How every dossier on this site is built — citation rules, scope, and tone.

Research Instructions for Subagents

These instructions apply to every research subagent working in this repo. Read them before starting and follow them throughout.

1. Scope of the project

The repo is a personal research library on culinary salt — the types of salt available to a consumer in 2026 for kitchen use across the full range of applications: everyday cooking, baking, brining, finishing, fermenting/pickling, and curing (cured meats, charcuterie, gravlax, corned beef, bacon, etc.).

The audience is a home cook (and home charcuterie hobbyist) who wants to (a) understand the differences between salts that look or sound interchangeable but aren't, (b) know which salt to use for which job, and (c) handle curing salts safely because the chemistry actually matters there.

2. Seven questions every dossier must answer

For every salt category, the writeup covers, in this order:

1. Intro — concrete facts. No fluff opener. Tell the reader what this category is in one short paragraph.
2. History — chronological narrative. Told as a story with dates, places, and people. The user explicitly prefers chronological history-telling, so this section should read like an article, not a bullet list.
3. Studies & nuance — what does the peer-reviewed and food-science research actually say about this salt: mineral content, sodium content (yes, all salt is ~98%+ sodium chloride regardless of marketing), iodization, microplastics in sea salts (real, cite the studies), health claims, anti-caking agents, fermentation interactions, curing chemistry. Where claims are marketing rather than science, say so. Where studies disagree, say so.
4. Preparation, handling, and storage — measuring (the crucial Diamond Crystal vs Morton Kosher density difference, ~2x by volume for the same weight — this is the source of countless ruined recipes), salt-to-water ratios for brining (cite Modernist Cuisine or McGee), salt-to-meat ratios for dry-curing (cite Marianski / Ruhlman), storage (humidity, clumping, anti-caking agents and what they actually do), shelf life myths, safety when handling curing salts (pink #1 and #2 are easily confused with culinary "pink" Himalayan — address this directly).
5. Cost — purchase price ranges, cost per teaspoon of salt-as-NaCl (the marketing premium for "designer" salts is huge — quantify it), bulk-buying economics for high-throughput use cases like curing.
6. Further reading — books (e.g., Mark Bitterman's Salted: A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, The Art of Making Fermented Sausages by Marianski, Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie, Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking, the Modernist Cuisine reference), papers, documentaries, the Maldon Sea Salt company history, the Wieliczka salt mine museum. Annotate each with 1-2 sentences.
7. Sources — numbered bibliography matching the inline [N] footnotes.

3. Citation rules — non-negotiable

• Cite as you gather, AND as you write. Every factual claim gets an inline [N] footnote.
• Use this format in the sources list:

  [3] Author Last, F. (Year). *Title*. Publisher / Journal Vol(Issue), pp. URL or DOI if available.
  

• Prefer primary sources: peer-reviewed food science journals (Journal of Food Science, Meat Science, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry), USDA/FSIS publications, FDA regulatory documents, academic food-science textbooks (McGee, Modernist Cuisine), monographs from authoritative culinary writers (Ruhlman, Marianski, Bitterman where he is sourced).
• Label trade/industry sources: e.g. [12] (industry source — Morton Salt), [13] (industry source — Diamond Crystal).
• If a fact is widely repeated but you can't find a primary source, write "commonly stated, primary source not located" — do NOT fabricate citations, DOIs, URLs, page numbers, or author names.
• The curing-chemistry citations especially must be solid. Sodium nitrite limits (e.g., the 156 ppm USDA limit for cured meats), inhibition of Clostridium botulinum, residual nitrite levels — these need real FSIS/USDA references, not blog repetition.

