- TikTok videos showing how to fry food in salt have gone viral, but this cooking method is far from new.
- Hot salt or hot sand frying has been used for centuries in Asia as a more affordable, convenient alternative to frying in oil.
- To fry food in salt, you must use only dry ingredients and a vessel with a high heat capacity, like cast iron or carbon steel.
There’s something magical about watching an ingredient go into a deep fryer. Hearing the oil sizzle and seeing dough puff or batter turn golden brown in a matter of seconds is a reminder of how enchanting cooking can be.
If the transformative, fast-acting process of frying food in oil is exciting for you too, then there’s an even more visually intriguing cooking method that will immediately capture your attention: frying in salt.
When cooking creator Roice Bethel (@roicebethel) shared a clip of himself cooking chips and popcorn in a pan full of salt this spring, the video quickly amassed over 15 million views. It’s satisfying to watch: popcorn kernels are submerged in plain salt, then seconds later start to puff into the snack you know and love.
Surprised followers chimed in with a myriad of questions — quite a few of them asked for Bethel to try frying chicken in salt — and one commenter even mentioned that “I have my culinary degree, and I did not know you could deep fry in salt.”
This cooking method does work just as it looks in the viral clip, but it wasn’t invented by Bethel. Instead, frying in salt — or more often, sand — is a process with historical roots that spans countries and centuries.
How does hot salt frying work?
When deep frying in oil, the fat surrounding the food is what transfers heat, cooking the submerged ingredients. In the process of hot salt frying, you’re simply replacing oil with salt, which can evenly distribute heat on all sides of the food. Hot sand frying is an identical technique that relies on the same heat transfer system, but replaces salt with sand.
Just like you can test the temperature of oil before frying, you’ll notice that Bethel uses a thermometer to gauge if the salt in his pan is at a high enough temperature for cooking.
You can only hot salt fry in the same types of vessels used for deep frying in oil. For example, you could hot salt fry in a cast-iron skillet or carbon steel wok, but you should not use a Teflon-coated nonstick skillet. The salt gets very hot and can damage an artificial nonstick surface or burn you if you touch it.
A food-grade, coarse salt is best for this technique — finer seasonings like table salt will be difficult to sift off the ingredients you cook, and coarse granules are less likely to absorb moisture. Aside from that, one home cook explains on Reddit that “one can use any salt; just let it heat for 15 minutes to let the volatile compounds evaporate (like iodine). Same goes with sand as well.”
Most importantly, only completely dry items should be fried in salt. Any damp ingredient, like chicken or steak, will cause the salt to stick, resulting in a dish that’s too salty, and the salt will not effectively make wet ingredients, such as batter, become crispy.
Where does hot salt frying come from?
Although there isn’t much information about hot salt or hot sand frying online, it’s clear this is a technique that has been around for hundreds of years and is still used today, especially by street vendors across several countries in Asia, including Bangladesh, Nepal, China, and India.
Kurush F. Dalal, an archaeologist and culinary anthropologist, explains that “sand frying is what is done all over India… Indians even make popcorn on the streets this way. It’s commonly used all over Northern India in winters to roast sweet potatoes. It’s incredibly cost-effective and a very controllable process.”
Dalal notes that “Traditionally, in most of the world salt was too precious a commodity to treat so casually,” emphasizing that frying in sand is what you are far more likely to see in India.
Frying in salt is more budget-friendly than frying in oil, and frying in sand is less expensive than either option. You can also reuse sand or salt many more times than you reuse cooking oil, and cleaning up after cooking with these materials is much simpler.
Fryums — colorful, puffed chips often made from potato starch — are one of the other ingredients you might see vendors in India frying in sand or occasionally salt. In China, chestnuts have historically been fried in woks full of sand during winter, and vendors in Bangladesh often toast peanuts in pans of hot, black sand.
If you’re eager to try hot salt or sand frying yourself, I recommend starting with something many vendors cook with this technique and you likely already have in your pantry: popcorn.
