With cooking salt, coarse is better

A little salt can go a long way toward balancing flavors and bringing out the most from your cooking.

But forget about the Morton's or other iodized salt, even if your mother (and her mother) swore by it.

Most professional cooks prefer to use the coarser, more elemental sea salt or kosher salt.

"A teaspoon [of] coarse-grain salt will have less sodium than a teaspoon of table salt with a finer grain," said registered dietitian and personal chef Katie Cavuto Boyle. "You'll end up using less salt, but get more flavor out of it."

Another advantage to using chunky salt is that it's easy to figure out a pinch.

"Using you fingers, you're picking up a pinch - your fingers are the same, a pinch will always be the same," said local chef and cookbook author Aliza Green, who favors kosher salt above all else. "You couldn't stick your fingers in a bowl of regular salt."

For frying chicken or fish, or smoking meats, only one salt will do for Delilah Winder, owner of Delilah's in the Reading Terminal Market.

"We use seasoned salt the most because we fry so much chicken and fish and we smoke our ribs," she said.

As for fleur de sel, truffle salt and other gourmet types, they can be nice additions to the table, but their higher cost - and more specific flavor - doesn't make them a good fit for regular cooking, according to Charles Ziccardi, culinary arts program manager at Drexel University's Goodwin College School of Technology and Professional Studies.

"I think it's more hype than reality," he said of the high-end salt phenomenon. "It's worth having a couple and experimenting with them, but I don't think it's worth incorporating them into daily life."

- Robert DiGiacomo