers guides to essential ingredients we bake with at the Bakehouse and at BAKE!Ⓡ, our hands-on teaching bakery for home bakers. As true artisan bakers, we use traditional recipes, time-honored processes, our hands, and flavorful ingredients, many locally sourced, to make our bread and sweet treats. Our baked goods, all hand made from raw ingredients, are rooted in age-old American, European, and Jewish traditions.
In February, we kicked off our Series of Ingredients Guides for Home Bakers with a blog post on Baker’s Yeast, the living leavener that gives magical rise to many of our artisan breads and pastries. For our second post in the Series, our sights are set on Salt,another essential ingredient in our baking arsenal, and its key role in elevating the flavor, texture, and structure of the artisan baked goods we make at the Bakehouse and at BAKE!.
What is Salt?
Whether extracted from underground rock salt deposits or harvested from evaporating sea water, naturally-occurring salt–at its core–is the mineral compound sodium chloride, which is essential to human survival. Our bodies need sodium in order to regulate and balance fluid levels in our blood and around our cells, and it plays a key role in nerve and muscle functions; while chloride helps regulate blood pH and blood pressure, and produces stomach acid that aids digestion of the food we eat and the elimination of harmful bacteria in our guts.
As an essential nutrient for human life, salt has been used in culinary applications to season, cure, and preserve food for thousands of years. Early civilizations, like the Ancient Egyptians, were among the first to bake with salt, adding it to bread dough for both flavor enhancement and preservation. In addition to its culinary usage, salt was also utilized for medicinal, religious, and mummification purposes, making it a highly valued and precious commodity in global trade for centuries.
Salt: An Essential Baking Ingredient
In baking, salt plays a number of crucial roles in achieving optimum results in any given recipe, whether you’re making bread, pastries, cookies, or cakes. For most baked goods, especially yeasted doughs, salt should be mixed into a recipe’s dry ingredients or dissolved in water beforehand to ensure that it’s evenly distributed and is better able to regulate yeast activity (see Fermentation Control below). In cake batters and cookie doughs leavened with baking soda or baking powder, it’s best to add salt to the flour mixture to ensure even distribution. When properly incorporated into a recipe, salt works its magic in the following ways:
Flavor Enhancement
In perhaps its most familiar function, salt in any given recipe does much more than lend a salty taste to baked goods. It balances sweetness, suppresses bitterness, and brings out the flavors of other ingredients, creating a more well-rounded flavor profile in everything you bake.
Fermentation Control
Salt is vital to regulating yeast activity, especially in bread baking and in the preparation of other yeasted doughs. It essentially slows down the rate of yeast fermentation, allowing for a more controlled rise while ensuring proper texture and structure. Without salt, yeasted doughs may rise too quickly or unevenly, leading to a dense and overly chewy texture.
Strengthening Gluten
Salt affects the texture and structure of baked goods by strengthening the gluten proteins found in wheat flour, improving a dough’s elasticity and structure. Breads bake up lighter and airier in texture and the crumb of cakes and pastries is more tender. When salt is left out, the resulting dough is slack and sticky in texture, work-up is difficult, and the volume may not be optimal.
Cutting Richness
In buttery pastries, like croissants and danish, a small amount of salt can help to balance the richness and fat content, creating a more pleasant mouthfeel.
Browning Enhancement
Salt enhances the flavorful browning of bread, cookies, and pastries by drawing out moisture, promoting the Maillard reaction (the chemical process responsible for the development of flavor and color during baking), and accelerating caramelization.
Preservation & Shelf Life
Once baked goods come out of the oven, are cooled, and then stored, salt acts as a natural preservative, helping to inhibit mold and bacteria growth and slow down moisture loss. This in turn extends their shelf life and keeps them fresher for longer. This is especially important if you’re baking in a humid environment, where baked goods are more prone to spoilage.
Types of Salt for Baking
The most common types of food-grade (or edible) salt used in baking include table salt, kosher salt, and sea salt. While the chemical makeup of all these salts is sodium chloride, they are not the same; nor are they equal when it comes to choosing which one to use in baking. Texture, shape, and mineral content set them apart, influencing how they taste, dissolve, and interact in a recipe. Here’s a quick descriptive breakdown of these salts and what baking applications they’re suited for:
Clockwise from top left: Kosher Salt, Himalayan Salt, Table Salt, and Sea Salt. Photo Source: iambaker.net
Table Salt
Also known as common, all-purpose salt, table salt is highly refined, consisting of fine, uniformly-shaped crystals produced through rapid vacuum evaporation. It also usually contains anti-caking agents to keep it flowing freely. Given its fine texture, table salt dissolves quickly and can be a suitable choice when precise volume measurements are critical. Always measure it carefully, as the fine grains make it more compact than other salts. Some words of caution, though, when using this very common and inexpensive salt: it can have a strong, sometimes bitter flavor and you should avoid using iodized table salt, as it can sometimes impart a slightly metallic or chemical taste.
