Can I substitute sea salt for kosher salt in this bread recipe?

Sure....they just want salt that has no iodine nor things to keep it from caking. But be aware that the finer the crystals the saltier a teaspoon of salt will be...add less than you think, taste and add more if it needs it.

sure you can. A friend tried and it works.

Angelaid, know how sometimes there is a little angel sitting on one shoulder and a little devil on the other, both whispering to you? When someone asks a question like this, I often have a terrible urge to answer something like, oh no, never, it'll ruin the whole recipe, your oven will catch fire and everyone will die a horrid painful death if you do XXX (out of date product, substitute, use a different pan, whatever.)

I'm glad that the devil voice doesn't get out very often. Does anyone else hear that momentary little whisper?

I had a "wise" response in mind....but it was more about wearing a yarmuka...or not!

I don't bake. Thought this recipe might be one of the baby steps to get me started.

I understand, and I didn't mean to single you out. Just that I get these fleeting thoughts. Same thing with the Home Decorating Forum, when the angel wins out and I am nice. ;-)

Angelaid...it's not about you...it's about those of us with evil thoughts.

Since you're starting to bake, do yourself a favor. Get a good kitchen scale with a display that isn't covered up by the bowl, and which does metric and American units, with fractions. The easiest way to substitute one kind of salt for another is to weigh it. Then the size of the pieces won't matter.

It's also a lot easier to measure flour accurately with a scale. You should still fluff it up, but you don't have to worry about how much is actually in a cup, especially if you have highly variable humidity.

You can learn to measure pretty accurately by eye and hand, but that takes years of regular practice. It takes less experience to know when to adjust your batter, but still quite a bit. You can measure accurately from the start if you have a scale.

I baked for a lot of years and I baked pretty damned good cakes and cookies and breads without a kitchen scale. I have one now, but it was a gift....am glad to have it but mostly use it for portioning large pieces of meat and dividing up bread dough.
If you are just starting to bake, don't get all worried about weights....most simple recipes have lots of lee way.

According to abinfive.com, you will have the same saltiness. 1 tablespoon regular salt. To 1.5 T Morton kosher salt to 2 tablespoons Diamond Kosher salt

Linda, I can bake a tasty cake without any recipe at all and just ballparking the measures. People who didn't grow up baking and just knowing what's right and how to do things often end up with fails. It's much easier to learn as an adult, following a recipe, if you weigh your ingredients.

How do you convert your recipes to weights instead of cups?

Well, Junco, there's the problem. a measured amount of flour can weigh very differently, depending on many factors and most recipes by far are written for volume measurement rather than weight.

It's much easier and more accurate to use scales. IMHO.

I just baked a cake tonight, starting from an American recipe given by weights. It's true that traditional American recipes used volume more, but that's changing. There's far more variation in volume than in weight, however, even among professionals, though it's true that humidity, etc., also affects the weight of flour.

Junco, it is possible to convert recipes, but you can't just use a table of standard weight to volume because that might not apply to your ingredients. Good recipes by weight even weigh the eggs, however. For the beginner, a good scale and a recipe given in weights (usually grams) is easiest. Otherwise, you really have to learn the correct way to measure flour, etc. And in the case we started with, you have to know how fine the salt is to know the measure. Just look at the ratios Westsider gave for two popular kosher salt brands. So much easier to weigh it! 1 gram of table salt is 1 gram of kosher salt (any brand) is one gram of sea salt (any grind). The air between the particles doesn't add weight but it does take up volume.

I think the issue of the salt is a relatively new one since different types of salt are rather new to the marketplace (last 10 years or so). Like LInda, I own a scale and am glad to know about weighing the salt, I will try that.

But it remains that most of the recipes I have as well as new ones i see are written in cup measures--like Linda I have years of experience mixing these and will continue to do them that way. I'm not saying I don't understand the benefits of weighing ingredients, I just don't see the need to move in that direction at this point in my life. As for a new baker who takes the advice to use weight based recipes, what is she/he to do when they want to make Aunt Sally's Red Velvet Cake, or the new pound cake in this month's Southern Living? Baking/cooking is like many things in life--experience and practice will improve your results.