4. Tone and voice

• Curious, plain-spoken, slightly skeptical. Not a wellness blog. Not a Wikipedia stub.
• Numbers > adjectives. "1 Tbsp Diamond Crystal Kosher weighs ~8.5 g; 1 Tbsp Morton Kosher weighs ~15 g [4]" beats "kosher salts come in different sizes".
• Avoid fluff openers ("Throughout the rich history of human civilization, salt has been…"). Start with a concrete fact.
• It's okay — encouraged — to call out where popular wisdom is wrong. "Himalayan pink salt contains 84 trace minerals but most are present in nutritionally meaningless quantities" with a source.
• Safety: the curing-salts topic must be clear and accurate. Pink curing salt #1 (Prague Powder #1, Insta Cure #1) ≠ Himalayan pink salt. Pink curing salt is toxic if used in normal salt quantities. Be direct about this.

5. Deliverables per topic

Each research subagent produces TWO files for its topic:

1. /research/<topic>/dossier.md — the full research notes, including sources of consideration that were rejected. This is the long version.
2. /site/<topic>.html — a polished, standalone HTML page derived from the dossier.

HTML page requirements

• Semantic HTML5 (<article>, <section>, <nav>, <aside>, <figure>, <table>).
• Readable typography: serif body (18px), generous line-height (1.6), max-width ~720px for prose.
• Inline <style> block, no external CSS, no Google Fonts, no CDN scripts.
• Section order matches the dossier: Intro → History → Studies & Nuance → Preparation/Handling/Storage → Cost → Further Reading → Sources.
• Inline footnote markers: <sup><a href="#src-3">[3]</a></sup> linking to the sources list.
• Sources list at bottom: each item gets id="src-N" and a back-link.
• A small top <nav> linking back to index.html and to the sibling topic pages.
• No tracking, no external fonts. System font stack for nav UI; serif for prose.
• No emojis.
• For comparison tables (e.g., salt-by-use-case), use semantic <table> with <thead> / <tbody> / scope="row|col"; styling inline. Wrap wide tables in a div with overflow-x: auto.

6. What NOT to do

• Don't pad. A 3,000-word dossier with real sources beats a 7,000-word one full of filler.
• Don't moralize ("everyone should use X"). Present the evidence; let the reader choose.
• Don't endorse specific brands in topic pages. The buying-guide page is the one exception and it is explicitly framed as such.
• Don't fabricate citations, even plausible-looking ones.
• Don't use emojis.
• Don't conflate "pink curing salt" with "Himalayan pink salt". This is a safety issue.

7. Topics and ownership

Initial topic list (one subagent per topic, run in parallel):

• everyday-salts — table salt, kosher salt (Diamond Crystal vs Morton in depth), iodized vs not, anti-caking agents, when each is the right choice. Covers basic cooking, baking, and pasta water.
• curing-salts — Prague Powder #1 (Insta Cure #1, pink salt #1, sodium nitrite-containing), Prague Powder #2 (sodium nitrite + nitrate), Tinted Cure, the chemistry of nitrite/nitrate cures, residual nitrite, the WHO Group 1 carcinogen classification (processed meat) and what it actually says, traditional saltpeter (potassium nitrate), the dry-cure vs equilibrium-cure vs wet-brine cure distinction, USDA regulatory limits, home-cure safety. THE MOST IMPORTANT SAFETY-RELEVANT TOPIC.
• finishing-and-specialty — Maldon, fleur de sel, sel gris, Himalayan pink, Hawaiian (alaea, black lava), smoked salts, kala namak (Indian black salt — sulfurous), Persian blue, the trace-mineral marketing claims and what the science actually shows.
• buying-guide — synthesis page. "If you only buy three salts, here's what they are". Brand-specific recommendations across kosher, finishing, and curing categories. Acknowledge in the page itself that brand-specific guidance is a deliberate exception to the general no-endorsement rule.

A cross-topic comparison page comparison.html and a landing index.html are built by the orchestrator after the topic subagents finish.

8. Sources master list

Each subagent appends new sources to /sources/bibliography.md under their topic section. Deduplicate by title when possible. The orchestrator may do a dedup pass after the first wave.