Salt News

Taking a break from this week’s theme that everything in life is better with a Himalayan salt plate underneath it (still testing the millions of more strange permutations of food with variously shaped pink salt bricks), we recently conducted a salted caramel class with our good friend David Briggs of Xocolatl de David. Dave demonstrated the finer points of making caramel, I talked about our gourmet salt “starter set,” which includes briny fine Fleur de Sel de Camargue, minerally moistly coarse Sel Gris de l’Ile de Noirmoutier, sharp flaky Maldon sea salt, bold but subtle flaky Turkish Black Pyramid, clean granular Aleae Volcanic sea salt, and lustrous rich pastry-flaky Halen Mon Gold oak smoked sea salt.

Something interesting came up in the class. After the presentation of the six exotic, fun-sounding salts, many people gravitated toward the Halen Mon Gold. And why shouldn’t they? Rich, warm, oaky nose. Crackly texture. Pungent smoky saltiness. That combined with caramel? Sounds like a no brainer; and indeed, there was much ooing and aahhhing over that particular salted caramel combination. I had suggested the stalwart and steady fleur de sel as caramel’s ultimate companion, if only to provide a stodgy voice of reason to The Meadow’s boisterous crowd of over 30 people.

However, several others of an adventurous ilk tried salting the caramel with Turkish Black Pyramid, a Mediterranean sea salt blended with activated charcoal to give it a bold, beautiful appearance and imparting a delicate earthiness to its bold, solidly structured pyramidal crystals. And… Drumroll please…

The Turkish Black Pyramid finishing salt was a hit! As a matter of fact, the appreciative rumblings spread, and everyone was trying it. When David Briggs asked the group as a whole which salt they would like to stir into the caramel sauce he had been mixing up while the rest of us were experimenting with cubes of more solid caramel, Turkish was the crowd’s suggestion.

Mixed into the cooling caramel sauce, Turkish Black Pyramid sea salt was even better. I am at a loss to explain why. It is sharp, but partially masked with the pure but earthy-tasting charcoal. It is massive and bulky and crunchy, and it only partially dissolved in the salted caramel sauce, sticking around just enough to give the finished sauce a rare, delicate, crunchy saltiness. Perhaps it is the crisp boldness of the salt crystals picking up the cream in Briggs’ salted caramel recipe. The alchemy of such things is beyond comprehension. There is nothing more fun than refuting your own expectations and discovering something new.

Mark Bitterman :: Oct.26.2007 :: Gourmet Salt :: 2 Comments »

Today I learned something: A large block of pink Himalayan salt used as a skillet makes a heavy cast iron frying pan seem like tin foil. Himalayan salt blocks cook with astonishingly, almost magically perfect heat distribution.

I cooked eggs this morning for The Missus. In a futile attempt to temporarily sooth her implacable appetite for eggs, I cooked two “dishes”:

Salt Skillet Fried Egg
Buttered Salt Skillet Fried Egg

Every morning for the last ten years or so, I have been greeted with the same refrain:

“Mmmm… (whuh?) I’m in the mood… (uh?) A nice… (a nice?…) fried egg.”

So, these are the mystical rhythms of the female mind. An eternity of the soporific/invigorating smell of eggs sizzling on butter on a skillet downstairs, salted delicately with Pangasinan Star or Fleur de Sel de l’Ile de Re, or, on an occasion of rare deviation, truffle salt.

But not today.

“Mmmm… (whuh?) I’m in the mood… (uh?) A nice… (a nice?…) salt brick.”

Today, Jennifer, with at least 85% of her brain still sleeping, decided that she wanted her Saturday Morning Egg cooked on a large block of Himalayan Salt. I don’t know if it is because she has caught on the midnight vibe of Himalayan Pink Salt Block writing that pervades the house like the surly ghost of Ezra Pound, or whether it was some creative impulse of her own, but the request was there.

