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When the Blue Cleaver test kitchen received a lump of Himalayan pink rock salt as a gift, we were perplexed. What is it? What will it taste like? How should we use it?
According to companies who sell the stuff, Himalayan rock salt is the purest salt on earth, formed over 250 million years ago, filled with mineral elements and completely free of toxins. It's hand-mined in Nepal, where people are not just using a figure of speech when they claim to have had a long day in the salt mines. The Blue Cleaver wonders if this is really necessary, and hopes that the goods are Fair Trade.
Nepalese businessmen have nicknamed Himalayan rock salt "white gold." We guess they haven't caught on to the fact that there actually is a white form of gold. Hrm. Health food/New Age websites (for example) have ascribed all manner of medicinal properties to the stuff: it'll give you energy, balance your blood sugar, regulate your heart rate, increase your brain function, aid your libido, assist your digestion, alleviate your sinus ailments, help you get to sleep, and prevent varicose veins. In fact, it's sold more often as a therapeutic product than an ingredient for cooking. WTF?
Well, sodium is a necessary nutrient, and it does help your body do many of those things. Of course, all salt adds sodium to your diet, and the trace amounts of minerals in this stuff are not likely to make much of a nutritional difference.
Now that we've established that a salt by any other name is still salt, we figured it'd be ok to eschew bizarre recipes like these and just use it to season food. Having no other method of reducing the hulking lump to granular form, we went at it with a hammer. It works, more or less. Though we couldn't get it down to grinder-friendly size, we knocked off some usable flakes and chunks.
We took a taste and found that its flavor is identical to . . . salt!
In a side-by-side test, we thought it tasted slightly more mineral-inflected compared with sea salt, but this difference was completely undetectable when used in food. It's obviously crunchier than granular stuff, but any Cleaver-wielder worth her salt (heh!) knows that's the case with any type of rock salt.
Folks, it's just salt. Sorry to disappoint.
