Salt News

I don’t intend to spill an inordinate amount of ink on Himalayan salt blocks at the expense of other fine saline subjects, but there are enough inquiries from customers these days that a short series on the practical side of working with plates of Himalayan salt seems warranted.

There are dozens of ways to use Himalayan salt blocks, as plates, platters, skillets, curing bricks, freezing slabs, and more.  Cooking, however, is an important one to get under your belt as soon as possible.

And by the way, I personally like to use one Himalayan salt block for cooking, and keep a separate Himalayan salt block/plate for room temperature uses such as curing, serving, and otherwise presenting food.  That way, your cooking salt block benefits from the patina and structural changes inherent to cooking, much as a cast iron skillet benefits from careful use and cleaning. At the same time, the purity and simplicity of the unheated Himalayan salt block can be emphasized when used for presentation at the table.

Heating, Using, Cleaning, and Storing Tips for Himalayan Salt Blocks: see the complete article.

Mark Bitterman :: Jan.30.2008 :: Recipes, Salt Blocks :: 1 Comment »

The beautiful thing about cooking with a plate of pink Himalayan salt plates is that the material is about as predictable and well-behaved as a shaved cat in an electrical storm. At least that is how it appears when you first start to use them. Salt is hygroscopic, meaning it has a tendency to drink pure water out of perfectly fine air. Hauled straight out of the mountain in Pakistan, Himalayan salt blocks have varying mineral densities that alter their thermal expansion coefficient, so different parts of the same plate can expand at different rates. At the same time, salt crystals in Himalayan salt blocks are strangely elastic, so the strains of such thermal expansion and contraction can be largely absorbed. Bringing us full circle, fissures and irregularities can appear from rapid heating and cooling, while rinsing and drying them can fuse them back together again. In short, your Himalayan salt brick or plate or block is a little like The Picture of Dorian Gray painted by Georges Braque, secretly reflecting the vagaries and adventures of your kitchen life in its glowing pink cubic crystals.

The prospect of a kitchen utensil harboring unspoken truths about our private kitchen lives, our sordid failures and glittery triumphs, is upsetting to some people. To them, there may be nothing to say but, “Stick with stainless steel.” Many others are not so much averse to the intrinsic mysteriousness and seemingly endless misbehaviors of salt plates, as they are flummoxed. For the benefit of the latter, I would like to share a recent letter I received from a particularly courageous Himalayan salt block user, and offer some replies as best as I can.

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Mark Bitterman :: Jan.26.2008 :: Salt Blocks :: 2 Comments »

Soy salt is crispy, frothy, mild, savory, and suavely unassuming. Meaty and bready and sea-weedy and saucy at the same time. Soy salt: a salt that walks through a room, like an Asian James Bond (Chow Yun Fat?) approaching the craps table, a man with tigershark eyes moving through the sea’s striated jungle shadows.

You are standing on the deck of a small but sturdy ship, gazing into the blue-green waters below, thinking about touching your toes to the cool brine that ripples and glistens in the fresh morning light. But just below, fast, flashing, the sharks swim. You look at your honey-bunny in the purple velour lounge seat by the cabin door, sipping Bloody Mary from the salt-crusted lip of a aquamarine plastic tumbler, smiling at the sun, listening to Jimmy Buffet. What is there in this moment to pluck at the ukulele of love and death and food and destruction? I look at eating as a way to bridge such dichotomies, a way to embrace your mid-morning glazed craving for a donut as you hum softy sunning in the sun, at the same time existentially thrilling to the teeth-gnashing and liquid mystery below.

When I first tasted soy salt made by the Kamebishi Company, located in the rural town of Hiketa, Kagawa Prefecture, in Japan, I quickly decided that soy salt was not a salt at all. It was more like a foodstuff. Fields of soy, savannas of cattle, whacked up vegetables on a charcoal grill. Randomness. The flavor is as intense and pungent as it is intractable and mild, much like a wine that has been given its time to age. I put it on eggs. Good. I put it on toast. Makes Marmite obsolete (almost). Put it on mixed greens salad. Perfect.

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Mark Bitterman :: Jan.09.2008 :: Gourmet Salt :: No Comments »