Pursuant to Jennifer’s request, I cooked up two fried eggs on a thick but smallish-sized Himalayan salt block. The first egg I fried straight up, with no butter or other oil. Just me, the egg, and a 600 million year old plate of salt quarried from the ancient haunches of Pakistan’s Himalayas mountain range.

Step one, heat salt block. This particular block is of a salmon hue, but striated with blood-red veins of denser minerals. A few customers at The Meadow have given me somewhat suspicious looks when I suggest cooking eggs, pancakes, and other gooey substances on rocks of Himalayan salt. I chose one from our embarrassingly large collection because it was smaller than many of the others, measuring 6 by 6 by 1.75 inches.

Still, it took about 20 minutes to get it hot. (After about fifteen minutes on medium heat on the medium-sized burner of our gas range, I turned it up to full for another 2-3 minutes.)

I cracked the egg and tested whether the salt block was hot enough by letting a small amount of egg white drip onto the surface. Noting that it immediately sizzled and turned white, I then plopped the entire egg, yolks unbroken, in the middle of the brick and partially covered with a saucepan lid.

In one minute I had THE WORLDS MOST PERFECT FRIED EGG. Just-crispy whites, luscious liquid/gelatinous yolk, and get this: it was delicately salty on the down side of the egg! Imagine what your palat experiences when it gets the salt-singed bit of the egg first, and THEN the egg itself! The tongue is stimulated, the mouth awakens, the higher sensory faculties of anticipation and sunny delight engaged, for in one happy second the world is salty eggyness. But then, rather than have that drift into salt-laden overkill, that delicate unfleshly avian endoplasm comes through in an a moment of delicate triumph. Suffice it to say, Jennifer was pleased.

For the second, I buttered the slab of Himalayan salt thoroughly. A nice bulky brick of buttered salt block: springboard for the wildest of rampages through the culinary unknown. Anticipation in the kitchen was palpable. First, the butter, strangely, did not burn at all, but rather just spread like pale honey across the surface of the very hot salt Himalayan block. I fried the egg, partially covered again.

Amazingly enough, given the relative exoticness of the tools at hand, the egg’s glory was in its simplicity. Perfect texture, and above all, perfectly evenly cooked. I said it above and I’ll say it again, the heat distribution when cooking on salt blocks, whether on an open fire or over a gas burner or on top of an electric range (more on that another time) or in an oven or under a broiler is unsurpassed. I have a very heavy, very old cast iron skillet that nonetheless could never get delicate foods like eggs to cook to thoroughly. I have a brand new, state of the art calphalon pan that cost about $75,000 that can’t hold a candle to it.

Jennifer’s observation was this: “I have never had an egg so hot!”

One other note: the buttered Himialayan pink salt block did not impart more than a trace hint of saltiness. Rather, the result was a very subtly salted egg that could then be tuned up with a pinch of Maldon or a fleur de sel.

You can buy Himalayan salt plates at The Meadow at www.atthemeadow.com/salt/himalayan-pink-salt-blocks.html

Mark Bitterman :: Oct.20.2007 :: Recipes, Salt Blocks :: 3 Comments »

A new craze in cooking is emerging that is as old as the hills. Actually, it’s much older than that.

Cooking on blocks of Himalayan pink salt opens up a new door in the old, old book of cooking. Or is it, a new chapter in the big house of food… Like a good bad mixed metaphor, cooking, serving, and eating food on blocks salt that predate food itself presents something of a self-contained paradox.

I’ve been cooking, freezing, curing and presenting foods of every sort on great slabs of Himalayan pink rock salt Pakistan, and have posed some ideas here for inspiration and edification. I hope my brief compendium of how to cook on Himalayan salt rocks helps dispel any notion that we have even come close to discovering the myriad dazzling and delicious ways we can combine food with salt to produce something greater than the sum of its parts.

Salt on food. Food on salt. Here is a brief but semi-in-depth look at cooking with Himalayan salt plates and blocks and platters and planks and cubes and chunks of the eerily beautiful Himalayan salt. Read on…

Mark Bitterman :: Oct.15.2007 :: Salt Blocks :: No Comments »

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments. So said Marcel Proust. I eat a green salad virtually every day, and it is not a habit I wish to break–regardless of its implications for the intimacy of my relationship with nature. Fortunately, I have salt: nature distilled, uncompromisingly authentic, and strangely unyielding to our efforts to describe it.

