For the next few months I’ll post favorite videos of saltmaking around the world. Some salt manufacturing facilities are filthy affairs where bulldozers groan amidst the thunder of dynamite. Others are tranquil places where all you hear is birdsong and the rustle of marsh grasses over the occasional laugh or murmur of an artisan practicing thousand year old saltmaking traditions. While the two extremes are related through the universal human need for salt, salt from the former finds its way to our tables only as a refined byproduct of a far vaster industrial need for salt. Salt from the latter makes you want to travel, talk, learn, cook, and eat.

This is one of the best videos I know describing artisan saltmaking at Malta. The Gozo salt pans located on Xwieni Bay have been been producing salt at least since Phoenician times. (The megalithic structures of Gozo date from 3600-3000 BC and there is every likelihood that salt was part of the economy that thrived there) The use of some modern equipment doesn’t diminish the charm and weird beauty of Gozo salt.

I have a thought that speaks to both of our perspectives on salt.  Ruhlman ’s book, Soul of the Chef, is a brilliant account of what’s involved in the technical mastery of cooking.  But implicit in the story (and sometimes explicit) is the importance of the ingredient.  Thomas Keller is a technical master, but he is also the consummate curator of ingredients.

The tension between technique and ingredient is age-old.  In the history of food there has always been a fight between technique and ingredient.  Cultures tend to come out on one side or the other: French, the technique; Italian, the ingredient.  This tension also plays out through trends and influences:  molecular gastronomy is about technique; Alice Waters is about ingredient.  As he describes so well, Keller is not only a master technician, he also emblematizes the age-old concept “honor the animal” and “honor the vegetable,” meaning use your ingredients fully and respectfully.

Keller also honors the mineral.

Keller’s strategic, creative, mindful use of natural, unique salts has been a major inspiration for me in my life and work.  If fact, I can think of no other person (outside Japan) who has so fully grasped the essential link between the technical perfection of cooking and the elemental imperative of good salt.  Several of the over 100 salts we carry in our store I discovered through Keller.

But, in conclusion, I will say that I totally agree three salts are enough for any household.  But they should be salts that reflect your values as a chef no less than the grade of meat or freshness of vegetable.  Coarse, moist Sel Gris for all around cooking and hearty foods like grilled and roasted meats and roots.  Delicate, irregular crystals of Fleur de Sel for subtler, moist foods like fish, sauced foods, and cooked vegetables.  Parchment fine Flake Salts for fresh vegetables and wherever you want a dramatic salty snap.  We have the Foundations Set at The Meadow to help with this.

The technical skill required for using salt masterfully is easy as pie (or easier: crust is a bear).  And finding good salts is easier now than ever.  My book will be coming out this fall in an effort to help matters along.  Honor the mineral!

A new study, “Can Dietary Sodium Intake Be Modified by Public Policy?” published in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology asserts that public health policy is neither a justified nor a productive way to regulate individual sodium intake:

As the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans are currently under development and regulations surrounding sodium consumption are being considered, an analysis of evidence to be released online Thursday, Oct. 15, in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN) questions the scientific logic and feasibility of the decades-long effort to limit salt intake in humans.

After examining data from sodium intake studies worldwide and a critical body of neuroscience research on sodium appetite (innate behaviors that drive us to consume salt), researchers from the Department of Nutrition at the University of California, Davis, and the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Washington University found compelling evidence indicating that humans naturally regulate their salt intake within a narrowly defined physiologic range.
This new analysis, “Can Sodium Intake Be Modified by Public Policy,” is timely as two expert panels convened by the U.S. government are considering nutrition policies that would lower current sodium intake recommendations and set in motion policies regulating the amount in food. The issue of whether sodium intake is a physiologic parameter that public policy cannot change has never before been considered. This study challenges the relevance of regulatory or legislative intervention by identifying evidence, which must be taken into account as U.S. guidelines are being reevaluated, and even more restrictive policies considered.

