# Table Salt vs. Kosher Salt

Table salt is the salt on your table: teeny-tiny grains in a little shaker.

Kosher salt is the salt that should be in your kitchen: large, thick grains.

Some people new to cooking get confused on the difference and when to use one or the other.

The long story short is you should always use kosher salt for cooking.
Table salt is much more intense and is only for brisk post-cooking flavoring at the table.
Kosher salt is more subtle, dissolves slower and thus releases its flavor slower.

Note also that you should add a larger mass of kosher salt where you might only
add a pinch of table salt, since table salt is much stronger partially because
it dissolves so quickly.

## Table salt is not lindy.

Table salt has iodine and other additives.

Its history is somewhat analogous to the addition of fluoride to municipal
water supplies.  Nearly a hundred years ago, the U.S. government began working
with corporations to add iodine to salt ostensibly because they were concerned
about people having iodine deficiencies.

A healthy diet including eggs, dairy and some seafood should get enough iodine
elsewhere to not need it in the form of table salt supplements, so don't feel
like to you need to use it.

## Why is kosher salt called "kosher" salt?

Hebrews and then Jews revile eating meat with any blood in it.  Larger grain
salt was better for the process called "koshering" whereby meat is covered in
salt and the salt draws out the liquid blood. Note that table salt is not
non-kosher in Mosaic law either, it is simply not suited for this "koshering"
process because it simply dissolves into the meat.

For one reason or another, this association caught on and we now call coarse
grain salt "kosher." Note that kosher salt is more or less the natural form of
salt, it is not, as one might imagine, some new innovation to comply with
Jewish dietary practice.
