Salt is one of the basic tastes that all humans have as well as an essential element for all life. As a seasoning, salt is one of the oldest extracts known to humans, with evidence of it being used as a preservative and additive dating back to as far as 6,000 BC.
Ancient Romanians extracted salt from spring water and salt-works in China procured it for trade. The Hebrews, Romans, Greeks, Egyptians – you name it. If a place was civilized, they used salt.
Today, salt is not as often needed to make food last longer but it’s a completely common table ingredient that just about everyone has at all times. But just because it’s common doesn’t mean that it’s cheap.
Special gourmet salts from around the world can command enormous prices from chefs hoping to enhance their creations with these 8 unique salts.
8. Soy Salt
Brand: Kamebishiya
Origins: Japan
photo source: MTC Kitchen
Soy salt has been produced in Japan for centuries. This particular jar available for purchase on MTC Kitchen is made using soy sauce brewed at a family-owned brewery that has been making it the same way for the last 254 years.
The concept of using soy sauce to create salt flakes requires the high-quality properties of Kamebishi soy sauce to create this seasoning, which is only used in Japanese iterations of Italian and French dishes in the popular fusion cooking craze.
The result is light and flaky, with the mushiro-koji preparation techniques that have been used for centuries adding authenticity and freshness to this three-year aged soy salt, which can cost as much as $8.93 per ounce.
Did you know?
The traditional method of creating Kamebishi soy sauce involves layering mold-applied soybeans and wheats to bamboo mats in a temperature-controlled room. This process, mushiro-koji, handcrafts each step of the process before fermenting the soy salt in 100-year-old cedar vats. This aging process takes three years before the salt is ready to be sold.
7. Kala Namak Rock Salt
Brand: Bitterman Salt Company
Origins: India
photo source: The Meadow
Kala Namak is also called Indian Black Salt, Nirav Black Salt, and Sanchal. This unrefined, untreated mineral salt is sourced from Darjeeling in India, mined from the volcanic rock there. Despite its name, this salt isn’t as black as some. It can be pink-gray, colored by magnesium and iron.
This salt is used most prominently as a condiment in Indian food, including chaats, which are fruit glazes, yogurts, salads, chutneys, and other snacks. The salt has a strong aroma of sulfur and can sell for as much as $9 per ounce.
Did you know?
Natural Indian black salt like what’s in this jar is not iodized like normal table salt. This means that despite the pungent sulfuric flavor of Indian black salt, you can’t use it to get your daily recommended allowance of the crucial mineral, iodine.
6. Kilauea Onyx Black Hawaiian Sea Salt
Brand: Bitterman Salt Company
Origins: Hawaii
photo source: The Meadow
Kilauea Onyx Black Hawaiian Sea Salt is renowned for its mineral content and black color. It sells for as much as $10 per ounce, as valued for its natural additives as for its stylish look.
Solar-evaporated salt is purified with black lava rocks to add mineral content to the salt, while charcoal detoxifies and brings out its natural flavors.
This black sea salt is perfect on plantains, scallops, grilled fish, sushi, and fruit. The farms that create the Kilauea Onyx Hawaiian sea salt are in Kaunakakai, on the Molokai island, one of the purest and most isolated places in the world. Its water has been tested to reveal bottled-water levels of pure drinkability.
Did you know?
The table salt in most of our houses has been heated, processed, and treated to remove its impurities. But in the process, the salt loses its mineral content and electrolytes, leaving pure but non-medicinal flavoring. This black salt is as natural and pure as it comes, allowing it to also boast health-improving properties.
5. Parmesan Truffle Salt
Brand: Bitterman Salt Company
Origins: Italy
photo source: The Meadow
Parmesan truffle salt is as delicious as it sounds, here sold in a 1.8-ounce jar on The Meadow. The Italian sea salt that forms the base of this gourmet mix is hand-harvested from the Mediterranean.
It’s then mixed for the boldest flavor possible with Parmigiano Reggiano cheese and summer black truffles from Italy.
This salt is fantastic for pastas, eggs, popcorn, a delicious grilled steak, scalloped potatoes, and more. Black truffle sea salt such as this jar sells for $10 per ounce.
