Salt News

Sometimes we get inquiries from our customers at The Meadow which, in the interest of promoting better awareness about good culinary salt, merit a public response.  Jason L asks about the purity of sea salt. My book, SALTED, to be released this October 12 (more on that in a later post!), explores this question in detail, and provides solutions that lead us toward the ultimate goal of tastier, more exciting, satisfying, and nutritious food.

Hi,

I have a couple questions about salt production and I’m hoping you can answer them.  I’ve had an interest in salt for a while and how it is made. I’m curious about two things.

1. How can you tell where sea salt is made?  Coastal water pollution is a problem all over the world.  Why should I assume that “French sea salt” (or any sea salt) is made from clean waters?  Is there a way to find out and/or verify?

2. Solar evaporation is a very old and common practice for making salt.  But how do they keep stuff out of the ponds?  Bird poop?  Bugs?  Dirt? Whatever else?  It seems like creating something with that much exposed surface area is bound to get contaminants.

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Mark Bitterman :: Aug.25.2010 :: Gourmet Salt, News & Musings :: 12 Comments »

So this morning I set out for Chelsea Market in New York City to buy some coffee beans and I had absolutely no intention of falling in love with another berry. But I stumbled across some great-looking stracchino cheese, and then moments later bumped into some luscious strawberries, and while I was fumbling for change to pay for the strawberries, what do I do but pull out but a pile of chocolate salt that had spilled from a jar in my pockets a few days earlier.  When this sort of thing happens it makes no sense to question fate.  I strolled out to the street, found one of those odd new middle-of-the-street tables they’re putting at the voids in intersections all over the city, and sat down for a little impromptu strawberry-stracchino-chocolate-salt breakfast in the morning coolness.  This was one of the first times I’ve used my own chocolate-infused salt on cheese—other than on cottage cheese and peaches, etc.  The pairing was a natural: Bitterman’s Chocolate Fleur de Sel (it’s the only salt at The Meadow we make ourselves, a secret infusion of chocolate and our house fleur de sel) brings a rich chocolate aroma to your senses even before you bite.  And the salt’s discrete nutty-mocha flavors are like a curtain through which emerge silvery spangles of mineral-fresh salt.  The impact of the salt in your mouth is incredible as it finds its way through the rich stracchino cheese mixing with the buoyant fruitiness of the strawberry: like one of those scenes in the movies when two lovers set eyes on one another from across a crowded train platform, and struggle ardently through the all those jostling people to reunite.

Mark Bitterman :: Aug.18.2010 :: Gourmet Salt, Recipes :: 6 Comments »

I’m sitting on a black leather couch of a playwright whose West Village apartment I’m subletting, thinking about how I need to get outside to buy some more raspberries.  About to pop the last one into my mouth. But then I stop.  My last raspberry ils talking to me. (If you’ve ever seen those videos of the annoying talking orange, you have a pretty clear idea of what I’m talking about.)  The last raspberry was reminding me that I hadn’t actually paid that much attention to the first raspberry.  It suggested I go back and retroactively experience past raspberries, though it didn’t say how far past. So I sprinkled a little Cyprus Hardwood Smoked sea salt on my talking raspberry.  The salt sparked images of all the raspberries that had come before: childhood raspberries from my grandmother’s Connecticut brambles, later raspberries from beach parties crashed in the Vendée, more recent from the hands of my boy in Oregon.  The flash of Cyprus Hardwood Smoked–a bright sizzle suffused in a maple warmth–makes for your own personalized version of the raspberry eating experience.

Mark Bitterman :: Aug.16.2010 :: Gourmet Salt, Recipes :: 3 Comments »

A crispy tangy spicy red snapper: flavors singing in exotic Southeast Asian voices.  Restless nights preceded this recipe.  There was hand wringing.  Soul searching.  The dilemma of which salt.  Bali Rama, with its arrowhead tips of explosive freshness, was the seductive choice, a magnificent sea salt that seems never to steer me wrong.  Maldon sea salt would have been a convenient and more predictable choice, salt’s gold standard of unflappable, balanced crispness.  But the snapper wanted something more, something both melodic and taunting, like the sound of seashells raked by summer waves across a tropical reef.  The choice of salts became clear: The Meadow Flake, with its huge pyramidal crystals that seem nearly to tremble with oceanic vitality, a sea salt with the mathematical exactitude of music.

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Mark Bitterman :: Aug.13.2010 :: Gourmet Salt, Recipes :: No Comments »

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 :: 5 Comments »