Best Salt for Baking Cookies

If you're standing in the grocery aisle staring at 13 kinds of salt, don't overthink it.

For most cookie recipes, you need one type of salt for the dough and one salt for topping cookies, if you want them to look fancy.

Jump to:

• Best Salt for Cookie Dough
• Can I use Table Salt?
• What's the Best Salt for Topping Cookies?
• My Baking Salt Setup
• Comments

Best Salt for Cookie Dough

Fine sea salt is my fave.

• It dissolves easily.
• It distributes evenly through the dough.
• No chemicals.

The unofficial queen of baking Dorie Greenspan says she uses fine sea salt for her cookie baking. Greenspan said fine sea salt has no additives and is easy to measure consistently and accurately.

Can I use Table Salt?

Yes, you can actually. In fact King Arthur Baking Co. develops all its recipes using table salt.

Table salt is inexpensive and it works well in cookies.

A word of caution: if you're swapping one salt for another, measurements may vary because different salts have different crystal sizes.

What's the Best Salt for Topping Cookies?

Some of the best cookies I've ever had in my life have been festooned with flakes of sea salt or finishing salts.

These are all good brands of finishing salts to try:

• Maldon
• Smoked Maldon (the salt I lust over)
• Fleur de sel
• Murray River
• Cypress or Cypriot
• Any flaky sea salt

You want delicate flakes to scatter across the top of your cookies when you pull them out of the oven. Chef's kiss...

My Baking Salt Setup

If I could only keep two salts in my baking cabinet I'd choose:

1. Fine sea salt for dough.
2. Maldon flaky sea salt for finishing.

But, because it's me, of course I have more than two.

Right now I have two types of Maldon alone, a regular and a smoked. My preference for topping cookies is the smoked.

The smoked salt is not harsh or strong, it just gives the faintest hit of "why are these cookies so freaking fabulous?"

And then I have three versions of fine sea salt in varying amounts of grain size. Those are from my local food co-op where I can buy a teensy amount.

Because I'm middle-aged and shop at T.J. Maxx, I also have pink Himalayan sea salt crystals. If I bake something pink, this salt goes on top.

If you're here, you might also find 7 Reasons Your Cookies Are Flat helpful.