What's the actual difference between sea salt and table salt besides the texture?

The main difference comes down to how they're processed and what gets added to them during that process. Sea salt is made by evaporating seawater, so it keeps whatever minerals were naturally in the ocean - stuff like magnesium, potassium, and calcium. Table salt is mined from underground salt deposits and then heavily refined to remove those minerals, leaving you with mostly pure sodium chloride. That refinement process is why table salt needs additives: anti-caking agents to keep it from clumping, and iodine added back in because it's good for your thyroid.

In terms of actual flavor, the mineral content in sea salt can give it a slightly different taste depending on where it's from, though honestly most people won't notice much difference in cooking. Where it matters more is texture and how it dissolves. Sea salt crystals are irregular and larger (unless it's fine sea salt), so they don't pack as densely in a teaspoon - meaning you might actually get less salt by weight if you're measuring by volume. Table salt crystals are uniform and compact, so a teaspoon of table salt has more actual salt in it than a teaspoon of flaky sea salt.

The iodine question is worth considering if you're not getting it from other sources like dairy or seafood. If you switch entirely to sea salt and aren't eating iodized salt anymore, that's something to think about. Otherwise, use whichever works better for what you're cooking - some folks prefer sea salt for finishing dishes where you see the crystals, while table salt dissolves faster and works better for baking where precision matters.

Here's what I actually noticed when I switched my kitchen over - table salt tastes sharper and almost metallic to me now, while sea salt feels rounder on my tongue.

Table salt gets stripped down during processing and then they add anti-caking agents like silicon dioxide, which changes how it dissolves and tastes. Sea salt keeps trace minerals like magnesium and potassium, which soften the flavor a bit.

If you're just seasoning pasta water it probably doesn't matter, but if you're finishing a dish or want to taste the salt itself, the difference is real.

When I switched to sea salt for my aquarium top-offs a while back, I realized people obsess over minerals that honestly don't matter much in most cooking - the mineral content in sea salt varies wildly depending on where it's harvested, sometimes negligibly.

The real gotcha nobody mentions is iodine: table salt's iodized (usually around 45 micrograms per teaspoon) specifically to prevent deficiency, while sea salt has almost none unless it's fortified, which most isn't. If you're not getting iodine from other sources like fish or dairy, you could actually run into a problem switching entirely to sea salt.

Beyond that, yeah, the processing and additives differ, but the iodine thing is what actually matters health-wise.

Have you actually checked what "iodine" does beyond preventing deficiency?

The mineral content angle gets overstated - sea salt has trace minerals, but you'd need to eat kilos to get meaningful amounts. What really matters is that table salt gets anti-caking agents and iodine added, which some people genuinely can taste as that metallic note mentioned earlier. Sea salt skips those additives, so it's cleaner-tasting in most cases.

For cooking it's purely preference, but for aquarium use (like someone touched on) those additives are actually a real problem since they mess with water chemistry - that's the one place where the difference matters beyond flavor.