Salt News

That is the question: whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?

Any attempt to do a taxonomy on salt (not being attempted today) must begin by trapping the adaptive, prolific, and celebrated varmint known as gros sel (or as we Americans are often wont to callit, sel gris, grey salt, Celtic salt). Finishing salt occupies a mysterious space in the gourmet universe, scuttling like a grizzled house vole through the interstices that connects haute cuisine, farmers markets, patio dinner parties, and European truck stops. Sel gris is the most widely used finishing salt, applied liberally to meat dishes, used to make a preserve a variety of preserves, folded into with superb Bretagne butter, dashed on vegetables and fishes and shellfish (what the French musically call fruits de la mer, “fruits of the ocean”).
Every grain of Sel Gris de Guérande contains all the imponderable splendors of the sea, and like a crystalline distillation of human existence, mirrors the mineral diversity of our own aqueous bodies (the ultimate fruit of the ocean).

 

Sel gris has become the largest gourmet salt import in the U.S., and its popularity is growing. In fact, sel gris is doing so well that it is in danger of falling victim to its own popularity. Threatened by “sea salt” on one side and “table salt” on the other, sel gris is now threatened on a third front as well, from the insidiously translated “gray salt.”

Sel gris is a manner of preparation, a geography, and a cultural artifact, not simply a description of salt that is gray. However, these days just about any coarse, moist, grey-colored sea salt is likely to be lassoed, hog tied, and emblazoned with semi-prestigious brand of sel gris. This harms sel gris no more and no less than it would to copy a painting and call it the original; if you don’t notice the difference, or don’t care, it does not matter.

Philippe de Montebello, Director at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is always making a lot of to-do about the aura of a work of art. Standing before an original work of art, according to de Montebello, was not to just regard just the art, but also, for a fleeting stretch of time, to become linked with the artwork as the thing in itself, the artwork as it abides in all its historical solemnity, the immutable physicality of the object imparting itself on the viewer, the viewer ineluctably imparted on the object, and thus for eternity the two joining together in glowing mortal solitude. Before art’s authenticity we exist truly, its indubitableness enjoining the clammy albino tentacles of our innermost beings to reach, strain, flick toward light from beneath the lid of the black box that contains us.

No doubt, in a perfect world, we would pass our lives reveling like beach-partying teens in the briny grit of authentic sel gris. However, authenticity in salt is, alas, not a highly evolved trait among grocery managers, and food-lovers, out of ignorance or expediency, buy whatever grey salt is proffered up on the market shelves. This salt is undeniably a vast improvement on industrially manufactured salt. Our lives today being what they are, we could even perhaps even excuse this inauthentic substance, though that gives false witness to the metaphysical delicacies that underpin good dining.

Indeed, the true horror of the false gray salt is not that it is false, but that it is simply not as good as a real sel gris. Much of the salt marketed as sel gris in the U.S. that lacks either the characteristic moistness, the slightly irregular sized, jumbled polyhedral grains, and the mellow taste of swooning Atlantic summer.

Sel gris has the enviable insouciance inherent to the true warrior, a gentleness that comes from unbridled power and, at least to the outsider, a kind of moral turpitude. Inauthenic gray salt by comparison exhibits the skittish sheepishness of a shaven cat. Sel gris is the sin qua non of good eating. Without it, women would wail, men would self-immolate, and the earth would crumble like a soggy biscuit in a bland stew of darkness.

For the sake of simplicity (and for the sake of making some people angry), it is worth arguing that a good, fresh sel gris de Guérande (or from the other two remaining traditionally-harvested salt marshes at on the islands of Noirmoutier and Ré) is the sin qua non of this sin qua non of salts. A Guérande pedigree is not essential to being termed a sel gris, but a sel gris needs to exhibit the characteristics–both physical and metaphysical–of a Guérande: grey with sea-minerals and salt-bed silicates, moist, packaged in its naturally occurring crystal form, and made with artesian pride and care.

Over 15% of the material in sel gris de Guérande are trace minerals—possibly the highest of any salt anywhere. 100 grams of sel gris contains about 100 minerals, including 34g of sodium, 287mg calcium, 109mg potassium, 34mg magnesium, 11mg iron, 1mg manganese, and 0.35mg zinc, plus a host of trace minerals like from antimony, copper, germanium, and gold to iodine, to palladium, yttrium, and zirconium. The earth contains 92 natural minerals. Our body arguably needs all of them. Sell gris delivers. The affect of this high mineral on the palate can best be understood by looking deep into the past.

How the Celtic Galls, who originated around 3,000 BCE on the isthmus of between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean (where today we have Turkey) eventually came to settle in France is a long, extremely fascinating story no doubt, but the only salient detail to keep in mind was that they did not do so through indolence and lack of appetite. While historians may squabble over details of the centuries of pillaging, feasting, interbreeding, and practicing of Druidism that got them where they are today, the collective love for turmoil that propelled them for centuries not in debate.

Yet the Galls’ thirst for blood, conquest, and riches was also symptomatic of a deeper yearning. These warring like tides of jerky-eating nomads were by nature not entirely enthralled with either being nomadic or smoking jerky. Tribes within the Gallic population continually tried to settle down, only to be chopped up (possibly for jerking) or carried off (invariably for interbreeding) by their more hot-blooded kin. For centuries this went on, the calmer Galls, like kernels of popcorn popped up into the air, would back shake down through the popcorn until they hit the hot plate again, only to be popped up again, over and over, leaving fewer and fewer unpopped kernels, until one quite Tuesday all the Galls had popping themselves out. Rome had fallen. A continent smoldered, cooled, and eventually took to making canapés and celery rood remoulade.

Having finally broken their swords, snuggled in, exchanged foot rubs, the Galls wasted no time either developing their own some of the world’s most evolved, revered, and ostentatious culinary arts. Salt, being important too health, preserving food, trade, and dining well, was not overlooked, and early on enjoyed great celebrity.

One of the earliest traditions is the method of harvesting salt from the swift, pure ocean currents seeking respite in the estuaries off the town of Guérande, Brittany. As the tide comes in, seawater is first allowed to settle in a silt pond before continuing its course to the shallow salt-fields dug in the native clay. After the combined effect of sun and wind evaporates the seawater to a dense brine, it is then flowed into saltpans to crystallize. As in the days of the earliest Celtic settlers, wood rakes are still used today to recover the salt from the bottom of the pan. (Sel Gris’ wealthy uncle, Fleur de Sel, forms on warm, windy afternoons as a pale crust at the surface of these pans.) The French government, which smiles on all things traditional, has even granted all sel gris de Guérande (and Noirmoutier and Ré) that I know of its Nature et Progrès certificate, which is the equivalent of organic.

Nothing less that this combination of swift sea, settling, natural clay, sun, wind, and Gallic raking from a bronzed and muscled paludier (salt raker) descended from nomadic warriors is responsible for the abundant graces of an authentic sel gris de Guérande.

Its high moisture content (often as high as 13%!) gives it resilience on red meat, substantial vegetables, cheeses, and chocolates, preserving crunch and complexity, giving its high mineral content and helter-skelter crystal structure time to join forces in the mouth, where they venture forth, free, marauders once again.

Mark Bitterman :: Aug.14.2006 :: Cooking with Salt, Finishing Salts ::

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