Salt News

Our flight leaves just one day after I return from my first IACP conference, so the bags must be packed in advance.  Cigarette lighter power adapters for cell phones, my laptop, and various and sundry electronic accouterments, a new camera bag for my incredibly sexy new Nikon D90 (I usually carry it in a grocery bag), battery chargers and SD memory readers, 8 hulking travel books (so far): why are we so laden with equipment, when I used to travel with a pocket knife, a spare pair of socks and a rain jacket?  Reasons.

We are on a safari, intent on face-time with the Big Game, the people who first inspired us in our love of salt.  Salt is produced in virtually every region of every country in the world, but some places strike home, transport us back to the stillness that comes only in the early years of culinary discovery: leaning against the dew-beaded fuel tank of my motorcycle in the pale morning, eating cold sardines as I watch the oyster boats return from the shoals.

We fly from Portland to Nice, drive across the south of France and the north of Spain to Portugal, down that coast and into Portugal, a loop to Casa Blanca, and then back up through the Spanish mainland and up the west coast of France toward Normandy, and then to Paris for some R&R.  There is a lot of country in that drive.  Existential fear caused us to abandon Italy, Germany, Poland, and Slovenia to the summer.

We welcome suggestions for places to stay, people to meet, things to eat, beaches to swim, and rocks to climb.  Here is our itinerary:

April 6: Fly

April 7: Arrive in Nice, drive toward the Camargue, stay in Arles

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Mark Bitterman :: Mar.24.2009 :: News & Musings :: 4 Comments »

The only thing better, or at least more interesting, than a chocolate chip cookie  is an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie.  The only thing better than that is the same cookie with a spectacular and intriguing finishing salt on top.  Topping your cookies with a beautiful artisan salt brings out the cow in the butter, hills in the oats, and the jungle in the chocolate.  Also, by topping your cookies with the salt rather than just mixing a small amount up inside the batter, you set the salt free to do it’s own thing, work its mojo with each of the ingredients as they combine in your mouth while you chew.

I used Bali Rama sea salt, which has really cool hollow pyramidal crystals and a great, snappy saltiness for the cookies pictured here.  The advantage of using a flake salt is that it remains delicate even after baking.  This salt is not yet on our website (it will be by the end of the week), but you could order it over the phone by calling The Meadow.  It did a spectacular job bringing just barely enough drama to the cookies to make them sparkle, but keeping everything mellow enough to assure they remain the ultimate comfort food.  The oven will dry out a fleur de sel, or sel gris, leaving you with a hard crunch and a slightly more ostentatious saltiness.

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Mark Bitterman :: Mar.22.2009 :: Recipes :: 5 Comments »

Andes Mountain Rose is a rock salt hand quarried from the Andes Mountains in southern Bolivia.  The salt shifts shapes as it walks through time: once a chalk-colored crust of a salt pan formed from an ocean that evaporated millennia earlier it was then buried under 10 thousand feet of shifting continental plates, only to emerge hundreds of million years later as a orange-pink stone.  The salt shifts colors in the changing light of the day in amazing, and sometimes unsettling ways.

Mark Bitterman :: Mar.11.2009 :: Gourmet Salt :: 2 Comments »