Mrs. Wages® Pickling & Canning Salt

This high purity salt produces a sparkling clear brine and is specifically designed for food canning. It has no iodine or other additives.

• 48 oz. (3.0 LBS) 1.36kg

What Is Pickling Salt?

Pickling salt is fine-ground 100% pure sodium chloride. That’s it! It really is just pure salt for canning and pickling at home.

Pickling salt is its most common name, but it can also be called canning salt or preserving salt. It is an important ingredient, and there are a few reasons that it’s important to use pickling salt instead of ordinary table salt.

What Makes Pickling Salt Different from Table Salt?

The biggest differences between pickling salt and table salt are the texture and the added ingredients in table salt.

Pickling salt is much more finely ground than typical table salt, and much finer than larger salt varieties like Himalayan pink salt or chef’s flake salt.

Why does the texture of the salt matter? Finely ground salt has more surface area relative to the volume, which makes it easier to fully dissolve the salt into your brine.

But there is another problem with using other salts instead of pickling salt.

That is, there are other ingredients in common table salt, and impurities in varieties like pink Himalayan salt that aren’t present in pickling salt.

Those impurities can change the composition of your pickle, changing your results. In addition, additives designed to keep the salt from clumping, and additives like iodine can also change how well a pickling recipe does when you use them.

What Happens When You Use a Different Salt in Pickling?

One of the core benefits of pickling salt is that the salt is highly consistent and provides consistent results when you use it. When you use a different salt, you lose that.

The most common reaction to using a different salt in pickling is that it can give you a cloudy brine. For the most part that’s not a bad problem to have, but it can make it harder to monitor the pickle and make sure you aren’t getting any accidental fermentation or bacterial contamination.

Another problem is that using a different salt may introduce off-flavors, especially for recipes that call for a higher concentration of salt, or that are likely to sit and be preserved for a long time.

Can You Substitute Pickling Salt?

Yes, but we don’t recommend it. Pickling salt is always going to be the best option when you’re making a pickle, and often it’s also the best option for other canning recipes as well.

That said, there’s nothing unsafe about using table salt. It just might change the way the pickle recipe works.

Even if it doesn’t make a significant difference in the beginning, the longer your pickle stays in the brine, or the longer your canned goods stay sealed before you use them, the more those differences are likely to show up.

The other challenge is getting the right amount of salt into your pickle. Pickling salts are typically measured by weight rather than volume, which can help make sure the right amount of salt makes it into the recipe.

However, other salts might not have the same weight per volume, so you may have to adjust the amount you add to make sure you’re getting enough sodium chloride into the brine, along with the other additives in the salt.

Getting the right proportion of salt into your brine is particularly important if you are making a fermented pickle.

Is Pickling Salt Only Good for Pickling?

No, but we don’t necessarily recommend using it for regular cooking.

There are a couple of reasons why pickling salt is mostly only used for pickling.

The first is that most table salt is iodized salt. Iodine is an important nutrient for thyroid health, and it’s easy not to get enough in your diet.1 So, while you can use pickling salt in a pinch, you don’t want to completely replace table salt with pickling salt in your diet because you’d risk iodine deficiency.

Taste is another big reason you might not want to switch. One reason so many chefs use larger flaked salt is because those larger flakes, especially added so that they don’t dissolve completely into your food, taste better.

Switching to pickling salt will let the salt dissolve more easily into your food, but it can also make it harder to taste how much salt is there and make you want to add more than you really need.

Looking for More Canning Tips and Recipes?

If you’re looking for more tips and tricks about canning and pickling, visit Mrs. Wages! Or go directly to our blog to see our latest advice!

INGREDIENTS: SALT.