The following is a true story about eating Marlborough Flakey gourmet sea salt.

Last night I sat down with the family herd, squaring off against a nice heap of leafy greens, and commence to “get a graze on.” All went well, for about a 13th of a second, when, lo! what is this? The usual salad salt, Maldon, the flake gourmet salt par excellence . . . What? This is not that. This is something other. What we know about our salad–what we expect in our salad–is not what we are eating.

The herd grunts various expressions of bovine surprise, then distress, then acquiescence. Then, as one, the herd smiles, each according to the inner workings of the mind: some with surprised pleasure, some with pleasured surprise.

“What is this?” says an especially eloquent member of the herd. “It is frothy, tingly. It tingles. The spine tingles.”

To which another especially locquatious member of the herd retorted, “I think the word you are looking for is spangles. The salt has starry spangles. It’s the spangliness that you are talking about.”

“Mom! He said spangles when I said tingles,” countered the first.

“Because it’s spangles. Tingles doesn’t do it justice. Spangles. I can feel it.” The second vocal one was not to be dissuaded.

“Stop it!” shrieked one off the adults in the herd, who had been feeling disoriented since the first bite, the ocean’s roar filling her ears. “No arguing. Tingles. Spangles. Enough arguing! What is this salad? What is going on here? What–”

The fourth and final vocal member of the herd (it turns out all members of the family herd were highly vocal) interrupted. “It’s the salt! Someone pulled a swaparoo with our precious Maldon! Where is my precious? My precious?” Eyes bulging.

“But I like this. I like the tingles.”

“And I like its spangle.”

The herd recommenced to graze upon the salad. More appreciative grunting ensued. Attention turned to the deep cellar of salt at the center of the table. An especially tactile member of the herd ventured a few fingers inside, took a pinch, and let it fall on the tabletop. Where it glistened, its frothy crystals burning hyper white.

Another especially tactile member of the herd did the same, then pinched it, crumbled it, contemplated its special je ne sais quoi. Immutable stuff. It just sits there, like snow, only with promise of nourishment.

Marlborough Flakey, a superb, slightly pricey sea salt from New Zealand, had somehow found its way from the jar by the toaster, where it routinely offers service to the eternal glory of one of the undying passions of my wild Paris days, the “Tartine à l’avocat” at Dame Tartine in Paris’s 4e arrondissement. The simple open faced avocado sandwich done up as fare for art students: a cross-cultural conflagration of crunchy creamy salty sweet flavors produced from the casual combination of spelt toast, mushed avocado, ground Parameswaran’s Special Wynad peppercorns, and Marlborough Flakey New Zealand sea salt).

How New Zealand ever became “forever and anon the land known to one and all as the setting for Lord of the Rings,” I will never know. The forests of New Zealand are fine, I am sure, but the gourmet salt is something sublime, raging, making holographs of past and present and future in the twinkle of your salad eating eye, making words conflate and expand, making thoughts glop up and down and merge and separate like the glowing globs of a lava lamp. The legendary Lembas bread gifted to The Ringbearer the Elves of Lothlorein, were surely made with Marlborough Flakey.

But I digress. In short, the herd was impressed with the salt, and deeply thankful for the opportunity for new argument that it afforded. If you have not yet discovered the pleasures of flake salt on salad, definitely try making a nice macerated shallot vinaigrette, dressing, serving, and then strewing judiciously with the flat fine snappy flakes of Maldon salt. If Maldon is already a known thing, your knowledge of nature grows hackneyed and pale, grab some Marlborough Flakey sea salt. Re-invigorate the herd. Discover, as if for the first time, the jungle of flavors, textures, and aromas within your salad.

Mark Bitterman :: Oct.11.2007 :: Gourmet Salt :: 1 Comment »