Cooking is an art....not a science. When making large quantities, as in commercial baking weighing is a good thing. And, when portioning a few pounds of ground beef into burgers, weighing is a good thing. When making jams and preserves and figuring out how much sugar is needed, weighing is a good thing.
But when making a Yankee pot roast, I won't be weighing out 100 grams of chopped onion, and when making cinnamon rolls I won't weigh the cinnamon I sprinkle on the sweet dough.
And if you have never tasted, side by side, Himalayan, black Hawaiian, red Hawiian, Fleur de Sel etc......you will know that only refined salt tastes the same always.
If you have made bread more than 4 times you will know that even if you carefully weigh the water and flour, sometimes you need to add more for dusting the bench...or less than other times.
Taste your food, taste your dough, taste your soup taste the mashed potatoes. Some onions are stronger than others and some cinnamon hotter and some apples jucier.
Learning how to adjust is what makes a cook...not a worker with giant scales and mixers in a wonder bread factory.

I often prefer weight because it's neater. Who wants to scrape peanut butter out of their one cup measure, not me. My flour is in its original bag, within a ziplock bag, pouring it into a bowl is neater than trying to scoop and level a cup within the bag. But it does seem that some things are written based on how they assume you're going to measure it. The nutrition label on a box of Bisquick says 1/3 cup is 40 ounces. But try to use that equivalency when you measure out two cups and you end up with something far runnier than what I think pancake batter should be. Scoop and level, seems just about right.

I agree with Lindac that cooking is an art, except when it comes to baking. Baking needs to be more precise so I think you're more likely to get the result you want if you weigh.

When it comes to salt, I'd certainly use the chart Westsider provided. That's very helpful. I use Diamond Kosher for most things, but never paid attention to changing the amount I use in a recipe due to it's texture. I've used it for so long, to me it is regular salt. I may try a recipe with the adjustment provided above and see what happens. I like thought of weighing the salt, if a weight is provided. Good to know.

As for determining a conversion of cups to weights, you can find them in some cookbooks and on the internet. But if I'm making a recipe from a baking cookbook, I use the measuring technique that the book uses, and most baking books give a procedure for measuring.

Sally

This has been an interesting thread to follow, and I would have to say cooking is both an art and a science. In fact, I would say food at its best is a blend of art and science, after being a foods judge at fairs for many years.

Leave the salt out of a bread recipe and see what you end up with? Bad science. Add the salt twice, an easy mistake, and see what you end up with? Bad science. Add the salt early and the gluten is harder to develop. Add the salt late in the gluten-development and it's easier to develop and won't require as much kneading. All science!

The same goes for adding too much water, flour, sugar (or other sweetener); or flavoring ingredients which can affect the gluten-development in bread when you add too much - like cinnamon and nutmeg when added directly to the dough (this is why we sprinkle cinnamon/sugar on the dough surface for cinnamon rolls, rather than adding large amounts of cinnamon TO the dough. Add too much dairy and you'll end up with loaf with characteristics like - low-volume, poor symmetry, poor cellular structure and texture..... That's pure science.

When people have a failed recipe, it's generally not from bad intentions or bad artistic interpretation, it's from bad science.

Most modern baked goods are based on a ratio of ingredients. Stick to the common ratio whether you use a scale to weigh each ingredient, cups, pint canning jar, tea/coffee cup or mug... for your measuring tool-of-choice.... So take a moment to marvel at the science. "A standard plain cake has, by measure, 1/3 as much fat as sugar, 2/3 as much milk as sugar; and about 3 times as much flour as liquid." This ratio works whether you are making one small cake, one large cake, or enough batter for 100 cakes. Alter the ratio, such as trying to make a low-fat or low-sugar cake, or changing the type of flour used, and you will need to alter the known science with different ingredients and/or mixing methods.

This science is most important when you develop recipes because you need to keep in mind ingredients that are tenderizers (fat and sugar) and those that are structure builders (flour and eggs), along with the other ingredients.