“If sodium intake is physiologically determined, then our national nutrition guidelines and policies must reflect that reality,” said lead author David A. McCarron, an adjunct professor with the Department of Nutrition at UC Davis. “It is unrealistic to attempt to regulate America’s sodium consumption through public policy when it appears that our bodies naturally dictate how much sodium we consume to maintain a physiologically set normal range. To do otherwise will expend valuable national and personal resources against unachievable goals.”

Sodium consumption not extreme

The researchers evaluated 24-hour urinary sodium excretion, the standard measure of daily sodium intake, from 19,151 individuals collected in 62 previously published surveys from 33 countries worldwide. In contrast to the widely held notion that salt intake has reached extreme levels in Western societies, the analysis indicates that daily sodium intake across a wide range of “food environments” tracks within a relatively narrow range: 117 mmol–212 mmol (2,700–4,900 mg). In addition, previous studies provide supportive evidence that adult humans naturally seek this range of sodium intake.

Further, the authors highlight neuroscience research in animal models demonstrating that sodium intake is tightly controlled by critical pathways in the brain to maintain optimal function of many physiologic functions.

“Decades of neuroscience research have revealed highly sophisticated brain circuits which regulate sodium appetite by facilitating communications between the brain and multiple organs throughout the body,” said study co-author Joel C. Geerling, a neuroscientist and physician formerly of Washington University and now at New York–Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center.

“One purpose of these pathways is to ensure that the body is obtaining adequate sodium from the diet to fulfill physiologic needs.” Geerling said.

The importance of the question posed by this article is further highlighted by the efforts of national agencies and municipal departments, such as the British Food Standards Agency (FSA) and the New York City Department of Health, which have set in motion campaigns to mandate food companies and restaurants to lower the sodium content of foods.

In the course of their analysis and included in this article, the UC Davis investigators statistically assessed government-sponsored surveys of 24-hour urinary sodium excretion completed at 13 sites within the United Kingdom and Ireland involving more than 6,000 subjects since 1982. This assessment indicates that there has been no change during the past 25 years in the dietary sodium intake of individuals living in the U.K. and Ireland and is at odds with FSA’s recent public claims of a significant reduction following that agency’s multimillion pound campaign to restrict salt intake in the U.K.

Is regulation necessary?

The 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee and an Institute of Medicine (IOM) Panel on Strategies to Reduce Sodium Intake are working to determine what the 2010 sodium intake guideline will be and how to implement strategies — including regulatory and legislative actions — to further lower Americans’ sodium intake.

However, the current daily intake guidelines call for a maximum daily intake of 2,300 mg of sodium, the equivalent of one teaspoon of table salt. These recommendations are already 17 percent lower than the lowest level of worldwide sodium intake (2,700 mg) and 38 percent lower than the worldwide average sodium intake (3,700 mg).

According to study co-author Judith Stern, professor of nutrition at UC Davis and a past member of the 1985 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, “If this body of evidence is not taken into account, updates to the Dietary Guidelines or regulatory actions are based on partial science. Clearly, before dietary sodium intake can or should be modified, additional discussion and analysis are required.”

From the standpoint of The Meadow, the entire discussion of sodium restriction is misguided at its core.  A good indication of when we’ll be ready to engage in a scientific conversation (which is a prerequisite for a public health debate) is when we start seeing peer-reviewed scientific studies entitled: “The health benefits of sel gris and other high-mineral sea salts;” “Artisan salt, flavor, and health;” “Eating habits, health, and the use fleur de sel as a finishing salt.”

Don’t hold your breath.

We eat animals, plants, and salts.  Salt is a food.  There are thousands of salts in the world.  Each has unique culinary and nutritional qualities.  Each is unique, often with a history going back thousands of years to the dawn of civilization, and sometimes well before.  Until we respect what salt is, begin to think of it as a whole ingredient (many contain every known element in the earth’s crust and atmosphere), as a quality natural ingredient (it is made from the sun and the sea, by the hands of skilled artisans) we cannot begin to understand its role in our diet.

