Rubbed my brisket with cheap salt from the gas station and ruined a whole cook

Last Saturday I had to grab some kosher salt from a Shell station when my store was closed, and that stuff had this weird metallic aftertaste that totally killed the bark on my 14-pound prime packer, has anyone else noticed a difference between cheap salt and the good stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

ryan_gibson8421d ago

Gotta disagree a little on the anti-caking agents thing. Most table salt uses stuff like calcium silicate or yellow prussiate of soda, not iodine, and those can leave a weird chalky feeling on the tongue but not really a metallic flavor. The metallic taste is almost always the iodine itself - it's a chemical that can taste like battery acid if you use too much. I ran into this exact problem once when I was out of kosher salt and grabbed a box of Morton's iodized table salt for a pork shoulder, and the finished meat had this faint tinny note that wouldn't go away no matter how much pepper I threw at it. So yeah, it's definitely the iodine doing the dirty work here, not the anti-caking stuff or the cheapness of the brand.

the_parker21d ago

Kosher salt from a gas station" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Most gas stations don't sell actual kosher salt, they sell plain iodized table salt in a box. That metallic taste is the iodine, not the salt itself getting weird. A cheap store brand kosher salt would be fine for a brisket, but table salt with anti-caking agents and iodine will definitely mess with the flavor no matter how much you paid for it.