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By Rabbi Dovid Cohen, Administrative Rabbinic Coordinator

Q. All salt is kosher, right?

A. Plain salt is kosher without hashgachah, regardless of whether it is fine or coarse, “kosher”, or designed for pretzels.  This also includes salt that contains iodine (typically listed in the ingredient panel as potassium iodide), anticaking agents (such as calcium silicate, yellow prussiate of soda, magnesium carbonate, or aluminosilicate) or dextrose.  In some situations, iodine is mixed with dextrose as a processing aid, and the dextrose would, therefore, not be listed on the ingredient panel.  It is for this reason that for Pesach one should not use salt which contains (added) iodine, unless it is specifically certified as kosher for Pesach.

At the same time, there are many salt blends which contain all types of ingredients, and the status of those blends depends on the other ingredients which were added.  If those added ingredients are all acceptable without hashgachah, then the blend may also be used.  However, if there are flavors or other kosher-sensitive ingredients, the salt blend should only be used if it is properly kosher-certified.

There are many varieties of salt which naturally occur with some color other than white.   For example, there is Himalayan pink salt, Persian blue salt, and grey salt (sel gris), each of which is mined or collected from a location where the mineral content tints the salt to a specific color.  However, not all “colored” salts are equally innocuous: for example, there is black salt which get its color from truffles (not to be confused with Himalayan black salt), and it requires hashgachah.  There are also many items sold as “green salt” or “yellow salt”, and the kosher status of each must be evaluated separately.

There are also two halachos worth noting regarding salt.  The first is that Rema (YD 88:2) says that one should have separate salt boxes/cellars for meat and dairy, because a bit of food might flake off into the salt when people dip in their meat or cheese, and then that food might stick to something at the next meal.  However, later Poskim note that this concern is limited to situations where food is dipped into the salt box/cellar, but technically there is no need to have separate saltshakers for meat and dairy.  Nonetheless, many people do keep separate saltshakers, to avoid situations where the saltshaker touches food or is held over a hot pot of food.

The second halacha of salt relates to Shabbos.  Shulchan Aruch (OC 318:9) rules that salt can only be “cooked” if it is in a pot that is cooking on the fire, and, therefore, on Shabbos one can add salt to any hot food, if it is off the fire.  Rema says that it is commendable to follow a stricter approach that says that one violates Shabbos if salt is put into any hot food, even if it is already in a kli sheini  (i.e., not the original pot it was cooked in).  In this context it is noteworthy that (a) Mishnah Berurah says that this is limited to salt mined from the ground without any heat, but if some “cooking” was done to the salt during processing at the factory, then one can be lenient, (b) much of the standard salt (i.e., not sea salt or mined salt) is heated as part of its processing, and (c) some contemporary Poskim have ruled that this qualifies for the lenient ruling of Mishnah Berurah.  [The details of this discussion are beyond the scope of this article.]

This article first appeared in the Let’s Talk Kashrus column, Yated Ne’eman, December 27, 2024.