Salt News

Avert your eyes.  Blush.  Go ahead.  The steak salad is always a little embarrassing to look at. Nobody is to blame for this.  Like the pitterpat of a Geisha’s geta sandal across the parquet, the modesty of the salad is betrayed by its inescapable voluptuousness.  But this needs to be greeted in the spirit in which it is offered, which is to say, with deference and respect.

So often the architect of the steak salad indulges in the natural inclination to use the steak itself as the seasoning for the entire dish, salting the heck out of the steak–and in effect utilizing the steak in much the way we use bacon bits and gorgonzola on a cobb salad, or anchovies and parmesan on a Caesar salad—taking advantage of an ingredient’s natural saltiness to season for the dish.  This is a perfectly normal impulse.  After all, for millions of years we got most of the salt we ate from red meat, so if some part of our reptile mind still thinks of meat as salt, the modern steak salad maker can surely be excused for thinking of salt as meat.

But the missed opportunity to enlist a good salt with steak makes this confusion tragic nonetheless.  Shinkai Deep Sea Salt: taught, brilliant, bitter-sweet, immaculate.  Sprinkled over the steak on this Japanese steak salad, Shinkai Deep Sea Salt brings grace and definition to the meat, deliciously integrating its carnal succulence into the civilized bed of gleaming garden greens.

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Mark Bitterman :: Jul.28.2010 :: Recipes :: 1 Comment »

Usually the thing to ask when using salt is: how can I make the most of the interplay between salt and food? There’s texture to consider, the mineral flavors of the salt itself, and the visual cues that sensuously salted food can provide to get the engines of your appetite revving.  A spinach gratin is a slightly difficult character in this regard. Gratin is incredibly delicious, easy to eat, and naturally accommodates a variety of dishes, but its nature is to avoid acting like the life of the party. Also, much of the salt comes from the cheese, and the general texture of the dish is so full and rich that it leaves little room for any but the most aggressive salt crystals to have an impact on the mouthfeel of the dish.  It takes an aggressive salt to shine against the backdrop of such a dish with sufficient luminosity to actually illuminate it without overwhelming it with saltiness. 

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Mark Bitterman :: Jul.20.2010 :: Gourmet Salt, Recipes :: 1 Comment »

Once in a while you come across a chef whose culinary acumen exceeds your wildest anticipation, whose sense of style outshines your most lurid food fantasies.  Their accomplishments are legendary, their followers legion, and their place in the pantheon of food history vouchsafed by critics and public alike.  Then there are those chefs who toil in obscurity, seeking not fortune or fame, but the more ephemeral limelight of the home cooked meal.  But when they are good, they are very good.  These are the chefs whose unstoppable energy, unflappable enthusiasm, and indefatigable zeal can recast for diners the very tapestry of cooking itself.  They make cooking more personal, dining more passionate, and reveling in the flavor of food more intimately bound up in life’s vital force.  These are the chefs that provide you with the olive oil and lemon simplicity of fresh fruit de mer pasta that you absently lick from your lips as you gaze into the glittering harbor from a Mediterranean piazza, or the tartiflette you wolf down in the fluorescent-lit kitchen of a motorcyclist you’ve picked up with somewhere on a long road trip through the heart of your incorrigible youth.  I know one such chef, a creature of cunning and instinct, a booming and uncontrollable beast whose unprovoked antics make Chef Gordon Ramsay seem like a snoozing churchmouse by comparison. But we tolerate him out of adoration for his genius in the kitchen.

Here is a chronology of the chef at work, making the eternal masterpiece that is a fried egg sandwich.

“Put some eggs in this bowl and mix them with a spoon.”

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Mark Bitterman :: Jul.16.2010 :: Gourmet Salt, Recipes :: 2 Comments »

Sautéeing on Himalayan salt blocks creates exponentially more flavor than sautéeing in a conventional skillet.  This is because a salt block cooks your food in two ways. At a blazing 500 degrees or higher, the heavy block of salt has enormous thermal mass, sizzling away moisture to produce a thick crust of rich, concentrated flavor.  At the same time, the Himalayan salt itself sets to work, bursting cell membranes, intermingling juices, and breaking loose new flavors that in turn sizzle away to make for even more concentrated flavors.  Want to make the most of this miracle of cooking chemistry?  Balance out the scallop’s rich buttery flavors with a spritz of citrus and reinforce everything with the lip-tingling spice of Szechuan peppercorns. You’ll not have another scallop that’s this fun to cook, impressive to serve, or tasty to eat.

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Mark Bitterman :: Jul.10.2010 :: Gourmet Salt, Recipes, Salt Blocks :: 4 Comments »