Product Review: Maldon Sea Salt Flakes – Salty, Flakey, Crunchy!

Sometimes you see a product on the knocked-down shelf in the supermarket, and you go as if to walk past, and then you second-guess yourself and look back. (Is it just me?) Because it's knocked down so damn cheap, and you've never particularly heard of it before, or ever thought of trying it. Because you have no damn idea what you'd use it for, so you start to walk past again... but it's so cheap! Why not try it! What the hell is it anyway!

It goes in your basket. You might as well find out, what the heck. (When I think about it, maybe it is just me. I always do think that, with a product I've never tried before, then maybe I'll be getting nutrients I've never consumed before as well. All the sea salt health benefits! Or at the least, a novel dining experience, I guess.)

That's why and how I wound up with Maldon Sea Salt Flakes in my shopping basket, anyway. Or near enough, as I remember it. And ever since I've been trying to use the fancy-pants stuff up, pretty much as I would use normal salt. I'm not really the ambitious home cook, fine dining type, you know?

I find the stuff perfectly fine for soups, where it tends to melt in and add a normal salty savour to the flavour, as you'd expect with regular salt. Putting on my chips and such is where everything tends to go awry. What I wind up with is endless wodges of saltless, savourless stodge – followed by densely salty mouthfuls that make me choke and tear up. This isn't what I'm intending when I shake salt over my fries!

Oh, it's fine. It's an epicure's product with no additives (check the label!) and a few very specific uses. (I won't be stopping buying the usual Morrison's easy-pour E-number loaded version anytime soon, though.) It's also popularly supposed to have extra nutritional properties you don't get with regular supermarket salt, something to do with iodine and the thyroid I believe. (Although there may be some disputation on that subject depending on which writer or authority you consult: at least one learned journal article asserts that the belief of a high iodine content for sea salt is just a myth.¹) Enjoy sea salt with food: just as long as you don't pour it on your chips!

References.

1. PK Dasgupta, Y Liu and JV Dyke. Iodine Nutrition: Iodine Content of Iodized Salt in the United States. Environmental Science and Technology. 2008, Vol. 42, Issue 4, pages 1315–1323.