Potential of toxic moulds in sea salts

[redzed]

Here is your weekend reading assignment.

Most of us consider salt as being sterile, producing an environment hostile to pathogens. But according to one study, this is a misconception. Sea salts apparently may contain spores of potentially dangerous moulds. This is both interesting and important since many of us utilize sea salts in our products, especially in the dry cured and fermented variety.

Take a look at this article which summarizes the study:
https://phys.org/news/2017-10-mold-cont ... ially.html
Here is a link to the scientific paper containing an analysis of the study:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 2017303106

[DanMcG]

Wow, I would have never given this a thought, but it does make sense.
(I think your two links are the same Redzed. )

[redzed]

OOPS! Thanks for catching that Dan. The correct link has now been inserted. I was surprised by these findings. It also makes you think twice about the practice of washing sausages that have unwanted mould growth with a warm salt solution because you just might be introducing more unfriendly spores. But this is the fun part of this hobby, you never stop learning.

[fatboyz]

Red if I have a little mold on my Salami's/sausages I wash them with a little Vinegar/water mix. Never thought of using salt but now I have a good reason to stick with vinegar.

[Bob K]

But aren't there mold and yeast spores just floating around in everyone's kitchen?....variety unknown. Now someone will recommend using sterilized salt. I would also imagine that there are many other toxins in evaporated sea salt from today's Oceans

[StefanS]

My 2 thoughts -
1. Some big concern/consortium want to buy/take over rival in food field
2. How to live - Lord - how to live ????

[Butterbean]

In my field its common knowledge that there are few if any absolutes in nature and anything is possible in nature but its important not to be so focused on the tree that you can't see the forest.

[reddal]

Is there any advantage of sea salt over regular food-grade salt?

Regular salt is cheaper, its purer (less trace amounts of other chemicals as well as the issue in this thread).

Whats the upside to sea-salt?

[Butterbean]

I don't think there is other than the impurities in the sea salts. I was researching this a few years ago and found some sea salts from Italy that had a guaranteed analysis on the label and this showed a guaranteed minimum amount of nitrate. From this I concluded that this might be part of the reason some of the EU protected products are said to be nitrate/ite free since - like celery powder - it is not considered to contain nitrates even though it really does. So what I was left with was that if I was going to make something nitrate free I would definitely use a sea salt rather than a refined salt and hope there was enough nitrates in the salt to properly cure the meat. That's my conclusion anyway.