Salt News

Okay, the headline is an exaggeration.  There were no Brazilian supermodels, wind licking at their silky locks, licking their freshly salted lips.  Just me and a small pile of Kauai Guavawood Smoked salt.  Probably, the pile of smoked salt was too small…  My idea was to try to create the effect of a majestic, volcanic mountain, clouds brooding on its cascading shoulders.

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

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Mark Bitterman :: Feb.18.2009 :: News & Musings :: 1 Comment »

Hooray!  The New York Times does it again, gives salt a gander.  The Times has published a nice little piece on the story of João Navalho, who after failing in a business to produce and market beta-carotene grown in abandoned salt marshes, he took the more obvious path and returned the land to salt production.  Enlisting Maximino António Guerreiro, an artisan salt company was (re) born.  A good deal of salt from Portugal’s Algarve region is finding its way to the American and European markets, competing as Portuguese flor de sal with the French fleur de sel and other French sea salt.

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.

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Mark Bitterman :: Jan.27.2009 :: News & Musings :: No Comments »

In a rare display of totally non-ironic wisdom, the widely acclaimed newscaster Steven Colbert has called for the U.S. to return to the salt-based economic model of yore.  According to Comedy Central, Stephen isn’t saying you should invest in salt, he’s saying you should convert your money into salt.

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.”

Mark Bitterman :: Nov.03.2008 :: News & Musings :: No Comments »

I just found a photograph I took with my cell phone a year and a half ago.

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.

Mark Bitterman :: Sep.18.2008 :: News & Musings, Salt Blocks :: 1 Comment »

I’ve been doing plenty of creative cooking on Himalayan Salt Blocks since my last post on the subject, and plenty more less creative things. Mostly, I’ve been working (remotely) with my people in Pakistan on optimizing the cut and grade of Himalayan salt blocks we are importing into the U.S.

The happy day has come: the latest shipment of Himalayan salt blocks has arrived, and now, after horrendous physical labor in the warehouse (my forearms are like Popeye’s, and small children stop and gape), it’s all ready to use.

Thanks to the great work of our supplier, for the first time we have divided our blocks into grades, allowing customers to buy the Himalayan salt block that best suits their expected needs. The bad news is I somehow have not yet managed to snap a photograph of them, but that shall be forthcoming.

There is more detail available at www.atthemeadow.com, but to summarize:

Our larger tiles and plates are thicker than standard blocks, for both added strength and a greater physical appeal. Large pieces such as 8 x 8 x 2 and the new 9 x 9 x 2 are an impressive half inch thicker than standard salt blocks, and the same goes for our extra-huge 9 x 18 platters. This larger size applies to all grades, not just the new premium.

The thick size is extremely cool to look at: it sits at the table like it wants to crush it. It broods. It handily supports the most massive food, from a Tomme de Savoie to a fan of lobster tails. I still have the 1.5 inch thick blocks in my kitchen, but they look a touch puny next to the new big fat boys.

Regular Grade Himalayan Salt Blocks are for serving food at room temperature, or if you have a mind, frozen for a sorbet or that semifreddo service you have been wanting to attempt for all those years. A Himalayan salt block cheese platter, marinated vegetable plate, sashimi plate, butter dishh, centerpiece, etc., will do best with a Regular Grade Himalayan Salt block.

The new Premium Grade Himalayan Salt Blocks™ are painstakingly selected (ever tried to move 200 ninety pound boxes of salt around a warehouse in the middle of July?), for the most versatile use by the most serious-minded cooks. They are the ones I wanted to take home… Fear not, I get all the funky pieces. I am glad to sort though a stack of the premium grade (or the regular grade for that matter) salt blocks looking for anything in particular that might desire.

Architectural Grade Himalayan Salt Blocks™ are the least expensive Himalayan salt blocks. They are pure and beautiful and similar to the regular grade in many regards, but are only sold in large quantities and may contain some flaws that make them less than ideal for culinary uses of Himalayan salt blocks. Starting a new club and want a luminous wall of salt? Building out a wine cellar? Sprucing up a spa? That’s the idea.

Mark Bitterman :: Jul.26.2008 :: News & Musings, Salt Blocks :: 2 Comments »

I’m not super self-aware, except at times–though even then much of my sense of self-awareness stems from the recognition that I often have no idea what I’m doing or thinking.Jennifer has called my attention, more than once, to a habit I have of cracking my knuckles when approaching someone who has just asked me a nice plump salt question. Walking from behind the counter–or descending the ladder from which I have been arranging wine bottles or fixing the frame of one of Roger Hallin’s beautiful nudes that are hanging some 10 feet up the 17-foot-tall walls of the shop–I interlace the fingers, flip the palms forward, and flex them, releasing a quite pleasant crackling of cartilage and tendon. Opening up the energy. I think Jennifer is concerned that there is an air of fiendish glee in the gesture that visitors might find… disconcerting.

Anywhere between five and five hundred times a day, someone stands before the wall where we have about 75 salts arranged in little apothecary jars and asks, “If I want to have just one salt, which one should I choose?”

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Mark Bitterman :: May.10.2008 :: News & Musings :: No Comments »