Salt News

Flank steak has to be pretty much the best thing short of a foot rub while drinking a root beer float.  But it’s tough.  It’s ornery.  There is a common strategy to making the flank steak supple enough to eat without popping your jaw out of joint: marinating.  I’ve made coffee and ginger marinades, lime and tequila marinades, smoked salt and chili pepper marinades, vinegar and sugar marinades… you name it.  Every time, great steak.  But think of the poor steak.  A wonderful, flavor-packed piece of meat forced to suffer quietly the insult of subjugation to intense acids and sugars and salts.  When we see a flank steak, we see a quandary.  How do we get that elemental flavor out of a meat that resists the teeth?  There is a solution, a way honor the humble yet noble flank steak in its naked beauty, a way that takes virtually no preparation ahead of time, a way results in a fun, incredibly juicy and savory dish.

I’ve covered this dish before here and elsewhere, including at the Himalayan salt block cooking classes at The Meadow, but I don’t think it has ever actually been hammered into a simple recipe.

There are two simple tricks to this dish (if you can call steak seared on a giant block of salt a dish): cutting the meat against the grain, and cooking it at a high temperature.  Oh, and cooking it NOT on steel, but on a block of ancient, super dense, mineral rich Himalayan rock salt.

Ingredients:
1 2lb piece of flank steak
1 8x8x2 inch Himalayan Salt Block or Plate

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Mark Bitterman :: Feb.19.2009 :: Recipes, Salt Blocks :: 2 Comments »

Okay, the headline is an exaggeration.  There were no Brazilian supermodels, wind licking at their silky locks, licking their freshly salted lips.  Just me and a small pile of Kauai Guavawood Smoked salt.  Probably, the pile of smoked salt was too small…  My idea was to try to create the effect of a majestic, volcanic mountain, clouds brooding on its cascading shoulders.

Taken yesterday, under cloudy, neutral light while I was brushing my teeth (I forgot to do it earlier).

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Mark Bitterman :: Feb.18.2009 :: News & Musings :: 1 Comment »

I am pretty sure we used either Toulouse sausage or duck confit in our petit salé aux lentilles when I was living at Le Montagnet, a chateau in the Southwest of France.  The official recipe, which probably hails from somewhere in the region of Castelnaudary, is usually made with pork shoulder and bits of lardons (fatback, more or less, though Pancetta rdoes the trick).  We leaned toward confit of duck because there was always some on hand.  We raised our own ducks there for foie gras, and the duck confit was the best I ever had.  And also, we used confit because we were cheap.  “We” at the time usually consisted of myself and Nadir, a Kabyle who had inveigled his way into permanent residency in France by flying low, under the radar.  Duck was our chicken.  Plentiful, and a source of inspiration for countless recipes.

Nadir never spoke French half way as well as I did, to be honest, but he always knew about the crazy little dishes eaten by the farmers and laborers inhabiting the rugged, forested terrain surrounding the chateau, stretching from Les Montagnes Noires (The Black Mountains, which amble from the Pyrannees to the Massive Central) up through Perigord.  When “we” were together as a “we,” and making food, it was usually because we had been abandoned, told to fend for ourselves for the night, when the family that resided at the chateaux had plans.  So as evening was creeping in long lazy purple shadows across the sheep pastures, I would be somewhere sanding oak planks out in the outlying farm buildings, or at some distant and unheated reach of the house fitting tongue into groove of the ancient oak slats covering the ground floor (everything there was made out of ancient coeur de chêne (heart of oak), the incomparably hard timber harvested from the mountains when the land was first settled some hundreds of years ago).

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Mark Bitterman :: Feb.16.2009 :: Recipes :: No Comments »