After two disastrous years, the salt fields of Guérande have reason to smile. The season was long and good. The 190 members of the cooperative of producers, «Les salines de Guérande», have harvested 14,000 tons of sel gris, which about or two thirds of the total production on the Guérande salt fields.  The remainder is produced by independent producers.  Add to this 650 tons of fleur de sel, their premium product.  This harvest is sufficient to provide the cooperative with three and a half years of reserves.

There have been rumors that fleur de sel has fallen into such short supply that the French have actually been forced to buy fleur de sel from Portugal and Mexico.  I’ve visited a number of the producers and cooperatives in Brittany and never found one that didn’t claim to still have reserves of their salt on hand, though none of them seemed terribly smug about it.  Now, 650 tons of fine fleur de sel, 14,000 tons coarse sel gris…  I can sleep at night again.

Such was our experience when Jennifer Turner Bitterman, co-founder of The Meadow, organized Farm Awareness Day, bringing together Corey Schreiber, James Beard Award winning chef and Farm-to-School food coordinator with the Oregon Department of Agriculture, Nikole Williams, Program Manager of Nutritious Services for Portland Public Schools, and Paul Folkestad, an instructor and chef with the Western Culinary Institute.  The event was held in conjuction with PPS’s Local Lunch and Harvest of the Month program, tasting and playing with asparagus with the students of Laurelhurst Elementary School.

And amazingly, the kids, insofar as is possible within the rather bewilderingly frenetic 20 to 30 minutes that they were allotted for lunch, really did eat asparagus.

Jennifer, Corey, and Paul pursued a three stranded strategy in their campaign to a) feed children, b) wake them up to the unexpected pleasures lurking within a stalk of astringent green vegetable, and c) make the entire thing thought provoking and memorable enough to hopefully percolate down to conversation with the parents over dinner table back home.

Strand 1 of the strategy: grill some asparagus and serve it from a platter.  400 kids, lunching in three seatings, can motor through a substantial amount of asparagus, even if there only a minority cared to partake. Minority status notwithstanding, there were a surprising number who were more than willing to wolf down a stalk or two. In fact, in addition to what was served them, I spied dozens of kids skulking away from their seats to grab a stalk, shoving it down their gullets as they returned to their tables, often realizing just as they were about to retake their seats that they had, alas, finished their asparagus, and so would have to skulk away again to get more, and so repeated the circle of seeking, eating, returning, realizing, and re-seeking again and again, transformed by hunger into a sort of asparagus-inhaling perpetual motion machines. (Skulking’s sort of a figurative term, as they really just bounded up from their tables and ran across the cafeteria to Chef Folkestad, who was dispensing piles of thick, remarkably nicely-cooked stalks of asparagus as fast as he could.)

Strand 2 of the strategy: give them the opportunity to personalize their vegetables with salt.  Jennifer thought it would help stimulate things if we played off the natural interest in things that are salty, cool, colorful, unique, and salty.  In other words, we allowed the kids to partake of the joys of finishing salt, which they did with gusto.  We brought three suitably dramatic artisan salts from The Meadow: warm and meaty Kauai Guava smoked sea salt, a rich red Alaea Volcanic sea salt, and a snappy charcoal gray Turkish Black Pyramid sea salt from Cyprus.  Hard to know what was the most popular, as the cafeteria was more or less engulfed in a white cloud of aerosolized Himalayan Pink rock salt that I was grating onto kids asparagus, hands, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and upturned smiling faces.

Strand 3 of the strategy: this was the most ingenious part of the entire event.  The only thing more effective than the age old trickery known as bait-and-switch is even older trickery of baiting and not switching.  We contacted Rudy Speerschneider, the maestro of hand-churned ice cream at Junior Ambassador’s ice cream, which operates out of a “Mostlandian” food cart on Albina Avenue not far from our shop (though if you follow the website, its actually “a fanatasical psychogeographical destination happening anyplace, anytime, anyhow,” which is a difficult place to navigate to using Google maps and conventional ground transportation).  The ice cream is indeed almost supernaturally delicious, despite leanings toward the bizarre side. What is funny is that people are as eager to rave about the smoked salmon-cream cheese sundae complete with capers and pickled onions as they are about the vanilla.  The kids agreed, and went after the asparagus ice cream with very close to universal enthusiasm.

