Type of salt used for salted nuts?

Answer 1

It depends on whether you are using commercially-produced salted nuts or buying fresh nuts and salting them yourself.

Commercial salted nuts - unless produced by gourmet outlets using specifically labelled salts such as pink salt, black lava salt, floral salt, and so on - would be produced using the cheapest salt available. There's nothing wrong in this. Manufacturers are in business for the same reason you and I work: to make money. We may be dedicated to the work we do, but we all have to live. Given that the vast majority of people can't taste one salt from another, it would be pointless to spend extra dollars on special salts to coat nuts. This would simply increase the retail price and so quite quickly put the manufacturers out of business. So if you're buying ordinary packets or tins of salted nuts, the type of salt doesn't much matter.

If you are buying fresh nuts and tossing them in salt at home you will achieve a more attractive and better-quality result than if you bought the finished product. You can choose your own favourite type of salt, bearing in mind that the coarser the crystals the less well they'll stick to the nuts. To present to your guests the best of both worlds, buy three or more different kinds of unsalted nuts and serve them separately: first, toss them in fine, table-grade salt, the kind you'd put in a salt sprinkler, then put them into their individual dishes and scatter coarse salt over them. Pink salt looks good with almonds in their skins, while ordinary sea salt looks attractive with any nuts. Kosher salt, with its large crystals, is great with large whole nuts such as Brazil nuts and macadamias.

Coarse salt crystals sparkle prettily in candlelight. If you have attractive salt and pepper grinders, put them on the table with the nuts. Decorate the bowls of nuts with a sprig of fresh herb or, in festive seasons, some kind of seasonal decoration.

Bear in mind that whatever the hype tells you, sea salt and other salts taste pretty much the same to all except the most highly-trained connoisseur of salt. I don't know any of those and maybe you don't, either! In the real world, nobody is ever likely to comment on the quality of salt used in any dish unless you actually allow yourself to be seen tipping it out of a Cheapest Salt in Town plastic bag, so if you aren't setting a special-occasion table for a party, or just for two, and simply want a few bowls of salted nuts for guests to nibble on in dim light while they watch the football or a new movie, use the cheapest mixed-nuts-and-salt combination on the market.