Salt News

Poultry loves a brine.  The major advantage to brining is that it adds moisture to lean low moisture meats – turkey is a prime candidate.  In addition to more moisture brined turkey has more tender flesh and a plumper texture.

A brine is a salt solution that denatures protein. This means the salt in the brine unravels the spiral formation of the protein molecules resulting in many more places for water to bond onto the meat. For some lean turkey meat or low-moisture pork (especially ribs), brining can add up to 10% moisture.  But not all brines are created equal.

Most brine recipes call for an industrially-refined salt such as kosher or table salt.  Such salts lack the beautiful magnesium, potassium, and calcium salts that occur naturally, and make for a flatter, duller salt sensation—to say nothing of the 80 other sundry minerals that are found in unrefined salt.  Many salts marketed as “sea salt,” manufactured in huge industrial salt evaporators optimized for yield and global industrial purity standards are stripped of their natural minerals, as well,  Brines are straight forward – a solution of salt, water, sugar and spices – and whatever you put in them gets absorbed in the meat, so you should take care with what you use.  Please use natural salt in your brine.  It makes a huge difference.

I recommend any natural sel gris (aka gray salt, or gros sel) for brining.  A 2 pound 6 ounce bag of excellent sel gris costs $12, and it will leave you with plenty left over for sprinkling on candied yams as a finishing salt, not to mention on buttered crusty Thanksgiving dinner rolls.  In fact, the bag will easily take you through the holidays and into the new year.  Sel gris is just about as old-school beautiful as any salt made.  Plus, all sel gris are especially rich in trace minerals, insuring a flavor that is balanced and full. Actually, there’s another plus: minerals in the salt are absorbed into the turkey along with the water, so you get more of all the good things salt has to offer.

Ingredients and recipe for a 16 lb bird.

• 1 1/2 cup sel gris (gray salt) or natural traditional sea salt
• 2 gallons of cold water. Like the salt, the water should be good. (I err on the safe side and avoid tap water, which contains lots of chlorine. Instead, buy a few jugs of spring water of some sort, and your turkey will not smell like a swimming pool.)
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 medium-sized branches rosemary
• 6 sprigs thyme
• 6 leaves sage
• 6 cloves garlic, peeled and gently crushed
• 9 fat peppercorns, preferably, Parameswaran’s pepper, with it’s succulent lemon-zesty-eucalyptusy-cardamom spice flavors

Bring 2 cups of the water to a boil, mixing in all the above ingredients, mixing to dissolve the salt as much as possible. Let the water cool for half an hour, then combine back with remaining water to make your brine. Put turkey in double layer food grade plastic bag breast down, pour cold brine solution over bird, get all excess air of out of bag and tie off. Place bagged brined bird in fridge and let soak for 24 hours.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Remove bird from fridge, pat dry very thoroughly, and rub with a thin film of olive oil.  Stuff with the stuffing of your choice, truss to hold stuffing in place, and roast. Cook until the internal temperature of the bird (at the inner thick part of the thigh) is 165°F, about 2 1/2 hours. I know this doneness temperature might be lower than what you are used to.  Many older cookbooks call for roasting turkey to 180°F.  This is excessive.  Bacteria (including salmonella bacteria) is killed at 145°F and roasting poultry much beyond 165°F dries it out.  In the case of a brined bird roasting to too high a temperature can drain out all the moisture you took so much time to get in there.  You’ll get much better results be stopping roasting at 165°F.

Allow the roasted turkey to sit for 20 minutes before carving (you can cover it loosely with foil or a clean towel if you want); a rest period will help the bird retain its juices and firm the meat for easier carving.

Scoop the stuffing into a serving bowl; carve and serve.

Mark Bitterman :: Nov.19.2009 :: Brining, Cooking with Salt, Recipes :: 5 Comments »

One of the best tasting flavors in Japanese cuisine is paradoxically one of the least appreciated in American cooking.  Maboroshi Plum Salt captures the flavor and delivers it to you as a psychedelic flamingo purple-pink powderized salt form: a miracle of sorts.  But how to use it?  Rice balls, white fish sashimi, a salted olive martini flight like the one at Alu, a great new bar in town?  Blake Van Roekel an instructor at the Robert Reynolds Chefs Studio sent me a recipe the other day that takes things in yet another direction.  Blake runs Keuken, an “eating by design” dinner series that brings together artist, chef, and diner in a collaborative evening feast.  Thanks Blake!

Asian Pear & Pomegranate Salad with Marboroshi Plum Finishing Salt
I used a very simple dressing as to not mask the salt, and the fruits themselves have juice and flavor. Also I just drizzled the lemon and olive oil on the salad after plating so that the salt would not dissolve immediately upon hitting a liquid (however, the salt looks beautiful upon the white flesh of the pear as it dissolves). It is a very clean and simple salad. Components of the menu for the entire meal fold in aspects of Asian cuisine or preparation, similar to the construes of the salad. Part of the inspiration of this course comes from how raw fruit is sometimes eaten in parts of Asia – dipped in salt.

