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?”

(more…)

No one knows whether the practice of salting food originated with religious rites, as an experiment with flavor, or with some chance observation of its curative properties, but earliest man recognized the culinary and dietary importance of the salt crystals that formed naturally by the seashore. The salting of food even predates the discovery of fire and cooking, and salting today remains the most effective way to enhance the flavor of foods.

Almost every culinary tradition in the world evolved around the availability of salt. Historically, thousands of artisan saltmakers flourished at the heart of major economic centers and ports of trade. The salts produced from each of these saltmakers brought something unique to the table, with crystals varying with the saltmaking techniques, climates, lands, and mineral contents of the seas from which they were made. For this reason, salt is the prism through which the ingredients, dishes, and people of the world can be experienced in all their fullness and variety.

When gold was discovered in the American West, frontiersmen needing salt to season and cure their foods created massive demand for salt. Aided by technological advances, businesses like Richmond & Company (which later became Morton’s) began to produce salt on ever larger scales, and a century vast international consolidation of salt production ensued. Most companies were wiped out, but key producers of some of the world’s most esteemed gourmet salts survived.

(more…)

I just got a note from Sandra Gutierrez, who is a food writer by trade, describing her personal connection with salt.  The pink tick mark at the center of the map below depicts the site where Sandra’s story was based.

Dear Mark,

I didn’t have a chance to tell you but my grandfather was a salt producer in Guatemala, Central America. I spent many summer vacations running around the salt boxes, and remember vividly how beautiful the mounds of collected salt looked as the sun arose each morning. I remember beautiful pyramids of golds, pinks and oranges reflecting all around us. I would run around the perimeters of the salt boxes and had many falls and scrapes that were “cured” by the salt. Ouch!

The ending of this story is a sad one. In the late 1970’s the Guatemalan government expropriated our family’s land and destroyed the “salinas”. They were called “Salinas Santa Rosa”. In its place they built a port “Puerto San Jose” and the rest of the land was divided among the government representatives for their own private use. However, they couldn’t erase the beautiful memories of children playing and laughing amidst the mounds of glittering salt!

Sandra A. Gutierrez
Food Writer/Cooking Instructor
www.SandrasKitchenStudio.com

IDEAS IN FOOD: Improvisation and experimentation in the kitchen, written by Chefs Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot, has a huge readership, and for good reason: they are intrepid, clever, and skilled cooks.  Check out their brief experimentation with Himalayan salt blocks here>>

There are dozens of ways to use Himalayan salt blocks, as plates, platters, skillets, curing bricks, freezing slabs, and more.  Cooking, however, is an important one to get under your belt as soon as possible.

And by the way, I personally like to use one Himalayan salt block for cooking, and keep a separate Himalayan salt block/plate for room temperature uses such as curing, serving, and otherwise presenting food.  That way, your cooking salt block benefits from the patina and structural changes inherent to cooking, much as a cast iron skillet benefits from careful use and cleaning. At the same time, the purity and simplicity of the unheated Himalayan salt block can be emphasized when used for presentation at the table.

Heating, Using, Cleaning, and Storing Tips for Himalayan Salt Blocks: see the complete article.

The prospect of a kitchen utensil harboring unspoken truths about our private kitchen lives, our sordid failures and glittery triumphs, is upsetting to some people. To them, there may be nothing to say but, “Stick with stainless steel.” Many others are not so much averse to the intrinsic mysteriousness and seemingly endless misbehaviors of salt plates, as they are flummoxed. For the benefit of the latter, I would like to share a recent letter I received from a particularly courageous Himalayan salt block user, and offer some replies as best as I can. (more…)

You are standing on the deck of a small but sturdy ship, gazing into the blue-green waters below, thinking about touching your toes to the cool brine that ripples and glistens in the fresh morning light. But just below, fast, flashing, the sharks swim. You look at your honey-bunny in the purple velour lounge seat by the cabin door, sipping Bloody Mary from the salt-crusted lip of a aquamarine plastic tumbler, smiling at the sun, listening to Jimmy Buffet. What is there in this moment to pluck at the ukulele of love and death and food and destruction? I look at eating as a way to bridge such dichotomies, a way to embrace your mid-morning glazed craving for a donut as you hum softy sunning in the sun, at the same time existentially thrilling to the teeth-gnashing and liquid mystery below.

When I first tasted soy salt made by the Kamebishi Company, located in the rural town of Hiketa, Kagawa Prefecture, in Japan, I quickly decided that soy salt was not a salt at all. It was more like a foodstuff. Fields of soy, savannas of cattle, whacked up vegetables on a charcoal grill. Randomness. The flavor is as intense and pungent as it is intractable and mild, much like a wine that has been given its time to age. I put it on eggs. Good. I put it on toast. Makes Marmite obsolete (almost). Put it on mixed greens salad. Perfect. (more…)

The Iburi-Jio cherry roasted sea salt in our household needs no explanation (think popcorn, think steak, think summer squash, think sashimi, think buttered toast, think sole, think salmon flatbread, think eye of newt—Iburi Jio is the omniscient presence that weighs in on all the mind’s internal arguments over whether ‘tis nobler to sprinkle a given gourmet sea salt or a prized smoked sea salt).

