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.

Vegetable Sandwich with Amabito no Moshio

Makes 4 servings

8 slices black bread or pumpernickel
1 teaspoon horseradish (optional)
4 ounces (8 tablespoons) cream cheese
½ bunch watercress, large stems trimmed
8 thin slices ripe tomato
2 thin slices red onion, halved
1 cup mung bean sprouts
24 thin slices cucumber
½ avocado, cut in 8 thin wedges
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
Small grind of black peppercorns
4 three-finger pinches Amabito no Moshio sea salt

Spread the (optional) horseradish very sparingly over each slice of bread. Spread the cream cheese on one side of each slice of bread. Top four of the slices with a small fistful of watercress, two slices tomato, a half-slice red onion, ¼ cup sprouts, six cucumber slices, and two slices avocado.

Mix the olive oil and vinegar and spoon a small amount over the vegetables. Season each sandwich with a grinding of pepper and a three-finger pinch of Amabito no Moshio sea salt. Top with remaining cream cheese and bread and serve immediately.

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.

Makes 6 servings

1 side of salmon, preferably wild, about 2 pounds, bones removed
¼ cup black sesame seeds
¼ cup white sesame seeds
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Finely grated zest and juice of a lime
1 teaspoon dark toasted sesame oil
½ teaspoon Aleppo pepper, or ¼ teaspoon crushed chilies
3 big pinches Iburi-Jio Cherry smoked salt

Coat the flesh-side of the salmon with the sesame seeds and pat gently into the surface.

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat until smoking. Carefully put the salmon in the pan flesh-side down and cook until browned, about 5 minutes. Turn carefully and cook until the fish is firm but still translucent in the center, 4 to 5 minutes more.

While the salmon is cooking, combine the lime zest, lime juice, sesame oil and Aleppo pepper in a small bowl.

Using a wide spatula or two spatulas, transfer the fish to a serving platter. Drizzle with the lime mixture and scatter the salt over all. Serve immediately. If you need to delay serving, wait until the last second to salt. You want the delicate crystals of the Iburi-Jio to barely dissolve at first bite.

Can’t find Iburi-Jio Cherry? You can purchase it from the Meadow by clicking here.

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.

Makes 1 quart

1 pound peeled and seeded cantaloupe chunks, about 3 cups<
1 cup simple syrup (see recipe)
4 teaspoons white balsamic vinegar
1 two-finger pinch fleur de sel
4 two-finger pinched Haleakala Ruby sea salt

To make simple syrup, combine 1 cup sugar into 1 cup water in a saucepan.  Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally until the sugar is completely dissolved. (This will make a little more than 1 cup simple syrup, so measure the called-for amount.)  Allow to cool before using. Puree the melon, simple syrup, and vinegar in a blender on high speed until completely smooth.  Stir in the fleur de sel and freeze in an ice cream freezer according to manufacturer’s directions, or pour into a shallow baking dish and freeze until solid.  Cut into cubes and puree in batches in a food processor until smooth and thick.  Freeze to finish firming, about 30 minutes.

Serve scoops in chilled glasses, topping each with a thrifty pinch of Haleakala sea salt.

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.

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.

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.

Serves 3 to 4

For the Snapper

2 teaspoon coriander seed, ground
1 tablespoon white peppercorns, ground
1 three-finger pinch Meadow fleur de sel
4 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 bunch cilantro, leave, minced
4 to 5 pounds cleaned (gutted, scaled, fins trimmed, gills removed) whole red snapper
juice of 1 lime
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
3 three-finger pinches Meadow flake sauce

For the Sauce

2 fresh lemon grass stalks, all fibrous layers removed, finely sliced
1/2 fresh chile, minced
1/4 cup Nam Pla (fish sauce)
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup lime juice, about 2 limes
8 chives, finely sliced

Combine the coriander, peppercorns, fleur de sel, garlic and cilantro into a coarse paste.  Make 3 deep slits in the sides of the fish and rub the spice paste into the slits and all over the surface of the fish. Set on a boiler pan and drizzle with lime juice and olive oil. Preheat the broiler and set the fish aside for 10 minutes while you make the sauce.

The lemon grass needs to be thoroughly trimmed so that only the tender heart is left.  (The trick to lemon grass is pealing away way more of the outer layers than you might think.)  Combine the sliced lemon grass, chile, fish sauce, water, and lime juice.

