The Best Salt To Use For Pickles If You Don't Have Pickling Salt

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The Best Salt To Use For Pickles If You Don't Have Pickling Salt By Joe Hoeffner Sept. 16, 2025 6:00 am EST

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If you've never made your own pickles before, you might be surprised that there's a special kind of salt expressly used for the purpose, whether you're brining cucumbers or beets, or pickling surprisingly tangy seafood like shrimp. Surely one kind of salt works just as well as any other, right? Not so! Pickling salt, which is free of the iodine and anti-caking agents found in table salt, is an important ingredient if you want your brine to taste salty without being compromised by any other chemicals. But if you don't have any on hand, what do you do? We asked Dr. Bryan Quoc Le, founder of Mendocino