Saltsale

Common table salt - normally a brittle crystalline material - can be pulled into nanowires that will extend by more than twice their own length without breaking, US researchers have found.

Nathan Moore and his team at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, were investigating water adsorption onto salt crystals using an interfacial force microscope (IFM) to probe the salt surface when they stumbled upon their discovery.

‘When we poked the salt surface, we saw some unusual force behaviour [between the tip of the microscope probe and the surface]. It seemed crazy at the time, but we thought: "could we be making nanowires?" - of course, seeing is believing, so we put salt in the [transmission electron microscope] and there we saw the nanowires!

Watch:

Surprisingly, the salt not only becomes ductile (i.e. able to be pulled into wires), but the wires are also superplastic - they can be extended by more than their own length before breaking. This unusual property is more normally associated with metals and certain ceramics, rather than ionic crystals like salt. The wires can also be compressed back into the crystal, but do tend to bend and buckle.

Full article here

Sodium chloride is the spice of life. It’s the one common condiment in everyday use across cultures, cuisines and continents. Yet it can be harmful if you have too much. Then again, it’s an essential nutrient, and too little of it can be dangerous too.

Salt’s humble image has undergone a sea change since the days of the Dandi march . Now it comes in an assortment of amped-up “healthier” variants. Iodized or not, low-sodium or normal…the confusion this simple and essential (even this is now being debated) food ingredient seems to churn up is bewildering, to say the least. So what’s the truth? Is salt good or bad for you? The truth, as is often the case, lies somewhere in between.

Full article here

You’ve heard of kosher salt? Now there’s a Christian variety.

Retired barber Joe Godlewski says he was inspired by television chefs who repeatedly recommended kosher salt in recipes.

"I said, ‘What the heck’s the matter with Christian salt?’" Godlewski said, sipping a beer in the living room of his home in unincorporated Cresaptown, a western Maryland mountain community.

By next week, his trademarked Blessed Christians Salt will be available at memphi.net , the Web site of Memphis, Tenn.-based seasonings manufacturer Ingredients Corporation of America.

It’s sea salt that’s been blessed by an Episcopal priest, ICA President Damon S. Arney said Wednesday. He said the company also hopes to market the salt through Christian bookstores and as a fundraising tool for religious groups.

Arney and Godlewski, 73, said a share of the proceeds will be donated to Christian charities, but neither would specify a percentage.

Rabbi Sholem Fishbane, kosher administrator for the Chicago Rabbinical Council, said marketing Christian salt as an alternative to kosher salt reflects, at best, ignorance about Jewish dietary laws. He said all salt is inherently kosher because it occurs naturally and requires little or no processing.

Full article here

Salt, long a foundation of flavour, is now also virtually a fashion accessory. Poured into tiny crystal dishes with cunning miniature spoons for the dinner table, or scooped into trendy countertop salt pigs (British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, naturally, has a salt pig on the market), salt is the new “it” food.

We’re not talking iodized salt, available in the little white box and so cheap that if you happen to accidentally spill a kilogram in the sink, it doesn’t matter a whit.

Finishing salts are high-end crystals available largely at specialty kitchen stores. The grains are chunky (sometimes as big and flaky as spring snow) and come in different colours, such as black, pink and grey.

Full Article here

Most of us take the salt in our shakers for granted. But there is a world of history and tradition in a pinch of salt.

Did you know that a hundred years ago salt shakers were practically non-existent?
That was before 1911, when Joy Morton began adding an anti-clumping agent to salt.
Before Morton’s ad agency thought up the little umbrella girl and the slogan "When it rains, it pours," the very idea of tiny, perfectly white, uniformly-sized salt crystals was a revolution.

But as so often happens with revolutions, now, a counter-revolution has begun.

Full article here

The name of some European spas — Bad Salzdetfurth, Bad Salzungen oder Bad Salzuflen — indicate that salt is an important part of the spa’s programme.

