Diamond Crystal vs Morton’s Kosher salt: bigger box, higher price
Most every recipe on Burnt My Fingers specifies (unless we forget) Kosher salt. That’s because we mistrust the tiny crystals of table salt that make it easy to oversalt your food, plus you might pick up iodized salt by mistake which would play havoc with your ferments. However, there are two popular brands of Kosher salt, so which to use…. Diamond Crystal or Morton’s?
Look closely and you can see the difference in Diamond Crystal (on the left) and Morton’s Kosher Salt.
Readers have occasionally pointed out that Morton’s Coarse Kosher Salt is produced by grinding down larger salt pieces, whereas Diamond Crystal has a proprietary process for reforming its crystals into fancy fluffy cones. As a result, a given amount of Morton’s by volume contains more NaCl than the same volume of Diamond Crystal. If you measure by teaspoons without knowing that—for example, if you are a lifelong user of Crystal but find yourself in a Morton’s kitchen—you are at risk of severely undersalting or oversalting your food.
As a regular reader of Burnt My Fingers, you can guess which we prefer: Morton’s. That’s because it is cheaper. It’s rare to find the two brands in the same supermarket, but in repeated shopping in my area Diamond Crystal comes in at about $4 and Morton’s at $3 for 48 oz. Which is not surprising—the looser structure of Diamond requires a bigger box, and there’s that extra processing to pay for.
You can find lots of chatter online about how “professional kitchens always use Diamond” but that doesn’t seem right—why have a higher food cost than necessary without getting an extra benefit? One legitimate vote for Diamond is from Stella Parks at BraveTart—she prefers diamond Crystal because it’s pure salt, whereas Morton’s has an anti-caking agent that can throw off certain candy recipes.
I did a poll on Facebook’s Tell Me What You’re Eating group and the votes (mostly from pro chefs) was 14-3 Mortons. Too small a sample to be statistically valid, but I’m calling it for Morton. There was also a sizeable bunch who said Himalayan Pink Salt, which is a topic for another day.
The most important consideration, whether yours is a professional kitchen or you serve a few hungry mouths at home, is to be consistent. Pick your salt and measure by weight, not volume. Err on the side of caution, then taste as you go. You can’t turn back the clock on an oversalted dish, but neither can you make up for that first disappointing bite of an undersalted product.
P.S. Kosher salt got its name not because it’s produced under Kosher supervision, though it is, but because it’s used in the process of koshering meat, which means to draw the blood out.
