Fleur de Sel vs. Himalayan Salt: Hand-Skimmed Sea Salt and Pink Rock Salt Compared

Fleur de sel and Himalayan salt are both sold as premium finishing salts, but they are made in opposite ways. Fleur de sel is sea salt: the thin layer of crystals that forms on the surface of the brine in seawater salt pans and is skimmed off by hand.¹ Himalayan salt is rock salt, mined in Pakistan and tinted pink by traces of iron oxide.² Chemically they are close. When a Swiss government laboratory analyzed four samples of each, every one came out between 36.9% and 38.8% sodium.³ What a cook notices is the crystal: fine, slightly damp flakes against hard, dry, pink grains.

Side by side

Where each one comes from

Fleur de sel. Guérande’s salt marshes make two salts from the same pans. Gray salt (sel gris) crystallizes on the clay bottom of the shallow basins and is gathered by hand by the salt worker, the paludier.¹ Fleur de sel forms instead as crystals floating in sheets on the surface of the brine, only in favorable weather with wind and sun, and is skimmed off by hand.¹ Under the specification it is white, sometimes faintly pink, holds no more than 12% moisture and less than 0.20% insoluble matter, and may contain no additives.¹ Fleur de sel is also made elsewhere. Two of the four samples in the Swiss survey below were labeled as from the Camargue, in southern France,³ and the Guérande rules don’t apply to those.

Himalayan salt. Harriet Hall of Science-Based Medicine describes the salt beds as deposited from ancient oceans about 250 million years ago.⁵ The commercial product comes from Pakistan,² where the state-owned Pakistan Mineral Development Corporation runs the Khewra mine, which it calls the world’s second largest salt mine.⁴ Morton describes its own pink salt only as sourced from the Himalayan Mountains.⁶ The pink comes from traces of iron oxide.² A widely repeated explanation credits the color to minerals left by bacteria in an evaporated sea; we found no source for it.

What’s in them: one laboratory, both salts

Most mineral comparisons between salts mix studies, sample sets and methods. A May 2016 report by Switzerland’s Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office (FSVO) is an exception: it analyzed 25 salts, including four fleur de sel and four Himalaya salts, in one project.³ The salts were bought from local retailers or over the internet.³

Scope. The fleur de sel samples were labeled as from the Camargue (two), Greece (one; the report notes this may be the packing country) and undeclared (one). None was from Guérande. Three Himalaya samples were labeled Pakistan, two of them Punjab; one was labeled South Africa, again possibly the packing country.³ The figures describe these eight samples, not either salt in general.

All figures from the FSVO report’s Tables 1 to 3.³

What the table shows, and what it doesn’t:

• Sodium is nearly the same. Neither is a low-sodium salt. The American Heart Association says table salt and most sea salts are about 40% sodium.⁸
• The extras are small. A potassium content of 2.2 g/kg is 0.22% of the salt by weight (our arithmetic). The highest fleur de sel iodine figure, 61.7 µg/kg, compares with 45 micrograms per gram in US iodized salt,⁷ which is 45,000 µg/kg; that puts iodized salt more than 700 times higher (our arithmetic).
• Himalayan salt’s iron is rust, not a supplement. The report says the iron in these salts is mainly present as insoluble iron oxide.³
• Contaminants. The report found specialty salts generally carried more contaminants than standard salts, but most contaminants did not reach even 1% of tolerable intake levels.³ Aluminum, at tens of thousands of µg/kg in every Himalaya sample and below detection in every fleur de sel, is the clearest difference between the two in the tables.
• The verdict. The FSVO concluded that specialty salts do not possess any advantages over standard salts, nor nutritional properties that would make them a recommended standard choice.³

A separate study points the same way for pink salt. Flavia Fayet-Moore and colleagues analyzed 31 pink salts bought in Australia in 2018 and found substantially more calcium than in a white table salt control, along with other minerals.² Even so, a 5 g teaspoon made no clinically significant contribution to nutrient intake except sodium, and it would take more than 30 g a day, about 6 teaspoons, for the minerals to matter, at which point the sodium would counteract any benefit.² Those were different samples measured by different methods, so the two studies’ numbers should not be mixed.

In the kitchen

America’s Test Kitchen found that sea salts vary in color but only slightly in flavor, and that once mixed into food, sea salt tastes no different from table salt.⁹ ATK recommends sea salts as finishing salts.⁹ So the useful question is what each one does on the surface of food:

• Fleur de sel gives fine, slightly damp crystals that crunch briefly and dissolve. A pinch over sliced steak, fish, ripe tomatoes, eggs or caramel is the classic use.
• Coarse Himalayan salt gives a harder, longer crunch and a pink fleck that shows on pale food such as fish, eggs and dressed greens.
• Inside a dish, in soups, doughs and pasta water, the crystals dissolve and the difference disappears.⁹

Those uses are kitchen judgment, not tested results. Two common claims have no test behind them that we found: that fleur de sel’s moisture gives it a briny aroma you can smell, and that Himalayan salt’s larger crystals taste less “instantly salty.” Himalayan salt blocks are also sold for cooking and serving; see cooking with Himalayan salt.

Can one stand in for the other?

Yes, almost always. Only the texture and color change. These treatments follow our fleur de sel substitute page.

How these were worked out. By weight: the Codex standard requires food-grade salt to be at least 97% sodium chloride on a dry basis,¹⁰ and Guérande fleur de sel can hold up to 12% moisture,¹ so a gram of fleur de sel cannot carry more salt than a gram of dry salt. The Swiss sodium figures overlap closely as well.³ By volume there is no published weight for a teaspoon of fleur de sel. Morton’s chart treats a teaspoon of its Himalayan salt as equal to a teaspoon of table salt (the chart applies only between Morton products),¹¹ so the starting points borrow the table-salt treatment from the substitute page. They are cautious starting points, not measured equivalents.

Health notes

• Sodium. Both are about the same share of sodium, and the AHA says total sodium intake is what matters most for heart health.⁸ A coarse salt holds less sodium per teaspoon only because fewer crystals fit in the spoon.⁸ The FDA’s Daily Value for sodium is less than 2,300 mg a day.¹²
• Iodine. The NIH Office of Dietary Supplements lists both fleur de sel and Himalayan salt among specialty salts that are not usually iodized.⁷ The trace iodine in the Swiss fleur de sel samples is far too low to replace iodized salt (see above).
• Health claims. Hall reviews claims that Himalayan salt detoxifies, lowers blood pressure or strengthens bones and finds them unsupported by evidence.⁵ This page makes no claim that either salt treats or prevents any condition.

What isn’t known

• No published weight per teaspoon for fleur de sel was found.
• No composition analysis of Guérande fleur de sel was found; the Swiss fleur de sel samples came from elsewhere.
• No published moisture figure for Himalayan salt was found.
• No taste test comparing the two salts directly was found.
• No dated, sourced price comparison was found.

Related

• Fleur de sel and Himalayan salt, the full profiles
• Fleur de sel substitutes
• Fleur de sel vs. sea salt, fleur de sel vs. kosher salt and fleur de sel vs. Maldon salt
• Himalayan salt vs. table salt, Himalayan salt vs. sea salt and Celtic salt vs. Himalayan salt
• Iodized vs. non-iodized salt and the best salt for cooking