There was a sort of strand 3 and a half: I stood around with a giant rock of Himalayan pink salt and shaved it onto the little cups of asparagus ice cream.  The dusting of salt brought out a hidden sweetness in the asparagus, and as well as fresh glimmers of its trademark vibrant, green, springiness.  Plus, the children seemed to find it refreshingly cool and to suddenly find themselves in the proximity of a group of adults crazy enough to hybridize ice cream, rocks, and asparagus into a singularly yummy and theatrical experience.

Below are some simple asparagus recipes provided by Chef Paul to inspire parents and kids take the asparagus experience back home.

Farm-to-School Asparagus Recipes:

These are three easy recipes below, but even easier is to trim your asparagus, plunge it in boiling water for 3 minutes, then plunge in ice water. Serve cold with kosher salt and a squeeze of lemon.

Asparagus Parmigiano

• 2 pounds asparagus stalks, washed and trimmed
• Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
• Extra-virgin olive oil
• Coarsely ground black pepper
• Coarse salt or sea salt
• Selmelier’s recommendation (coarse, moist salt such as Sel Gris de l’Ile de Noirmoutier, or a hearty fleur de sel like Peruvian Warm Spring will give the teeth and the tongue something wonderful to toy with against the juicy/salty aparagus/Parmigiano combination.

Use a vegetable peeler, shave curls off the Parmigian-Reggiano cheese. Snap or cut off the tough ends of the asparagus. Arrange asparagus in a single layer in a shallow baking pan. Blanch the asparagus in lightly salted boiling water for approximately 3 minutes or until crisp-tender; do not overcook. Remove from heat and refresh under cold water; drain well. Toss asparagus with just enough olive oil to lightly coat. Arrange asparagus on a serving platter or individual serving plates. Sprinkle coarse salt, pepper, and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese curls over the top of the asparagus.
Makes 4-6 servings.
Simple Roasted Asparagus

• 1 bunch fresh asparagus
• ½ cup extra virgin olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• ¼ cup balsamic vinegar
• salt and pepper to taste
• Selmelier’s recommendation: Turkish Black Pyramid, hands down, a beautiful salt with a touch of earthiness to balance out the asparagus

Preheat oven to 425. Trim tough bottoms of asparagus stalks up to ½ inch. Liberally coat the asparagus with the other ingredients. Roast asparagus on high rack in oven until tender, usually 4-6min depending on thickness of asparagus. Serve hot or cold. Makes 4 portions.
Asparagus with Orange Dressing & Toasted Hazelnuts (from Gourmet Magazine)

• 2 tablespoons finely chopped hazelnuts
• 1 1/2 to 2 pounds asparagus stalks, washed and trimmed
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated orange zest
• 2 teaspoons fresh orange juice
• 1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• [salt]
• Selmelier’s recommendation: Ack, had to edit/eradicate an ingredient!  Good sweet lord, why wreck all those fresh ingredients in such a beautiful recipe by introducing industrially refined sodium chloride into it? No offense Gourmet, which we read religiously, but a simple flake salt like Maldon will set the entire dish about five rungs farther up the stairway to heaven.    

Preheat oven to 375°F. Toast hazelnuts in a small shallow baking pan until golden, 4 to 5 minutes. Cook asparagus in a large frying pan of boiling salted water until crisp-tender, about 3 to 4 minutes, and drain well in a colander. Transfer hot asparagus to serving platter or individual serving plates. In a small bowl, whisk together orange zest, orange juice, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper to taste. Spoon orange dressing over top or asparagus and sprinkle with nuts.
Makes 4 servings.

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

April 8: Visit the Aigues Mortes salt works, among the largest in the world and also a producer of Fleur de sel de Camargue.  Lots of driving over the next 3-4 days, so rest up 2nd night in Arles.

April 9:  Drive through Toulouse en route to staying in St Sebastien.

