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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »