'I love you like salt', she said, and the king, her father, was so spurned that he rejected her in favour of more flattering praise.

But as we all know, the daughter was professing her essential relationship with her dad - without him, all else would be ordinary. He made her life have substance and meaning. Thus, he was essential to her.

That's the way it is, too, with bread and salt. Without salt, bread has no meaning.

I don't hold too much truck with those who advocate 'salt free' bread - you can make bread even with tiny amounts of salt - so small as to be negligable, and yet it still has a profound effect. Salt is a bit like religion, or 'spirit', or micronutrients. A little is almost always better than none at all, and definitely always better than too much!

Actually, technically bread lacking salt has no structure. If, like me, you've forgotten to put the salt in a dough, you'll eventually discover that the bread didn't rise properly. It will either not rise at all, or fall over after attempting to rise. And certainly, if you press on and try to bake it, you will eventually end up with a flavourless mass of flour and water.

Gluten requires salt for its structural integrity. Salt adds 'spine', if you like. It also restricts the action of yeast. Effectively, it 'sets' the gluten. That's why I advocate the delayed salt method - the idea is that the gluten is allowed to develop naturally, and once this has occurred, salt is added, which has the effect of 'setting' this process, which then helps to provide a predictable and even rise for the bread.

Mostly, people think of salt as sodium chloride (NaCl), but it is actually more complex than that. Salt also contains some essential trace elements in very small concentrations. The main ones are calcium, magnesium and sulphate, which, while they are there in tiny concentrations (we're talking parts per million here), they are important to human health and to bread production.

What kind of Salt is the best for making Bread?

Bakers in Australia use either regular cooking salt, or flossy salt, or both. Sea Salt is also used in some bakeries.

Cooking Salt

Cooking salt comes in Fine, Coarse or Medium grades, and the use of each is dictated by the desired end result. Generally, a fine salt will be used in pastries and in white breads, while coarse grades hold up better in sourdoughs and wholemeal breads. The more coarse the salt, the better it suits a 'slow' dough. What this effectively means is that slow doughs allow the salt to dissolve into them over time, whereas 'fast' doughs (i.e., doughs which proof in an hour or less, for example yeasted dough) need finer salt, which dissolves more rapidly.

Flossy Salt

Continental bakeries like flossy salt, and I also think that for sourdough bread, flossy salt is very good. That's because the large flakes 'burn' through the dough, assisting with the appearance that sourdough and continental bakers go for - a loose textured, uneven crumb. The other thing that European and sourdough bakers like about flossy salt is that it dissolves easily. Essentially, flossy salt is like flakes of salt, rather than chunks. Very good stuff, and you'll be able to buy flossy salt from this site very soon, so hang in there.

Sea Salt

There are differences between sea salts, though in many cases 'sea salt' is also 'cooking salt', because both are harvested from seaside salt flats - though this is not always the case. There are many sea salts that are truly drawn from offshore salt deposits such as Celtic Sea Salt, which comes from Brittany, where the salt is mined not far off the coast of France.

Sea salt tends to be more crystallline than other salts, and so structurally doesn't dissolve as quickly. This can be fine for slow fermenting doughs, but be careful, because a chunk of salt left over in dough can be quite offputting if you're not expecting it.

I will go into more detail about different kinds of salt and their relative uses in future articles - and because most home bakers can't easily get their hands on flossy salt, I will soon be offering it for you to buy through this site, along with some other quality offerings which might not be easily sourced where you live. So stay tuned!

You can also learn more about the wonderful art of making Sourdough Bread by reading books, which are available for sale through this site. Check out the new Recommended Reading section at your leisure. Remember, every book you buy helps me to expand this free sourdough and artisan breadmaking resource.

You might need fresh flour in your breadmaking adventure. SourdoughBaker Shop has the freshest organic flours for you to use. We also have Ripe Sourdough Starter, ready to go immediately. Kick start your sourdough breadmaking

Until next time,

Happy Sourdough Baking!