Salt News

Hawaiian sea salts offer a combination of color, lots of minerals, and a varying grain size that makes them some of the most versatile salts available. Red alaea salt, black salts infused with activated charcoal, green salt infused with bamboo leaf extract, and plain, high-quality white Hawaiian sea salts are all available at The Meadow.

Hawaii has a rich salt producing history that stretches back long before Europeans landed on the Island. Today, some salts that are sold as “Hawaiian” are made elsewhere, and processed to look like traditional Hawaiian salts. Virtually all the “Hawaiian salts” sold around the world (including in Hawaii!) are based on industrial sea salts from manufacturers such as Cargil, and then passed off as authentic Hawaiian salt.

We’ve written a new guide that will tell you all about Hawaiian sea salt at The Meadow, including descriptions of the types of Hawaiian salts, the history of Hawaiian salt, and how Hawaiian salt is made.

Mark Bitterman :: Jul.13.2012 :: Gourmet Salt :: 4 Comments »

Cooking Up a Story is doing a week-long feature on rediscovering salt. I did an interview about the importance of salt and its relation to our food:

An excerpt about the three foundational salts of cooking: “The most popular salts we sell are fleur de sel, which is a delicately crystaled, very mineral rich salt for all-purpose finishing. Put it on eggs, fish, cooked vegetables. We have flaky salts, which are parchment fine crystals that you can put on a green salad, each of them a different textual drama. And then we have coarse, moist, minerally salts called sel gris or grey salt. Steak, lamb, root vegetables, roasts, or anything hearty enough that it wants a big minerally crunch of salt to go along with it.”

Mark Bitterman :: Jul.12.2012 :: Gourmet Salt :: No Comments »

Iron is a mineral required for human life. It sits at the heart of the hemoglobin molecule, which allows blood cells to carry oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body. There are trace amounts of iron in unrefined salt, which lend both color and flavor, and in it’s own subtle way, perhaps a bit of nutritional balance as well.

Some people have posited that high iron levels in the blood will increase the risk of disease.  According to the National Institutes of Health, the scientific jury is still out on that one.  Nonetheless, some of these people worry to the point that they look even to the fringes of their diet, to the food they eat in in only  small quantities–and there they find occasion to continue their fretting.  Their concern is over unrefined salt.  Can eating unrefined salt actually increase iron intake to a threatening level? A fair question. Let’s do the math:

The USDA’s recommended daily allowance (RDA) of iron is 18mg. But dietary iron comes in two different forms: heme and nonheme. Unrefined salts contain non-heme iron, which is not absorbed into the body as efficiently as heme iron.

The RDA for salt intake is 2,300mg of sodium (Na), or about 6,100mg of NaCl (refined salt). Around the world, many people eat twice that amount of sodium.

So, what is the impact of salt consumption on you iron intake?

Himalayan salt, commonly singled out from the thousands of unrefined salts of the world as an example of a natural salt with its fair share of trace minerals, has 38.9 parts per million iron. Very roughly, the salt is about 0.00389% iron by mass.

Nutritionally speaking, a teaspoon of salt has the full U.S. RDA of sodium and 1.32% of a day’s supply of Iron:

If you ate two times the US maximum recommended amount of salt you would be consuming iron equivalent to what you’d get in 3/4 a slice of whole wheat bread or 1 heaping tablespoon of cooked lentils.

How much salt would you need to consume to pump your body up with the full U.S. RDA of Iron? 76 heaping teaspoons, or more salt an average salt-loving person consumes in a month. From a physiological standpoint, even that wouldn’t quite get you there, as the non-heme iron in the salt would not be efficiently absorbed. In sum, don’t look to salt to sort out your anemia.

From what I read, the scientific community is nowhere near a consensus on the real risk of high iron levels and increased risk of heart attack–in fact, from what I DON’T read (because there isn’t that much out there to read) it seems the scientific community has other fish to fry. But either way, I’m not enough of a lentils fanatic to lose much sleep over it in my own dietary contemplations. While noting the inconclusiveness of scientific knowledge at present, the US Government has kindly established the “tolerable upper intake level” of iron at 45mg per day. To get that much iron from salt you’d need to consume 190 heaping teaspoons of salt in a day, or 1,156,812mg.

That’s 2.55 pounds to you non-metric folks.

Mark Bitterman :: Mar.13.2012 :: Gourmet Salt :: 5 Comments »

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 »

Our friend at the flower market who grows the calla lilies for our shop in Portland also has 40 chickens.  Every year over the winter, as the pluvial Pacific Northwest endures its onslaught of alternating grey darkness and dark greyness, the birds more or less give up egg laying altogether.  Stubborn about our eggs, we more or less give them up too, and the resulting drought of omelets, frittatas, aiolis, caesar salads, mayonnaises, pound cakes, and pisco sours is one of the greatest hardships of winter.  Come spring, however, the chickens kick into gear and produce cartons upon cartons of bug-fed eggs with lovely brown-speckled shells and yolks the color of radioactive apricots.

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Mark Bitterman :: May.14.2011 :: Gourmet Salt :: 1 Comment »

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 »