It's been a while since I have written a newsletter, so here goes. This one will focus on salt. In the old days, salt was a valuable trading commodity. Roman legionaries got some or all of their pay in salt, thus the word "salary" came into our language. "Worth his salt," throwing a pinch of spilled salt over one's shoulder (usually the left one) to ward off bad luck, salt used in ceremonial cleansing, "take things with a grain of salt" ... the lore goes on. There are three main kinds of salt that we see today; four if you count the supermarket salt, which is refined and the personality essentially taken out of it. One is mined, extracted from ancient salt domes and deposits which were laid down when that part of the landscape was a sea bottom. Many of the most ancient salt deposits get a pinkish color. We see this in Himalayan pink salt, Bolivian rose salt, and Peruvian Andes salt. Those were deposited before the mountain ranges thrust up thanks to plate tectonics, and have been harvested for millennia. A second source is from brine wells, such as the Murray River salt from Australia. The third is solar evaporated in shallow lagoons from seawater which is let into those lagoons which are then dammed off. Most of our sea salts have been evaporated to crystals this way. Here, we find the Breton Grey salt, also called Sel Gris; Hawaiian Alaea salt, Maldon Sea Salt from Great Britain, Ravidà Sicilian Sea salt, Cyprus flake salt, and many more. In Bali, however, the locals split coconut tree trunks longways, hollow them out to resemble dugout canoes, and then they ladle the sea water into the long, narrow cavity in the trunk for the sun to evaporate off the water. I've put more detailed descriptions with each salt listed in this web page.
Some salts are processed a bit after they have formed crystals. These include those with activated charcoal added, such as Hawaiian Hiwa Kai and Cyprus Black Lava salt. Others are smoked; Auntie has a very nice selection of these, ranging from a number of hickory smoked salts to Bali smoked salt (smoked over kaffir lime leaves and coconut) and Fumée de Sel, which is Fleur de Sel slow-smoked over wood chips from barrels used to age Chardonnay wine. In the Pacific Northwest, we find Alder-smoked Salish sea salt, used not only for cookery but also ceremonially by the Tlingit and Kwakiutl Native Americans, as well as Yakima Applewood-smoked salt. The former salt is absolutely divine"on salmon; the latter makes pork sinnnnngggg. You'll just have to go to the category "salts" to see what an extensive selection your Auntie has to offer. Most salt crystallizes in cubic crystals. Other forms, however, are seen, such as the flake salts and the solid nuggets of Himalayan Pink Salt Grater Chunk. Some of the most unusual salts are the Japanese Aguni Bamboo Salt and the Korean Roasted Bamboo Salt. Go look at the descriptions for those; these are small-batch salts made by master salt-craftsmen, and are rather hard to find. But Auntie has found ‘em. Auntie has one wicked big salt selection, you betcha!
Many chefs these days are getting away from the store-bought salt which you'll find in those cylindrical cardboard containers in the supermarket. Regional and specialty salts are being called for more and more in some of the more elegant restaurants and gourmet kitchens. Perhaps the first to catch on was the Sel Gris (sometimes called "Celtic Sea Salt"), but now the wide world of salt is opening up to the consumer. If you are doing traditional North Indian cookery, you'll want to use Kala Namak, which has a sulfurous smell to it. For a luau, the brick-colored Alaea salt (the red color comes from the volcanic lava lining the evaporation pond) or the Hiwa Kai is best. If you slice tomatoes and Mozzarella cheese, sprinkle the alternating layers with fresh chopped basil, drizzle on some good olive oil, and then scatter some Cyprus Black Lava Salt over it, you will have a showy and very tasty dish.
Some of you are doing salt-free or low-sodium diets. Note that sea salts have a lower concentration of sodium than the supermarket salt, which is essentially pure sodium chloride. Sea and mined salts include natural minerals, and are best used as finishing salts (i.e. placed on the dinner table in a nice salt cellar), although your basic cookery may be done with "generic" sea salt (either California or Atlantic; New Zealand also produces a nice cooking sea salt) or Kosher salt. Auntie uses only sea or Kosher salt in her blends, not the supermarket kind. There are several really good books on salt, its history and its role in history, so here's your reading list:
Kurlansky, Mark (2002). Salt: A World History. First published in 2002 by Walker Publishing Company; reprinted 2003 by Penguin Books. ISBN for the latter: 0-14-20.0161-9 (paperback). [Incredibly readable; I believe this one made the NY Times best-seller list. Excellently written!]
Multhauf, Robert P. (1996). Neptune's Gift: A History of Common Salt. Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-5469-5 (paperback). [this tends toward technical stuff, but there are a lot of great historical pictures herein, and info on early period salt production]
Well, that's all for now. If you want a good recipe, check out oregano, Mexican, c/s for my "secret" chili con carne. It has some zip to it, and goes great on a cold winter's day.