Pickling salt is a type of salt which is designed specifically for pickling and canning. In order to make it most suitable for its intended uses, pickling salt is especially pure, and it is typically very fine grained, to ensure that it dissolves easily. Many markets carry pickling salt, although urban dwellers may have to do a bit of searching for it; in a pinch, pickling salt can be replaced with kosher salt or table salt, although these salts may not perform as well.

The fine grain of pickling salt is very important, because it makes the salt easier to dissolve. This means that the salt will be distributed evenly throughout the brine, creating the required salinity to make pickled foods safe to store and eat. Without a fine-grained salt, cooks would need to be extra-careful to make sure that all of the salt had dissolved, creating an even suspension in the brine for pickling.

The purity of pickling salt is important from an aesthetic point of view, but not necessarily from a food safety standpoint. Iodized salt like typical table salt will turn pickled foods dark, which can make them unsightly, and the anti-caking agents used in most salts will cloud the brine. While neither of these problems are dangerous, most people don't like to eat discolored pickles fished from a cloudy brine, so cooks use pickling salt instead.

Pickling salt doesn't just have to be used for pickling. It can be used just like regular table salt in recipes, although it can tend to cake, so people should be careful with pickling salt around moisture. To prevent caking in stored pickling salt, a few grains of rice can be added to the container; pickling salt can also be roasted in the oven to bake the moisture out, making it easy to break the caked salt apart.

In addition to salt, pickling brine classically includes an assortment of spices which will slowly leach into the food as it pickles, infusing it with flavor. Depending on the spices used, the pickled food may be hot, savory, or fairly neutral in flavor, and the intensity of the salt flavor varies, depending on whether the food is pickled in vinegar with salt as a preservative, or whether a salt brine alone was used for pickling. When a salt brine alone is used, cooks can use the egg test to see if the brine is sufficiently strong. In the egg test, an egg is dropped into the brine: if it floats, the brine is good, and if it sinks, the brine is not salty enough.