Redmond Real Sea Salt

What it is

Real Salt is unrefined sodium chloride mined in Redmond, Utah, out of a bedded deposit left behind by an inland sea that dried up long before anything walked on land. The seam sits beneath layers of volcanic ash and clay, which is the basis for the company’s claim that the salt was sealed off from modern industrial pollution. It is crushed and screened — not washed, not bleached, not heat-treated. The listing here is the fine-grain 10-ounce shaker. The grains are pink-flecked and slightly irregular, and the salt carries roughly sixty trace minerals, which is where the color comes from and, Redmond argues, the flavor.

Why it’s on this list

Two reasons, and neither one is nutrition. The first is taste. Fine Real Salt dissolves fast and lands rounder and less metallic than iodized table salt, which is essentially pure sodium chloride plus an anti-caking agent. Salt is the one seasoning you use every day, on everything, and the cost of using a good one is trivial.

The second is that it comes out of the ground in Utah, mined by an American family company that has worked the same deposit for decades. Most “sea salt” on the shelf is evaporated in ponds overseas and shipped in. This one you can point at on a map.

What it is not is a mineral supplement, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

What to know before you buy

• The trace minerals are real and nutritionally irrelevant. They are present in trace amounts, by definition. You would have to eat an unsafe quantity of salt to get a meaningful dose of magnesium or potassium from it. The minerals affect flavor. Treat any claim beyond that with suspicion.
• It is not iodized. Unrefined salts contain only trace natural iodine. Iodized salt exists because iodine deficiency was a real public-health problem, and still is in some populations. If iodized salt is your main source of iodine, switching away from it is worth raising with a doctor rather than doing by default.
• For pasta water, buy the cheap stuff. Salting a pot of water burns through a shaker fast and none of the character survives. Use bulk kosher salt for volume work and save this for the table.
• Grain size matters more than brand. The fine shaker is for cooking and the table. If you want a salt to pinch and scatter over a steak, buy the coarse or kosher grind instead.
• Salt is a medical question for some people. If you have high blood pressure, heart failure or kidney disease, your total sodium intake is a conversation to have with your doctor. The brand does not change that arithmetic.