April 10: Drive to Porto, Portugal Drive by Asturias and eat cheese.

April 11: Visit Lisbon and surroundings such as the 7th century Moorish town of Alochete, once a major salt-producer.

April 12: Still chilling in Lisbon.

April 13: Small town like Tavira in Portugal’s Algarve. Visit with the folks at Mirasol and Necton.   Rome took much of its salt from the Algarve back in the day, and saltmaking there has been revived seriously in recent years.

April 14: Tavira

April 15: Tangier, Morocco.  There are some good salinas to visit on the Southern tip of Spain on the way, near Cadiz, so who  knows how far we will get.  The goal is to cross the straits to Africa.

April 16: Check out various and sundry sights along the coast en route to Casablanca.

April 17: Casablanca (take in the sights), stroll the markets, eat fruits and nuts and dried fruits and buy salts harvested from the nearby seas and distant mountains.  An old buddy, a real trouble maker, from my Paris days lived in Casablanca, but who knows what prison cell not contains him, or I would visit.

April 18: Tangier

April 19: Seville, Spain Here we leave the salt road, and travel inland for a spell.

April 20 and 21: Madrid

April 22: Bordeaux, visit makers of Pineau des Charentes

April 23 through 27: Il de Noirmoutier and surrounding countryside, maybe extending up as far as St. Malo, where we will eat the best salted butter in the world, hand made by a fellow named Jean-Yves Bordier.

April 28 through 30: Paris.  Not sure what we will NOT do here, but certainly stomp around my old stomping grounds, check out some of the recommendations from the website of my friend Dorie Greenspan, who is on intimate terms with both food and Paris, take up smoking and sit in cafes and write whilst smoking a Gitanes.

May 1: Return to Portland Oregon, put the kids, bewildered and savage as feral cats, back in school.

We will keep track of this trip in real time, to the best of our ability, Tweeting at: Twitter.com/Selmelier.

In the meantime, we would love your ideas and advice!

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

A boulder field.  This also displays of some of the qualities of a hand-ground salt.  Note the micro-grains of salt next to the hefty boulders….  (the hefty boulders are about 1 to 2 mm in diameter).

Taken in the early morning today….  Maybe progress?

Taken just now, with strong (and rare) Portland Oregon sunlight streaming through the window.

Well…. at least I’ve already brushed my teeth this morning.

Among the ten or so Fleur de Sel’s we carry, the French versions are predictably more popular than their Portuguese brethren.  Times’ writer Elaine Sciolino points out “…Mr. Navalho confesses that his team learned many of its techniques from Guérande, the Brittany-based cooperative that restored traditional salt-making to France in the 1970s and whose brand dominates the hand-harvested salt business. France produces about 80 percent of Europe’s hand-harvested salt and fleur de sel.”

The quality of any artisan salt ranges from producer to producer.  I have found that João Navalho’s Necton salt company indeed produces a good flor de sal.  (We sell a hand-harvested artisan sea salt from neighboring salt producer as Flor de Sal do Algarve.)  The Times story points out the challenges any buyer faces when deliberating artisan salts: it is not always easy to know when a salt is in fact made by an artisan: “Nico Boer, the German co-manager of the Marisol salt works in nearby Tavira, said one Portuguese salt producer sold more than a dozen tons of industrial salt to the French several years ago, passing it off as hand-harvested.”

The New York Times story, “From a Portuguese Marsh, Salt, the Traditional Way,” written by Elaine Sciolino, is classic New York Times journalism, packed with great insights into the people and place, but keeping a pole’s distance between the writer and any observations of the heart of the matter: in this case, the culinary and other benefits driving the growing global use of artisan salts.

Word choice matters enormously, and Ms. Sciolino uses language that is intended to make the artisan salt seem like a plaything of the frivolous and decadent: “These days, European designer salt must compete with exotic salts from around the world, including Himalayan pink salt harvested at altitudes over 10,000 feet, a South Korean salt that is roasted in bamboo, and Hawaiian red Alaea, which gets its color from red clay.”

