One of the reasons that I love shopping at Costco, besides my 2% Executive Membership cash back, is that exposes me to all sorts of products I would not necessarily have bought before, and not only that, does so at a price that I can afford to try new things. Take the Fleur de Sel de Guérande, for example. This is truly a gourmet, high-end product that sells for many times the price in grocery stores and specialized stores, but that I can buy for a very affordable price at Costco.
Fleur de Sel de Guérande Natural Flower Sea Salt
This 125 gram (4.4 oz) container of Fleur de Sel de Guérande, straight from France, was priced at $5.69 at Costco. That’s in Canadian dollars, too. You can get similar items on Amazon for about twice the price, if you were so inclined. In grocery stores, the price rises steeply. These people have overhead to carry.
The real question, however, is this one: why on God’s green earth should you get this salt? You can buy iodized seal salt for a quarter of the price, at Costco or elsewhere. Salt is salt, right? No need to be difficult, right? It makes food salty.
That’s where you’d be wrong. If salt is salt, then help yourself to a 20-kilogram bag of rock salt for the driveway for three bucks, and put that in your food. Salt’s salt, right? Ha ha. Not quite.
Fleur de Sel, or Natural Flower Sea Salt, is collected by hand in Bretagne, France, following methods going back a thousand years. It is not cleaned, bleached, or crushed in any way and retains an indescribable texture and flavor.
Just to be clear, this is not the kind of salt that you add to a recipe when they ask for a ‘pinch of salt’. It’s not something you put in the water when you’re cooking pasta, unless you’ve got no sense and money to burn. Regular plain table salt is just fine for those purposes. Fleur de Sel is destined to greater things. Leave it on the table for your guests to sprinkle directly on their food, where they can appreciate fully the texture and taste.
Getting a salt of this quality, at this price, is a really cool thing. It is nothing like the Greek Kalas sea salt you can get at Costco and elsewhere. Fleur de Sel de Guérande is something you should have in your pantry or spice rack to give your guests a real taste of something special.