Back to measuring flour for bread. This is one area that is completely without a standard for a scale or a dry measure, as all measurements for flour in a bread recipe are just a "good (or bad) guess". Add to that the way each person fills a cup with flour which will get you completely different amounts of flour if you were to weigh the amount on a scale, and the measuring cups themselves have NO standard in manufacturing.

This is one area of baking where experience (art) along with science will help improve your bread. Due to the differences in the amount of gluten and moisture in flour, and those differences vary from brand-to-brand, season to season (moisture high during the rainy season and low during a dry winter) as well as from bag-to-bag of the same brand, you need to develop the "feel" (art) for bread dough. Your hands will "know" more about the dough than an exact measure. This is why you need to hold back 1/2-3/4 cup of flour during kneading. You may not need to add all the flour once it has the correct "feel" - and you may use all of the flour and require even more than the recipe called for..... It is also better to err on the side of a loose/wet dough than a hard/stiff dry dough.

But I would also encourage EVERYONE to get a scale. There are lots more uses, along with measuring ingredients (especially if you find a recipe that is all weight measurements). It's the best tool in your kitchen when you MUST weigh something. It's far more accurate to measure 4-ounces of shredded cheese on a scale than it is to try to measure an equivalent in a cup - do you pack it tight/loose???? You can scale (weigh) the amount of batter in two cake pans to make sure you have an equal amount of batter in each of them so you have cake layers that are the same size. I even scale dough for burger and hot dog buns so I can adjust the size wanted/needed and make them consistently that same size, as well as the amount of bread per serving (a serving of bread is considered 1-oz.). When buns/rolls/loaves are the same size, they will bake more evenly.

A reason to weigh the amount of salt is because of the size of the grains of different salt products. The finer the grind, the more salt grains there will be in a teaspoon (or whatever measure) because they will pack very closely together, while there will be less total salt when you put coarse-grinds of salt in the teaspoon because there are more voids of air between the larger chunks of salt. But the difference will probably not make a really huge difference in this bread recipe, but it IS a science factor you may want to keep in mind. And plenty of bread has successfully been made with plain old iodized table salt - even though I personally stopped using it many decades ago. So many things are choices, and neither totally right or totally wrong.

-Grainlady

Got a kick out of this recipe the other day. Calls for 153 grams each of 00 and AP flour, giving equivalencies of 1 cup plus 1 Tbsp, and 1 cup plus 1 Tbsl plus 1 tsp respectively, but then goes on to specify 200ml water, or "around a cup," which it's not if you're being that precise.

http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1016230-robertas-pizza-dough

Well, I agree with Grainlady to a large extent. and partly disagree. Once you know the science, like how the malliard reaction affects flavor and how warming spices in a pan affects flavor, and how over cooking white meat makes it tough and stringy....and do those things automatically because that's just what you do...then cooking becomes art and you can add chopped dried apricots to your bread without making it heavy....and when you have made enough bread you know when it feels right, and that less flour to liquid makes bigger holes and milk makes a denser bread.
But, I will never weigh my salt! LOL!

So, Grainlady, explain to dense me your instruction, "A standard plain cake has, by measure, 1/3 as much fat as sugar..." Does that mean, given a cup of sugar, you'd use 1/3 cup fat?

Sally

Yes.....check out some cake recipes.

So, sally2, check out this link and you'll see how ratios work for all kinds of baking without recipes:

http://usingmainlyspoons.com/baking-without-recipes-using-ratios/

and one more:

http://www.cleveland.com/taste/index.ssf/2009/04/understanding_the_ratio_approa_2.html

-Grainlady

Okay, thanks Linda and Grainlady.

Sally

America's Test Kitchen did a blind test a few years back and could not detect any difference in flavor in different varieties of unseasoned salt. The differences for most of us are in the measurements. I usually start with substituting about 1.5 times as much Kosher salt as table salt if one is more handy than the other. They also did not detect a flavor difference between iodized and non-iodized salt.

I read that too....but that was not considering various salts with mineral content, like the pink and black salts of various regions. And perhaps they coulkdn't tell the difference in salt in a dish, but if you put a bit on your finger, you sure can tell.