Combining sugar with salt is not such an unusual idea. Some ingredients work best when they are used to counterbalance another, and sugar is one of these. At Artisan du Chocolat we constantly experiment with sweetness. We've been using salt, balsamic vinegar and black peppercorns to enhance our caramels – they've been very popular.
I looked at how the French historically made sweet caramels using a little salted butter and decided to take this one step further by introducing sea salt to create a new kind of sweetness.
One of the first things I do with any apprentices training with me to help them understand sweetness is to give them a saturated sugar solution and add small increments of salt, asking them to taste it each time. At a certain point the taste of the sugar begins to change. This balancing act can have quite a dramatic affect on the "sweet" taste. If you don't go through the process, you don't appreciate how sugar behaves, and how it can be balanced with other things.
