Salt News

Hooray!  The New York Times does it again, gives salt a gander.  The Times has published a nice little piece on the story of João Navalho, who after failing in a business to produce and market beta-carotene grown in abandoned salt marshes, he took the more obvious path and returned the land to salt production.  Enlisting Maximino António Guerreiro, an artisan salt company was (re) born.  A good deal of salt from Portugal’s Algarve region is finding its way to the American and European markets, competing as Portuguese flor de sal with the French fleur de sel and other French sea salt.

Among the ten or so Fleur de Sel’s we carry, the French versions are predictably more popular than their Portuguese brethren.  Times’ writer Elaine Sciolino points out “…Mr. Navalho confesses that his team learned many of its techniques from Guérande, the Brittany-based cooperative that restored traditional salt-making to France in the 1970s and whose brand dominates the hand-harvested salt business. France produces about 80 percent of Europe’s hand-harvested salt and fleur de sel.”

The quality of any artisan salt ranges from producer to producer.  I have found that João Navalho’s Necton salt company indeed produces a good flor de sal.  (We sell a hand-harvested artisan sea salt from neighboring salt producer as Flor de Sal do Algarve.)  The Times story points out the challenges any buyer faces when deliberating artisan salts: it is not always easy to know when a salt is in fact made by an artisan: “Nico Boer, the German co-manager of the Marisol salt works in nearby Tavira, said one Portuguese salt producer sold more than a dozen tons of industrial salt to the French several years ago, passing it off as hand-harvested.”

The New York Times story, “From a Portuguese Marsh, Salt, the Traditional Way,” written by Elaine Sciolino, is classic New York Times journalism, packed with great insights into the people and place, but keeping a pole’s distance between the writer and any observations of the heart of the matter: in this case, the culinary and other benefits driving the growing global use of artisan salts.

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Mark Bitterman :: Jan.27.2009 :: News & Musings :: No Comments »

Kim Severson at The New York Times has written a piece on salted caramels, briefly tracing the path of what many of us recognized years ago as inevitable; America has become obsessed.  The article does an absolutely great job of talking about salted caramels as a sort of cultural phenomena.  Severson doesn’t talk much at all about the salted caramels themselves, perhaps worrying how idling way the day chewing salted caramels will cause her mind to drift, losing sight of deadlines and worldly obligations, or worse, overwhelming the her–salty warm fingers of rapture bearing her body aloft, leaving her journalist’s objectivity on the jagged black rocks below.  In the blogosphere we have no such worries, and can chew a fleur de sel caramel, mull over its virtues, and make earth-shattering assertions in our own sweet time.  The reason for the success of salted caramels can only be found by tasting, by giving the salt-spangled caramel its due.

“It has been a challenging year for investors, homeowners and Republican candidates, but 2008 was very lucky for sweet caramel seasoned with fancy salt.  The combination has long enchanted French and American chefs, but this year it became one of those rare flavors that works its way from an elite culinary obsession to the American mass market.”

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Mark Bitterman :: Jan.03.2009 :: Gourmet Salt :: No Comments »