Did you know?
Fresh summer black truffles have a rough surface, covered in diamond-shaped bumps. Their aroma is rich and woody, flavored with garlic, hazelnut, wild mushroom, and earth. They are cultivated in northern Italy where they grow beneath pine, hazelnut, and oak trees.
4. Icelandic Birch Smoked Sea Salt
Brand: Bitterman Salt Company
Origins: Iceland
photo source: The Meadow
Icelandic Birch Smoked Sea Salt is made from the sustainable salt works run by Stefansson, Eiriksson, and Jonsson. Iceland has been a pioneer in artisan salt-making for 240 years, so they’re working with some solid artistic precedents.
Their salt is made from evaporating crystals using geothermal power, just like their ancestors did it, using natural geysers in the bay of Reykjanes to make the salt the most natural way possible.
The lava that lies under the Eurasian land plates generates the geothermal forces necessary to heat the water that powers a lot of the island’s electricity but also allows them to make the perfect finishing spice for fingerling potatoes, wilted green vegetables, or fresh snapper.
This sea salt retains a ton of natural minerals and has a unique woody aroma. It sells for as much as $11.11 per ounce.
Did you know?
The smokey salt is named for the Downy Birch, which is unique in that it’s the only tree native to Iceland. It has long been used in Iceland as a fire-starter and material for carving as well as a basis for many folk medicinal remedies. It also flavors the process of making this unique salt.
3. Saffron Salt
Brand: Bitterman Salt Company
Origins: Italy
photo source: The Meadow
Sea salt blended with saffron and a dash of turmeric takes advantage of the world’s most expensive spice to enhance a special meal with its pungent palette. It’s delicious on lamb tagine, paella, chicken, fish, or in Bloody Marys.
Saffron salt is the perfect seasoning for a cream sauce too.
Saffron salt can sell for as much as $15 per ounce. It’s made in salt evaporation ponds, making it uniquely rich in dietary vitamins and minerals, even compared to other luxury salts.
Did you know?
Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world, not only for its flavors but for the way it’s harvested. Saffron flowers are delicate and have to be handpicked – only around three stigmas of spice can be harvested per flower and of these, not all of them are of high enough quality for the best saffron salt.
2. Black Truffle Sea Salt
Brand: Bitterman Salt Company
Origins: Oregon
photo source: The Meadow
Black Truffle sea salt is a complexly flavored salt mixture with concentrated truffle oil. The salt goes perfectly with eggs, fettuccini, popcorn, French fries, roasted vegetables, steaks – pretty much anything can be enhanced by this iconic luxury sea salt.
Black truffle sea salt can sell for as much as $16 per ounce. This finishing salt is flavored with truffles ranging from across Italy, including Umbria, Tuscany, Piedmont, and Marche, though the salt was assembled in Oregon. They’re the most expensive flavoring fungi in the world.
Did you know?
Black truffles are dark, robust, and strongly flavored with earth, cocoa, and tannins. There are many different varieties of truffle but black winter truffles found beneath certain breeds of tree in the Perigord regions of France and black summer truffles in Italy are the most luxurious.
1. Amethyst Bamboo Korean Sea Salt
Brand: Bitterman Salt Company
Origins: Korea
photo source: The Meadow
The most expensive salt is Amethyst Bamboo Korean Sea Salt. This salt by Master In-Shan is a combination of Amethyst and Oyster bamboo salts, the most expensive in the world due to their flavor and efficacy.
Bamboo salt is a well-known ingredient in many concoctions in Taoist medicine.
The salt is known to stimulate the eater’s Chi, with other purported benefits such as relieving edema, curing fevers, treating cancer, and remedying pretty much anything that ails you. We can’t guarantee these benefits, but the salt’s flavors are verifiable – smoky, sweet, savory, salty.
This high-value salt sells for as much as $43.75 per ounce.
Did you know?
Bamboo salt is made by roasting coarse gray sea salt in aged bamboo cylinders, seven times in total, each time giving it properties of pine resin, clay, bamboo, and even flavors of iron roasted out of the oven. The salt is roasted until it can be melted, recrystallized, and ground again.