I don’t want to sound harsh, but the term “designer salts” is not used by anyone in the salt industry.  It is a term coined by food writers, probably to show they are not suckers, that they see this as a fashion trend equal to Jordash Jeans.  The history, culinary associations, and personalities do indeed contribute to our complicated love for this elemental part of our food, but there are other forces at work as well.  Since Marie Antoine Carême (1784–1833) we have been simplifying cooking techniques and refining flavors in a quest to capture the full majesty of the foods we eat.

“The history of Portugal and salt is long and romantic.  The first known document related to Portuguese salt works dates from the 10th century, when a countess donated salt marshes to a monastery that she founded. A century later, the Algarve region was shipping salt across Europe; in the 15th and 16th centuries, salt helped make Portugal a global power.”

In fact, Roman salt-fish factories can still be found in the Baixo Sado area of Portugal, and the Roman Empire exported a great deal of salt from Portugal maybe in the neighborhood of 1,000 years earlier!

For thousands of years people have been making salt by the side of the sea.  The strength of writers like Ms. Sciolino is that they understand our collective need for a deeper connection with our culinary and earthly heritage.  (I hope Ms. Sciolino will jump on a jet and visit another country reviving its artisan salt production, like Mexico, next!)  Artisan salt is a compass by which every professional chef and home cook can navigate on their odyssey through history.  The genius of people like João Navalho is their observation that celebrating simplified and more flavorful ingredients is not a trend, but an enduring characteristic of our evolving society.

We are way ahead of you Stephen.  At The Meadow we offer people their change in salt rocks.

“Moving to a salt-based economy is a return to our fiscal roots,” stated Colbert.  “The price of salt has gotten so high that some cities can’t afford enough road salt for the winter and will be forced to de-ice their roads the old fashioned way with global warming. In the last year, salt has gone up from 45 to 79 dollars a ton. A ton of dollars is currently worth two euros. That’s why I’m not saying you should invest your money in salt. I’m saying you should convert your money into salt. Moving to a salt-based economy is a return to our fiscal roots. Roman soldiers were paid in salt. It’s where we get the word salary which is compensation people get in exchange for doing a job. Ask your parents. Of course, we can’t trust our banks anymore, but our salt wealth can be stored in any number of locations.”

In the spring of 2007, the editors of the bridal issue of a magazine popular here in the Pacific Northwest asked us to design a floral arrangement and table service.   Jennifer came up with an idea that stunned everybody who saw it, combining in one sophisticated table setting the most ephemeral and delicate of beauties with the closest thing on planet Earth to the eternal.

For flowers, Jennifer found about two dozen different varieties of white flowers, many of them wildflowers we collected ourselves from the forests, streams, and meadows near our house in Portland Oregon.  She arranged them either singly or in small bunches in a variety of unique vintage and antique glass vases from the vintage vase collection in our shop.  For the centerpiece she arranged pale pink dogwood blossoms with very tall, slender white tulips. The effect was one of extraordinary diversity brought into strange and unexpected harmony, as if nature herself had flung together the vases and flowers, and suddenly withdrawn, leaving the fragile petals trembling above the crisp white linens covering the table.

Jennifer then set 8 inch by 8 inch by 2 inch thick squares of light pink Himalayan rock salt plates on white china chargers.  The Himalayan rock salts are 600 million years old.  They just sat there, and glowed.  Way back before there as any developed life on the planet, a great ocean became enclosed by land and slowly evaporated off to form a vast deposit of salt and natural trace minerals.  The luminescent squares of Himalayan salt, effectively the distillate of one of the first oceans to form on the planet, both anchored the table with their solidity and uprooted it, bringing the primordial bed of all life on earth into contradistinction that was simultaneously aesthetic, conceptual, and playful.

The photographs in the magazine were great, but never quite did justice to the amazing delicacy of the white wildflowers and the immutable depth of the salt blocks.  But this picture at least serves as a schematic for the idea.

For any of you–like me recently–still baffled: to get an image out of your cell phone you can email it to yourself.