Serves 6
1 Asian pear
1 pomegranate
young salad greens
1/4 lb aged chevre (Jasper Hill, Constant Bliss – it was excellent!)
mild, high-quality olive oil (Sylver Leaf, Foothills blend was perfect)
juice from 1/2 lemon
Marboroshi Plum finishing salt

To prepare, slice the pear into 1/8″ slices. Remove the pomegranate seeds and place in a bowl. Slice the cheese into 1/4″ slices and cut in half on the diagonal. To compose the salad, weave the pear slices amongst the salad greens, sprinkle the pomegranate seeds on top, and place the cheese to one end of the salad. Drizzle with olive
oil and a squeeze of lemon. To finish, sprinkle the salt around the edge of the plate and the salad itself. Enjoy!

Mark Bitterman :: Oct.09.2009 :: Finishing Salts, Recipes, Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Nothing pleases children like asparagus. They just can’t get enough of it. So when you bring a few dozen pounds of asparagus to a school cafeteria, you expect to be inundated with boisterous, hungry faces, jockeying for position, beseeching you for more of the stuff.  Kids, there’s nothing like ‘em to remind you of the simple pleasures of the farm.

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.

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Mark Bitterman :: May.28.2009 :: Cooking with Salt, News & Musings, Recipes :: No Comments »

Flank steak has to be pretty much the best thing short of a foot rub while drinking a root beer float.  But it’s tough.  It’s ornery.  There is a common strategy to making the flank steak supple enough to eat without popping your jaw out of joint: marinating.  I’ve made coffee and ginger marinades, lime and tequila marinades, smoked salt and chili pepper marinades, vinegar and sugar marinades… you name it.  Every time, great steak.  But think of the poor steak.  A wonderful, flavor-packed piece of meat forced to suffer quietly the insult of subjugation to intense acids and sugars and salts.  When we see a flank steak, we see a quandary.  How do we get that elemental flavor out of a meat that resists the teeth?  There is a solution, a way honor the humble yet noble flank steak in its naked beauty, a way that takes virtually no preparation ahead of time, a way results in a fun, incredibly juicy and savory dish.

I’ve covered this dish before here and elsewhere, including at the Himalayan salt block cooking classes at The Meadow, but I don’t think it has ever actually been hammered into a simple recipe.

There are two simple tricks to this dish (if you can call steak seared on a giant block of salt a dish): cutting the meat against the grain, and cooking it at a high temperature.  Oh, and cooking it NOT on steel, but on a block of ancient, super dense, mineral rich Himalayan rock salt.

Ingredients:
1 2lb piece of flank steak
1 8×8x2 inch Himalayan Salt Block or Plate

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Mark Bitterman :: Feb.19.2009 :: Cooking with Salt, Himalayan Pink Salt Blocks, Recipes :: 2 Comments »

I am pretty sure we used either Toulouse sausage or duck confit in our petit salé aux lentilles when I was living at Le Montagnet, a chateau in the Southwest of France.  The official recipe, which probably hails from somewhere in the region of Castelnaudary, is usually made with pork shoulder and bits of lardons (fatback, more or less, though Pancetta rdoes the trick).  We leaned toward confit of duck because there was always some on hand.  We raised our own ducks there for foie gras, and the duck confit was the best I ever had.  And also, we used confit because we were cheap.  “We” at the time usually consisted of myself and Nadir, a Kabyle who had inveigled his way into permanent residency in France by flying low, under the radar.  Duck was our chicken.  Plentiful, and a source of inspiration for countless recipes.

Nadir never spoke French half way as well as I did, to be honest, but he always knew about the crazy little dishes eaten by the farmers and laborers inhabiting the rugged, forested terrain surrounding the chateau, stretching from Les Montagnes Noires (The Black Mountains, which amble from the Pyrannees to the Massive Central) up through Perigord.  When “we” were together as a “we,” and making food, it was usually because we had been abandoned, told to fend for ourselves for the night, when the family that resided at the chateaux had plans.  So as evening was creeping in long lazy purple shadows across the sheep pastures, I would be somewhere sanding oak planks out in the outlying farm buildings, or at some distant and unheated reach of the house fitting tongue into groove of the ancient oak slats covering the ground floor (everything there was made out of ancient coeur de chêne (heart of oak), the incomparably hard timber harvested from the mountains when the land was first settled some hundreds of years ago).

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Mark Bitterman :: Feb.16.2009 :: Cooking with Salt, Recipes, Sea Salt :: No Comments »