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It wasn't that long ago that the big supermarkets carried just two kinds of salt: the one in the familiar round blue canister, and rock salt for making ice cream and melting the snow off your sidewalks.
Today we have a dizzying array of salt choices: plain old table salt, kosher salt, sea salts in textured grades (coarse, medium, fine), exotic pink, black, and orange salts from even more exotic locales, smoked salts, herbed salts, ludicrously expensive rare salt...the list goes on.
But what we're lacking is knowledge about how to use these salts. Some of these salts are more interesting than others (you can actually taste seaweed and other ocean aromas in some of them, and texture makes a big difference), but, in the end, sodium chloride tastes...like salt.
Until you mix interesting ingredients with salt to make flavored salts. Then all bets are off.
Imagine taking some maccha (powdered green tea) and putting it into a small electric coffee grinder with some crunchy coarse sea salt and blending the two. Then imagine sprinkling this electric-green mixture on freshly poached eggs. The alchemy is amazing.
Or try doing the same thing with some dried lavender buds and tossing a purple pinch of lavender salt on a thinly sliced heirloom tomato. A perfect blend of summer, ready in two minutes!
Need a smoky, deeply savory finish for that grilled steak? Try a some smoked paprika blended with sea salt.
Using flavored salts as "finishing" salts in your everyday cooking is the simplest thing you can do to elevate an ordinary dish into something extraordinarily delicious, with virtually no effort or time. Try keeping a few finishing salts near your stove, in small attractive ceramic bowls, within easy reach. If they're visible and near the stove, you'll reach for them often.
Unique, flavor-packed salts are an easy pathway to nearly instant breakaway food.
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