Broil the fish 4 inches away from the heat until the skin is crisp on both sides and fish flesh is opaque (but still moist) deep in the slits.  Transfer to a serving platter.

Drizzle the sauce over the fish, scatter the chive, and finish with The Meadow Flake salt over top.

Avert your eyes.  Blush.  Go ahead.  The steak salad is always a little embarrassing to look at. Nobody is to blame for this.  Like the pitterpat of a Geisha’s geta sandal across the parquet, the modesty of the salad is betrayed by its inescapable voluptuousness.  But this needs to be greeted in the spirit in which it is offered, which is to say, with deference and respect.

So often the architect of the steak salad indulges in the natural inclination to use the steak itself as the seasoning for the entire dish, salting the heck out of the steak–and in effect utilizing the steak in much the way we use bacon bits and gorgonzola on a cobb salad, or anchovies and parmesan on a Caesar salad—taking advantage of an ingredient’s natural saltiness to season for the dish.  This is a perfectly normal impulse.  After all, for millions of years we got most of the salt we ate from red meat, so if some part of our reptile mind still thinks of meat as salt, the modern steak salad maker can surely be excused for thinking of salt as meat.

But the missed opportunity to enlist a good salt with steak makes this confusion tragic nonetheless.  Shinkai Deep Sea Salt: taught, brilliant, bitter-sweet, immaculate.  Sprinkled over the steak on this Japanese steak salad, Shinkai Deep Sea Salt brings grace and definition to the meat, deliciously integrating its carnal succulence into the civilized bed of gleaming garden greens.

Makes 4 main dish servings

For Dressing/Marinade
1/4 cup soy sauce
Grated zest and juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons canola oil
1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
1 tablespoon honey
1 garlic clove, minced
1 tablespoon minced gingerroot
1 small fresh red chile, stemmed, seeded, and minced

For Salad
1 pound flank steak
3 tablespoons canola oil
1/4 lb oyster or shiitake mushrooms
2 baby bok choy, halved lengthwise
1 quart mixed baby greens, cleaned
3 stalks Chinese celery, or 1 stalk Pascal celery, thinly sliced
2 scallions, root end trimmed, thinly sliced
6 grape tomatoes, sliced
1/2 cucumber, thinly sliced
8 sugar snap or snow pea pods, sliced crosswise
Julienned zest of 1 lemon
4 three-finger pinches Shinkai Deep Sea Salt

Mix the ingredients for the dressing/marinade in a small bowl.

Put the steak in a zip-lock bag.  Add ¼ cup of the dressing/marinade to the bag.  Seal the bag and massage the dressing into the meat.  Refrigerate for at least 2 hours and as long as 12 hours.  Cover the remaining dressing/marinade and refrigerate.

Heat a charcoal or gas grill for high direct grilling.  Remove the steak from the bag and wipe off any excess marinade.  Coat the steak with 1 tablespoon oil, the mushrooms with 1 ½ tablespoons oil, and the bok choy with the remaining ½ tablespoon oil.

Grill the mushrooms until well marked and almost tender, 1 to 2 minutes per side. Set aside and toss with 2 tablespoons reserved dressing.

Grill the bok choy halves until grill marked on both sides, about 1 minute per side. Set aside and toss with 1 tablespoon reserved dressing.

Grill the flank steak to desired degree of doneness, about 4 minutes per side for very rare, 5 minutes per side for rare, 6 minutes per side for medium rare, 7 minutes per side for medium, turning 90 degrees halfway through the grilling of each side to create cross-hatched grill marks. Set aside to rest for at least 10 minutes before slicing.

While the steak is resting, gently toss the baby greens, celery, scallions, tomatoes, cucumber, and sliced pea pods with 1/3 cup of the remaining dressing.  Mound on 4 plates.

Slice the steak against its grain into thin slices. Arrange several slices steak, some grilled mushrooms, and grilled bok choy on the salad. Scatter the lemon zest over all.  Drizzle with the remaining dressing.  Sprinkle a pinch of Shinkai deep sea salt over each portion, rubbing fingers together gently as it falls to scatter as evenly as possible.  Serve.

