Cheese Salt

Coarse, flaked, non-iodised salt — and the reason a recipe specifies it rather than ‘salt’ is that the two things ordinary table salt carries, iodine and anti-caking agents, both cause problems in a cheese.

What it is

Cheese salt is simply non-iodised salt with no anti-caking agents. There is nothing exotic in the bag, and what matters is mostly what is not in it.

No iodine. Iodine is an antimicrobial — that is the point of it in table salt — and a cheese depends on microorganisms doing their work for months. The usual advice is to avoid it, and the reasoning is sound even if the effect at kitchen doses is modest.

No anti-caking agents. These are insoluble, and in a brine they cloud the liquid and settle out. In a dry-salted curd they leave a fine grit.

A grain that suits the job. Cheese salt is sold both fine and flaked, and either works — the point is that it dissolves at a rate which lets you distribute it evenly through curd rather than dumping a dissolved slug into whatever it touches first. A flake is easier to scatter by hand; a fine grain dissolves faster in a brine. What you want to avoid is a grain so coarse it sits undissolved on the curd.

What salt does in a cheese, which is four things at once

It is the brake on ripening. Salt slows the culture and the enzymes. Under-salt and the ripening runs away from you — the cheese over-acidifies, the texture goes wrong and the flavour with it. This is the job people underestimate most.

It draws whey. Salt on or in the curd pulls moisture out, which is a large part of how a recipe hits its final moisture content.

It is safety. Together with acid and moisture, salt is what makes the finished cheese an inhospitable place for what you did not invite.

And it is flavour, which is the one everybody thinks of first and is arguably the least of the four.

The three routes it takes

Dry-salting the curd — milled curd tossed with salt before pressing, which is the cheddar method and the most even.

Dry-salting the surface — rubbed on the formed wheel over several days, drawing moisture out of the rind.

Brining — the wheel floats in saturated brine for hours or days. ⚠ And a brine has a trap: made with salt and water alone it will pull calcium out of the cheese, leaving soft, slimy edges. A brine wants about 0.25% calcium chloride and to be acidified to roughly pH 5.0 so that it is in equilibrium with the cheese instead of dissolving its surface.

⭐ How much, in the end: most cheeses land between about 1.5% and 2% salt by weight of the finished cheese — with the deliberate outliers well outside that, like a Pecorino Romano, whose saltiness is a ripening control as much as a seasoning.

Substitutes (if absolutely necessary)

• Kosher salt — the everyday stand-in, and a good one: non-iodised, no anti-caking agents, coarse. ⚠ Weigh it, do not measure it by volume — Diamond Crystal and Morton differ by roughly a factor of two per cup, and that is enough to ruin a cheese in either direction.
• Coarse sea salt or pickling salt — both fine, for the same reasons.
• Plain table salt — will work in a pinch if it is genuinely uniodised and additive-free; read the box rather than assuming.
• Note: iodised table salt is the one to avoid, and so is anything with an anti-caking agent listed.

Where to find it

• Local store: the canning aisle — pickling salt is exactly the right product and costs a fraction of anything labelled for cheese. Kosher salt in any supermarket does the same job.
• Online: cheesemaking suppliers sell it as “cheese salt,” which is convenient and not necessary.
• Storage: airtight, indefinitely. Salt does not go off; it only cakes.