Product of the week - kosher salt

After hearing lots of good things about kosher salt from foodies and chefs on the Food Network we decided to give it a try. It is more salty than regular salt so you don't need so much. It has a good strong flavour. However why is it called kosher salt? Here is an extract from Wikipedia with the answers:


Kosher salt (sodium chloride) (or more correctly, koshering salt), is one of the most commonly used varieties of edible salt in commercial kitchens today. Kosher salt, unlike common table salt, typically contains no additives (for example, iodine), although kosher salt produced by Morton contains sodium ferrocyanide as a free-flow agent. Kosher salt has a much larger grain size than regular table salt, and a more open granular structure.

Kosher salt gets its name not because it follows the guidelines for kosher foods as written in the Torah (nearly all salt is kosher, including ordinary table salt), but rather because of its use in making meats kosher, by helping to extract the blood from the meat. Because kosher salt grains are larger than regular table salt grains, when meats are coated in kosher salt the salt does not dissolve readily; the salt remains on the surface of the meat longer, allowing fluids to leach out of the meat.