Pinch of salt

Now I don't want to burst anyone's bubble here since we're all getting so cosy with using sea salt in all our cooking and freshly ground from the mill onto our salads. After all, the culinary messiahs demonstrating TV gameshow cookery don't make a move without their box of Maldon Sea Salt crystals, pyramid shaped, soft and flaky, the chef's natural choice according to the label. The problem is that since chefs have started to debate which salt to use, they've learnt a lot about a basic ingredient that they've taken for granted for so long and many have begun to realise that the layer of salt scraped from the oceanic salt bed may have been subjected to a myriad of pollutants as the oceans are being used as dumping grounds for harmful toxic poisons such as mercury and dioxin not to mention oil spillages. With some 89% of the sea salt producers now refining their salt, today's sea salt isn't quite the healthy icon we all believed it to be.
So what's a man with a bag of hot slap chips in his hand to do ? Well you could try the perfect salt for hot chips - Ritrovo Truffle Salt imported from Italy with a hint of earthy black truffle or from the same company, Saffron Salt or Fennel Salt both begging to be sprinkled on rice, pasta, fish or eggs. Then there's the Peruvian pink, flower salt from Bali and Hawaiian Salt thats the colour of red clay. Other Hawaiian salts from the island of Molokai include red, black and silver hues. Of course there's also a host of small producers smoking salt over coconut shells and lime rinds, mixing it with green tea and bush tomatoes, the list just goes on and on.
But the real salt snob will seek out the new pink salt from the Himalayas which of course has strong health and nutritional qualities because it is unrefined and unpolluted, formed in the foothills of the Himalayas more than 200 million years ago and miraculously only recently marketed at a very high price for salt. They say that this salt is known as " white gold " because it contains eons of stored sunlight and offers all the natural elements identical to those in your body, the very same elements originally found existing in the " primal sea ". I say......take it with a pinch of salt.