Salt News

The vegetables of summer are steadily dropping off their vines and sliding back into the sun-soaked recesses of memory. Much as I look forward to fall–rain, endive, leaves, rain, a hiatus from mowing the lawn, endive, rain–I still crave the crisp, succulent, almost arrogant freshness of a veggie sandwich: all that is vegetal between the savory bookends of bread and cheese. And nothing loves a great salt like a veggie sandwich. My favorite: Amabito no Moshio (藻塩) is an ancient type of Japanese salt, called shio.

Shios are identifiable by their fine, snow-like texture.  Their firm, intensely mineral backbone lends a delicacy and brightness to food, much as acidity supports definition and complexity in wine.  Amabito no Moshio is the granddaddy of shios, created some 2,500 years ago in what was then more or less a neolithic Japan.  Seaweed was hauled out of the water by fishermen and dried on the rocks, then sprayed with water, then dried some more, then sprayed some more, etc. etc. until a now salt-encrusted seaweed could be rinsed to make a saturated brine.  The brine, along with bits of the kelp, would then be boiled off over a wood fire, resulting in a delicately seaweed-infused salt.  Today, The Meadow’s Amabito no Moshio, made with the hondawara variety of seaweed (Sargassum fulvellum) is inspired by that tradition.  If today is your day to celebrate the veggie sandwich–perhaps your last true fresh veggie sandwich of the year–do it with the proper reverence, and with a last backwards glimpse of summer’s sunny sanctity.

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Mark Bitterman :: Sep.27.2011 :: Gourmet Salt, Recipes :: 3 Comments »

Our friend at the flower market who grows the calla lilies for our shop in Portland also has 40 chickens.  Every year over the winter, as the pluvial Pacific Northwest endures its onslaught of alternating grey darkness and dark greyness, the birds more or less give up egg laying altogether.  Stubborn about our eggs, we more or less give them up too, and the resulting drought of omelets, frittatas, aiolis, caesar salads, mayonnaises, pound cakes, and pisco sours is one of the greatest hardships of winter.  Come spring, however, the chickens kick into gear and produce cartons upon cartons of bug-fed eggs with lovely brown-speckled shells and yolks the color of radioactive apricots.

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Mark Bitterman :: May.14.2011 :: Gourmet Salt :: 1 Comment »

A salmon caught high in the freshwater streams of the mountains bears within its pink flesh the flavors of faraway places in the Pacific Ocean, a rosy imprint of the long voyage back to its birthplace. These fish see a lot of things below the ocean depths. And then they eat them. Salmon deserve a suitably thoughtful and voracious treatment in the kitchen.

Iburi-Jio Cherry, a smoked sea salt from Japan, has endured a journey comparable to that of the salmon. Artisan salt makers plumb seawater off the coast of the Oga Peninsula, drawing a pristine brine up from the pure, deepwater currents. After concentrating the brine, they heat it over a wood fire over three days, stirring constantly to produce a salt that is the texture of powder snow. This salt is then gently cold smoked over cherry wood for a sweet, smoky, bacony aroma that is unrivaled in the culinary world.

The combination of deep sea minerals, cherry wood smoke, and buttery salmon takes your taste buds on peregrinations through flavor’s most unfathomed depths.

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Mark Bitterman :: Mar.17.2011 :: Gourmet Salt, Recipes :: 1 Comment »

Finally, we have a book that gives salt its due!  Salted: A Manifesto on the World’s Most Essential Mineral, with Recipes. Written by Mark Bitterman, selmelier at The Meadow, Salted is the fruit of decades of field work (a.k.a. eating, traveling, talking) and research.  The book opens the door to salting for greatness in everything you eat, and includes hundreds of full color photographs illustrating the dazzling diversity of gourmet salts.  The inspiration for this book is simple: salt is the most powerful ingredient in the kitchen–and the most commonly used and universal one.  An understanding and respect for salt leads inevitably to more distinctive and better tasting food.

Salted has three parts:
1: The Life of Salt explores the history of salt from mankind’s first salted bite to the industrialization of salt with the advent of the modern chemical industry, concluding with the explosive revival of gourmet salt in the culinary world.  A science section investigates the vast complexity of salt, from its origins in primordial oceans to the myriad roles salt plays in human physiology.  Then a look at the craft of salt making describes the key principles and technologies behind saltmaking, from rock salts hauled from the depths of the earth to sea salts evaporated under an open sky.

2: Salt Guide provides a first of its kind taxonomy of culinary salt, delineating the basic families of salts and summarizing the merits of each in the kitchen.  A field guide to salt provides full color macro images of more than 150 salts, with tasting notes and suggested uses for food.  Profiles of more than 80 of the most important salts revel in the charms (and occasional horrors) of the most important varieties.

3: Salting is the hands-on part of the book. This section provides key strategies for salting, with basic techniques for the novice cook and advanced concepts for professional chefs and bartenders. Fifty recipes organized by cooking technique cover everything from seasoning fresh foods to grilling to curing to cocktail mixing, with plenty of helpful charts and tips. There’s even a section on cooking with Himalayan salt blocks!

$35 hardcover • 320 pages • Full Color • 8″ x 10″ • ISBN: 978-1-58008-262-4 • Ten Speed Press

• Order Salted from the The Meadow’s website for a signed Edition of the book.  Shipping is free! Salted: A Manifesto on the World’s Most Essential Mineral, with Recipes from atthemeadow.com
• Prefer to buy through Amazon? Just follow the link here and the Amazonians will know we sent you to them: Salted: A Manifesto on the World’s Most Essential Mineral, with Recipes from amazon.com.

Reviews

Named in “6 Best Food Books” of the Fall by Christian Science Monitor!
If you care about food, cooking, and taste, then you care about salt. And if you care about salt you will be over the moon about Salted by Mark Bitterman (Ten Speed Press).

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Mark Bitterman :: Oct.11.2010 :: Gourmet Salt, News & Musings :: 1 Comment »

Once in a while salting is not about harmony.  Instead it’s about a gentle but jangling discord.  Haleakala Ruby is a luscious, warm Hawaiian sea salt that takes its color from the Haleakala volcano’s sacred alaea clay.  This is a salt that excels on fish and pork, where it seeks out and then embellishes the opulent undercurrents of flavors lurking in these subtler foods.  But it’s also good on fruit.  The salt shifts unexpectedly from meadows of sunny butter to coral reefs of revitalizing brine.  The less acidic the fruit, the more pronounced the oceanic freshness, as if the salt knows precisely how to respond to the needs of the food.  Start with a cantaloupe sweet as honeysuckle, trickle a little balsamic acidity for added complexity, stir in a pinch of fleur de sel to bring the flavors into crystal clarity, then serve with a sprinkle of Haleakala Ruby…  This is what it tastes like to have your heart skip a beat.

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Mark Bitterman :: Aug.30.2010 :: Gourmet Salt, Recipes :: No Comments »

It is impossible to transform a cube into a sphere by cutting off corners.  Every time you cut a corner off, you reduce the degrees of the angles, but no matter how many times you do this, you will still have sides.   A perfect sphere has no sides.  This is the classical version of the problem.  The same impossibility holds true going in the opposite direction.  You can start with one cube, and then attach six cubes to it, one for each side.  Then add more cubes to those sides, and more cubes to those, etc. etc., until you form something that approaches the shape of a sphere–but again there will always be sides. Math has its limitations.  Happily, salt does not.

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Mark Bitterman :: Aug.28.2010 :: Gourmet Salt :: 2 Comments »