Day 8: Today's Pick — A $22 Tin of Salt From the Isle of Skye

I do not love writing about expensive salt. It is the most cliché food-internet topic. So let me get the cliché out of the way: yes, the salt is fancy. Yes, you should still buy it. No, it is not a daily-cooking salt — it is a "right at the end" salt, and that is the whole point.

The salt

It comes in a small black-and-cream tin from Isle of Skye Sea Salt Co., a small operation harvesting from the open Atlantic west of Scotland. The flakes are large, flat, slightly translucent. They have the structure of pyramids more than crystals. They snap apart between your fingers without crumbling.

What it tastes like

Salt. That's the joke and also the truth. It tastes like extremely clean salt, with no metallic edge and a barely-there mineral sweetness. The point is what it does to food, not what it does on its own.

What it does to food

Pinched onto a tomato slice, it makes the tomato taste more like a tomato. Pinched onto a piece of bread with butter, it makes the butter taste like butter and the bread taste like bread. (This is harder than it sounds.) Pinched onto chocolate chip cookies just out of the oven, it does the thing that the food-magazine recipes promise but the supermarket flake salt mostly fails to deliver.

The flake size matters. It hits your tongue, dissolves, releases. Smaller-grain salts dissolve too fast, larger crystal salts crunch wrong. This salt is in the geometry sweet spot.

What it does NOT do

It is not a cooking salt. Don't use it in pasta water. Don't use it in a brine. Don't use it inside a stew. The texture is the entire point, and the texture disappears in liquid. You'd be wasting it.

Why $22

Hand-harvested. Small operation. Real labor. The economics of small-batch sea salt are not a scam in the way that, say, "single-origin pink salt" is mostly a scam. The Skye operation is a few people on a coast harvesting the right way.

How long it lasts

A small tin (around 100g) lasts me 18–24 months as a finisher. That works out to about $0.03 per use. The price-per-use is fine. The price-per-tin just feels weird because the alternative is a $1 box.

The tin

I want to register an aesthetic objection in favor of the tin: it is beautiful. After the salt is gone, the tin is the size and shape that's perfect for a small drawer, holding paperclips, holding picks, holding earrings. I have four empty Skye salt tins in my house being used for various small purposes. This is part of the value.

Tomorrow: a Brazilian board game my friend brought back that has, somehow, replaced poker night.