Visitors to those European spas and others immerse themselves in healing, briny water containing a minimum of 1.45 percent salt. The salt springs on which the spas are built are found nearly everywhere in Germany. They are especially common on the northern border of Saxony, Brandenburg, Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Beyond its use in spas, salt no longer plays an economic role,” said Schmidt. But recreational enthusiasts follow the tracks of salt’s story when they travel the “Salt and Brine Wellness Route” in the Swabian Alb region northward to between the Neckar and Hohenlohe districts where there are abundant underground salt deposits.

Bathing in salt water can lift one’s well-being. Water containing 3 percent salt gives the body buoyancy, allowing the muscles to relax. The higher the salt content in the water, the greater the relaxation.

Full article here

Salt used to be so simple. Now recipes are very specific about types, grinds and flavors. Anyone who does a lot of home cooking needs a whole kitchen shelf to hold all the varieties.

Salt comes from two sources: It is either mined from the ground or taken from evaporated seawater. The most common salt is mined.

• TABLE SALT: This is what most of us fill our salt shakers with. It’s fine-grained with additives that keep it from clumping together. Some connoisseurs believe the additives affect the flavor of the salt.

• IODIZED SALT: In the olden days, it was common for people to have hypothyroidism, which is caused by lack of natural iodine in the diet. Iodine was added to salt to prevent that problem.

• KOSHER SALT: This is a coarse-grained salt that contains no additives. It is often used in Jewish cooking, especially when preparing meat. Many cooks prefer it because it is pure salt flavor. For some recipes, it may be necessary to grind it to a finer texture.

• SEA SALT: This salt is made from evaporated seawater. It comes in several crystal sizes. You might find solar sea salt, which means the water was slowly evaporated by sun exposure and the salt has been collected by hand.

• CELTIC SALT: This is solar sea salt from northern France. Connoisseurs say it has a slightly sweet flavor.

• ROCK SALT: This type is in large chunks. It sometimes has a gray look because it is not refined and it contains minerals. It is used primarily for decoration or for making hand-cranked ice cream.

• PICKLING SALT: This is very finely grained salt that has no additives. It is used for pickling because it stays clear when added to liquids.

• SEASONED SALT: This is salt combined with dried herbs and spices, such as onion or garlic.

In addition to these basic salts, there are exotic salts such as Bolivian rose, French fleur de sel, smoked salt or even Hawaiian salt.

Full Article here

The heap of salt was produced in ancient evaporating ponds, or “pans,” along the coast. In a world where our relationship to the products we use is almost entirely virtual, it’s refreshing to see at least a vestige of reality, if even at boutique scale. Salt, to some extent, connects these communities to the quality of the sea nearby.

Full Article here

You know the little star after “salt” on an organic product’s ingredient list? And the small print explaining it’s an “approved non-organic ingredient”? Well, that’s there because salt is a mineral and isn’t something you can farm organically. The star might disappear soon, however, as salt brands start moving into the organic market.

Well, it turns out that salt can actually be organically approved if it has been sustainably harvested and comes from a nature reserve where there’s no risk of water pollution — and if there hasn’t been anything added in the processing of the salt. And it turns out Geo Organics’ isn’t actually the first to be organically approved in Europe. The Cornish Seasalt Company also has an approved product and is in the process of applying for an organic certification.

Full Article here

Most people probably think of salt as simply that white granular food seasoning found in a salt shaker on virtually every dining table.

It is that, surely, but it is far more. It is an essential element in the diet of not only humans but of animals, and even of many plants. It is one of the most effective and most widely used of all food preservatives (and used to preserve Egyptian mummies as well). Pre-civilization “salt men” represent a significant contemporary archeological research source. And the oldest as well. Its industrial, medical and other uses are almost without number. In fact, salt has great current as well as historical interest, and is even the subject of humorous cartoons, music, “art” and poetry. Sometimes, however, we need to separate the salt to get the history. And there’s a lot of history to get ( 1 2 3 4 5 ). There’s even a 2002 book by Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History.

Full Article here