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.  Two salts jump to mind: Maine Coast Sea Salt and Moroccan Atlantic Sea Salt. The salts have hard, bright, faintly hot but minerally flavors and a somewhat hard crunch, so you don’t  need a lot for the salt to contribute a note of rowdiness to the spinach gratin.  A few pinches on the top of a gratin will greet your lips with something unexpected, an in-your-face attitude that awakens you to the full pleasure of the gratin’s comforting flavors.

Makes 4 servings

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
4 ounces shiitake mushrooms, stems trimmed, caps sliced about 1/4 inch thick
1 pound cleaned baby spinach leaves
3 two-finger pinches Maine Coast Sea Salt (or Moroccan Atlantic Sea Salt)
3 grindings black peppercorns
2 tablespoons dry sherry
1 cup heavy cream
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
Grating of nutmeg
2 ounces shredded Gruyere cheese

Preheat a broiler.

Heat the olive oil in a very large skillet (raw spinach occupies 50 times the space of the same spinach cooked, which means you will need a pan many times larger than you think you will need) over medium high heat.  Add the mushrooms and sauté just until tender, about 4 minutes.  Add the spinach leaves and stir until completely wilted, about 3 minutes. While the spinach is cooking season it with one pinch of Maine Coast sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Transfer to a shallow gratin dish or casserole.

Return the pan to the heat and add the sherry.  Bring to a boil.  Add the cream and boil until the volume is reduced by half.  Remove from heat and stir in the mustard and nutmeg.  Pour over the spinach and spread evenly.

Scatter the gruyere on top of the spinach mixture and run under the broiler until the cheese is fully melted and preferably a little brown.  If it begins to get oily before it browns remove it right away.  Scatter the remaining Maine coast sea salt over top and serve immediately.

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.”

“Put a little butter in the pan and melt it.

“You fry it”

“You need bread to put the egg on.”

“When it’s on the bread you can have some pepper. Not very much.”

“To put on the fleur de sel you have to use your fingers to sprinkle it.”
[French fleur de sel de l'Ile de Re is this chef's favorite sea salt for a fried egg sandwich.]

“So, this is how you do it.”

Sautéeing on Himalayan salt blocks creates exponentially more flavor than sautéeing in a conventional skillet.  This is because a salt block cooks your food in two ways. At a blazing 500 degrees or higher, the heavy block of salt has enormous thermal mass, sizzling away moisture to produce a thick crust of rich, concentrated flavor.  At the same time, the Himalayan salt itself sets to work, bursting cell membranes, intermingling juices, and breaking loose new flavors that in turn sizzle away to make for even more concentrated flavors.  Want to make the most of this miracle of cooking chemistry?  Balance out the scallop’s rich buttery flavors with a spritz of citrus and reinforce everything with the lip-tingling spice of Szechuan peppercorns. You’ll not have another scallop that’s this fun to cook, impressive to serve, or tasty to eat.

FYI We’re holding a Himalayan Salt Block Class Wednesday July 14 at The Meadow!  Info here>>

Makes 4 servings

2 4x8x2 inch (or one 8x8x2 inch) cooking grade Himalayan salt blocks
1 1/4 pounds large wild-caught sea scallops (about 16)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon cracked red Szechuan peppercorns
Finely shredded zest and juice of 1/2 lemon and 1/2 lime

Place the salt block(s) over a low gas flame and heat for 15 minutes. Raise the flame to medium and heat another 10 minutes. Raise the flame to high and heat another 15 minutes, until it is uncomfortable to hold your hand about 2 inches from the surface of the block for longer than 3 seconds (approximately 500°F).

While the salt block is heating pat the scallops dry and pull off their white gristly tendons (located on the side of the scallop) if not already removed. Coat the scallops with the olive oil and Szechuan pepper and let stand at room temperature until the salt block is hot.

Place the scallops on the hot block.  The scallops should almost skitter across the top.  If they just plop there and sizzle modestly, the salt is  and sear until browned and springy to the touch but still a little soft in the center, 2 to 3 minutes per side. Work in batches if your salt block cannot comfortably fit all the scallops at once.

Remove to a platter or plates, or move the entire salt block to the table and set on an oven mitt or trivet to serve still sizzling to your guests. Scatter the citrus zest over top and drizzle with the juice.  Eat immediately.