The pork loin, however, was a bit of a rogue foodstuff for this time of the year. For some reason, it had been bought the very morning of Thanksgiving, and, inevitably for a pork loin bought on the day of gustatory debauchery, it had thereafter lingered. This evening I pulled it out, and after noting with the nose that it was none the worse the wear after the week it had spent in the fridge, I fried it in coconut oil.

Coconut oil, for those of you not in the know, is a strange substance which, in addition to culinary application, has “recommended uses” as a dietary supplement (1 to 4 tablespoons coconut oil daily), for skin care (massage into skin as needed), and for hair care (liquefy, then apply 2 teaspoons cocoanut oil to hair and scalp 1 to 2 hours before washing!). Hmm… (more…)

How does brining work? Simple: a brine is a salt solution, and salt subtly denatures the proteins in the turkey, allowing them to hold more water, making for a juicier bird. Since you are bringing brine into the bird, make the brine of the finest stuff: sea salt and spring water.

So, rather than squeak around the kitchen like a church mouse, I just say it: This is the best turkey brining recipe in the world, bar none. Though there may be fancier brines, more complicated brines, or in the parlance of pun-insensitive management consultants, “more sophisticated brining solutions,” there is not a better way to brine than the old fashioned way. Use other turkey brining recipes as inspiration for elaboration on this recipe, but show your bird your love by sticking to the fundamentals.

My logic is simple: if salt is the key agent in a brine, a better salt will yield a better salt brine. Use the right salt for your turkey brining and you are vouchsafed something I once read (for real) on a fortune cookie: “eternal fun smart joy.” The right salt will contribute mineral complexity to the flavor of your bird, which in this day and age of large-scale farming, is possibly already mineral-deficient to begin with. From a flavor standpoint, this is not subtle.

Rule one to brining your turkey–and there is only one real rule. Never, NEVER use Kosher salt in your turkey brine. Kosher salt is 100% pure sodium chloride, though at times a touch of sodium ferrocyanide is added for good times. Pure sodium chloride in the form of kosher salt is a calamity that has befallen man far more grave than any wrought by Pandora or Eve. Kosher salt, whether dissolved in a brine or, worse yet, added directly to the food you put in your body, is the equivalent of using Velveeta in you fondue, or cream of mushroom soup in your beef Bourguignon. The refined sodium chloride that is Kosher salt has no correlative in your body or on your palate. That is why it tastes harsh, biting, and painfully sharp. Do NOT use Kosher salt. Lots of recipes call for Diamond brand Kosher salt, or Morton’s Kosher salt, and lots of people like to preach earnestly about the superiority of Diamond over Morton’s, or vice versa. To me, both Kosher salts are fine, if, and only if, you are koshering your meat–which is to say, extracting as much fluid from it as possible. If you are not koshering something, do not, ever, use Kosher salt.

So, back to brining your bird… (more…)

Amnesia Brewing’s excellent copacetic IPA, which they sell to-go in mason jars, and contemplating Maldon Smoked Sea

Salt. The Maldon Smoked sea salt (smoked primarily with oak, but with a muddling of various other hardwoods in reportedly top secret proportion) is a little sharp, even

astringent in the nose, making it not one of my favorite salts to smell on its own. But that is perhaps irrelevant,

as I don’t need to smell every salt au natural before eating it, and when eating it, interesting things happen.

The delicate crunch of Maldon’s flaky crystals provides a very pleasant sensation in the mouth. Maldon has

preserved all the flaky delicacy of its regular flake seasalt in its hardwood smoked

seasalt. (Strangely, you comem across GIANT mutant flakes now and again (sometimes larger than a quarter), and I don’t recall seeing them so large so often in the non smoked sea salt.)

Then breath through your mouth while you chew. This practice, of course, may take some discretion on your part, as nobody wants to see too much heavy in-breathing and chewing at the table. If you walk amongst the

rough and ready, I definitely encourage you to just breath heavily, flinging Maldon smoked salt, chomping hazelnuts, slugging back gulps of beer, and contemplating the sensation.

But if your lifestyle calls for more reserve–doilys and manners and whatnot–then just try briskly salting your hazelnuts (or bread and butter, or cheese, whatever) and softly pull a breath of air through your ever-so-subtly parted lips (this is something familiar to wine tasters), feeling the action of air, salt, and food combine on your palate.

The result is a bit of a surprise: a waft of sweetness, a sharp-yet-rich quality, almost a little like candied citrus.

So, thumbs up, Maldon. Tonight it is cranberry and candied hazelnuts on a goat cheese and various greens salad for dinner. A perfect opportunity for Maldon Smoked salt.