Kosher Salt
Originally used in koshering meat, kosher salt is a popular ingredient in baking due to its coarse and flaky texture and larger-sized crystals. It has a clean, pure taste and is less salty by volume than table salt, which can enhance the overall flavor of baked goods without overpowering other ingredients. The larger crystals dissolve more slowly than table salt, allowing for a more even distribution of salt throughout the dough or batter. Kosher salt is also free from additives such as iodine, which can sometimes affect the taste of baked goods.
When choosing to bake with kosher salt, note that not all kosher salt is the same. Take the two major brands, MortonⓇ and DiamondCrystalⓇ. They differ significantly when it comes to the size, shape, and texture of their crystals; their sodium content; how quickly they dissolve; and how salty they taste. MortonKosherSalt, which is made by compacting salt granules between high-pressurized rollers, has smaller, denser, and more uniform crystals that are coarse and crunchy in texture and dissolve at a slower rate. DiamondCrystal, on the other hand, is made by evaporating brine in open pans, resulting in crystals that are large, hollow, pyramid-shaped flakes with a texture that’s light, airy and delicate, and which dissolve more quickly. As for sodium content, Morton has almost twice the amount of sodium per ¼ teaspoon as DiamondCrystal. Not surprisingly, Morton has a decidedly more salty taste than DiamondCrystal.
Sampling of MortonⓇ and Diamond CrystalⓇ Kosher Salts & Table Salt. Photo source: Healthy Recipes
Sea Salt
Sea salt is a type of unrefined salt that is harvested directly through the evaporation of sea water or other bodies of salt water. Once the water is collected in coastal pools or salterns, the wind and sun work their magic to evaporate the water naturally. What’s left behind are salt crystals often containing trace amounts of minerals, like magnesium, calcium, and potassium, which can enhance the salt’s flavor and boost its nutritional profile.
Harvested sea salt comes in different sizes, shapes, and textures. Here at the Bakehouse and BAKE!, we use finely ground sea salt for everything from breads, pastries, cookies, and cakes to savory items. Using sea salt across the board allows us to avoid the off flavors of iodized table salt and to benefit from its more complex flavors. We also prize its ability to dissolve properly. The recipes calling for salt in our cookbooks, Zingerman’s Bakehouse and Celebrate Every Day, as well as those we teach over at BAKE!, are all written for finely ground sea salt.
In the Bakehouse Bread Bakery and over at BAKE!, we also like to use MaldonⓇ Sea Salt Flakes as a finishing salt on our Rosemary and Olive Oil Focaccia and on cookies, like our Chocolate Ganache Thumbprints from our most recent BAKE! lineup of Fancy Schmancy Holiday Cookies. Maldon Salt is a gourmet sea salt that has grown in popularity because of its distinctive pyramid salt flakes and its clean flavor. It’s harvested in the English town of Maldon on the high-salinity banks of the Blackwater Estuary in Essex England. The river is favored by flat, tide-washed salt marshes, high winds, and low rainfall. The Maldon Salt Company has been in operation under its current name since 1882.
Salt Conversions for the Home Baker
While we recommend using finely ground sea salt for home baking, we also know that recipes may call for simple table salt or either Morton or Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt or that table or kosher salt may be what you have on hand. As noted above, these different types of salt have different sizes, shapes, textures, and levels of saltiness. Due to the disparate size and shape of their respective crystals, table salt and either brand of kosher salt aren’t always a direct substitution for finely ground sea salt. For small amounts (like 1 teaspoon or less) fine sea salt and table salt can be used interchangeably; for larger amounts, including kosher salt, follow these approximate guidelines – by volume and by weight in grams:
1 Tbsp Table Salt= 1 ¼ Tbsp Fine Sea Salt = 1 ½ Tbsp Morton Kosher Salt = 2 Tbsp Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt or Maldon Sea Salt Flakes
After a long, established career as a Ph.D. art history scholar and art museum curator, Lee, a Michigan native, came to the Bakehouse in 2017 eager to pursue her passion for artisanal baking and to apply her love of history, research, writing, and editing in a new exciting arena. Her first turn at the Bakehouse was as a day pastry baker. She then moved on to retail sales in the Bakeshop, followed by joining the Marketing Team and becoming the Bakehouse’s designated culinary historian. In addition to her retail sales and marketing work, she’s a member of the Bakehouse’s Grain Commission, co-author and editor of the Bakehouse's series of cookbooklets, and a regular contributor to the BAKE! Blog and Zingerman’s Newsletter, where she explores the culinary, cultural, and social history and evolution of the Bakehouse’s artisan baked goods.
