Journal
Pink, grey, and black
Colour is the first thing a salt is sold on, and the last thing a cook should trust. Pink, grey, and black look like a range. They are three different objects, and only one of them is in our shop as a rock.
Pink means the halite of the Khewra mine in the Salt Range — the trade name “Himalayan pink” is colour in the crystal, not geography on a map. The crystals are large, dry, and the colour of a washed rose. The taste is salt, with a stony finish if you let a piece dissolve slowly. We sell it inside the box and as rock refills, because grinding it fine throws away what you bought: salt you can see on the plate. When a lot has an assay, we publish it on Transparency.
Grey is the salt of the Atlantic marshes, sel gris, raked up still damp with a little clay from the floor of the pan. It tastes round, slightly sweet, and less fierce than a dry flake. It likes roast meats and the water you cook potatoes in, if you can bear to spend it that way.
Black causes the most confusion in shops. A truly black crystal of halite is a rarity. The black salt in a grocer’s is almost always sea salt mixed with activated charcoal. It is matte, it stains a white fish grey, and it tastes like salt with a faint bitterness from the carbon. Used with a light hand on goat’s cheese or the rim of a tomato, it is handsome. We do not sell it; the journal on finishing will do more for your cooking than a black tin.
White still matters. A finishing flake is white because the crystal is thin and clean. Sicilian rock salt is white because that is the colour of the halite. If your cupboard has room for two salts, make them a flake and a rock on Personalise, and let the colours come later, when you know which dishes are bored.
Blue, here, is Persian blue: a rock salt crystal with a blue cast. Use it by the pinch, the same way you grate pink halite at the table. The note on the mineral is on The Salt; you can choose it as ground salt on Personalise.
The comparison worth making is on one plate. Same tomato, three pinches, thirty seconds. Pink stays. Grey softens. Black marks. The one you reach for again is the one to keep. The essay behind the names is on The Salt. The shop is for the salts we put in your kitchen.