Bitterman's Craft Salt Cooking: The Single Ingredient That Transforms All Your Favorite Foods and Recipes

Other books by Mark bitterman

Salted: A Manifesto on the World’s Most Essential Mineral, with Recipes

Salt Block Cooking: 70 Recipes for Grilling, Chilling, Searing, and Serving on Himalayan Salt Blocks

Bitterman’s Field Guide to Bitters & Amari: 500 Bitters; 50 Amari; 123 Recipes for Cocktails, Food & Homemade Bitters

contents

Introduction: The Food That Time Forgot

one

Meat

two

Poultry

three

Seafood

four

Eggs and Dairy

five

Vegetables and Fruit

six

Grains

seven

Sweets

eight

Drinks and Cocktails

craft salt field guide

acknowledgments

Metric Conversions and Equivalents

Index

Introduction

The Food That Time Forgot

I awake early, an hour before the sun came up, eager to explore the salt farm. The air is warm on my skin, humid but fresh. Barefoot, I take the narrow path through the marsh grasses toward the salt ponds, through the cordgrass, flowering salicornia, and sea lavender. Salt crystals crunch under my feet as I pick my way along the rough wooden planks that cross the ponds. I stop in the middle, and the still waters around me mirror the golden fire of dawn reaching up through a purple sky, silhouetting the scattered volcanoes to the east and along the border of El Salvador to the south. Behind me, to the west, birds squawk like pterodactyls from the shadows of the mangrove forest, and the faint roar of the ocean fills up the space beyond. I kneel, sift my fingers through the brine, and touch the glistening crystals to my lips. The flavor is unlike anything on earth; this is craft salt.

Salt is a food that traces its roots back to the horizon where mankind meets nature. Over the millennia, across virtually every culture and locale, everyone who could make salt did make salt. It was never easy. Water had to be evaporated using the sun or fire from seas or salt springs, or raw salt rocks had to be broken and pulled by brute force from the earth. Environments like salt marshes had to be protected, and resources like wood had to be conserved. It took great ingenuity and skill, honed over centuries to a fine craft, to achieve salt making that was reliable and sustainable. Salt is one of the most varied, locally rooted, ingeniously produced, and distinctive foods on earth.

Our planet is home to many hundreds of craft salts, each a perfect, authentic reflection of its native ecology, economy, and culinary tradition. But in order to use them, you don’t need access to every one. For practical use, there are only seven categories of salt, which all of the hundreds of varieties fall into: fleur de sel, sel gris, flake salt, traditional salt, shio, rock salt, and smoked/infused salt.

Each of the salts that make up these broad categories look and taste like no other salt on earth, from mild to bold, from briny to sweet, from dry to moist, from delicate to rugged, from tactfully unprepossessing to ostentatiously gregarious. A single respectful glance at craft salt reveals something truly amazing: Salt has personality. Each has stories to tell that give our purchasing dollars meaning and make our cooking fulfilling.

The mission of this book is to make you think differently about salt and empower you to make food that is better in every way—taste, texture, eye appeal, and nutrition. My aims are to share an appreciation for real, naturally made salt and to reveal how the lively personalities of distinctive craft salts will celebrate your food like nothing else. With a pluck of courage, we can unearth the lost truth of craft salt, reveal its ancient power, and explore new horizons of flavor and satisfaction in cooking.

Winning Salt

There are two ways to make salt. The most common salts are made by a process called winning, meaning evaporating salt water from the ocean, salt springs or wells, or from manmade brine. The other way is to dig it up out of the earth from a salt deposit.

Sea salts are the most common type of evaporative salt. Making them is simple enough, on paper: Collect some seawater in a shallow pond, keep it out of the rain, let the sun evaporate all the water, and then collect what’s left. In reality it’s fantastically more complicated than that. The process has to be controlled to crystallize the minerals you do want and leave behind the ones you don’t. You need a lot of space dedicated to concentrating the seawater, and then a tidy, manageable area for crystallizing the salt and collecting it. If it rains, you’re done for, so you need to pick the right place, and then scale everything to perfection so that you can make a reasonable quantity of salt before losing everything. If a storm comes, you lose the whole harvest, or worse, the entire salt farm.

Modernization has thrown up its own challenges, including the threat to salt marshes of urban development and pollution of the oceans. Perhaps the most difficult challenge faced by traditional sea salt farmers is the advent of large-scale, mechanized salt farming. Challenges notwithstanding, skilled practitioners of traditional solar salt making can be found around the globe. From Guatemala mangrove forests to highland Bolivia salt flats; from the Philippines to Vietnam; across Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Slovenia; from India to Eritrea to Ghana and a dozen countries in between, solar salt making is a vital economic activity and a storied connection to the past. Salt springs also feed famed salt works from Spain to Peru to China.

Lacking either an arid climate or natural concentrated brines, people have to get inventive. Bringing seawater into greenhouses both heats the brine and surrounding air to accelerate evaporation and protects the slowly forming salt from rain. This method has taken off in recent years in the Americas, where an often inhospitable climate and an insistence on sustainability converge to push salt makers to innovate. Hawaii, Maine, South Carolina, Florida, West Virginia, British Columbia, and Newfoundland are homes to greenhouse or similar zero-emissions salt-making techniques.

Yet another way to make salt sustainably is to look in the opposite direction of the sun, which is to say, straight down. Salt makers from Iceland to Wyoming to China have harnessed natural geothermal energy to make salt. The Earth’s liquid mantle delivers more than twice the total of all humanity’s energy output to Earth’s crust, superheating water that can be tapped at hot springs to heat pans filled with saltwater, creating exquisite salts in very inclement climates.

Fire-Evaporated Salt

What do you do if you want to make salt, but there is simply not enough sun, too much rain, or no other natural sources of heat? The simple answer would be to boil off seawater using wood or coal or oil. This method was once widespread. Entire forests in Europe were decimated. Entire regions of England were blighted by coal soot. Thirty pounds of raw seawater must be evaporated to make a single pound of salt. The next time you reach for a box of fire-evaporated salt, consider that fossil fuels are a big part of the price tag!

Today environmental concerns make relying exclusively on fossil fuels to do the job unappealing and impractical in most instances, but there are exceptions. Many of the best fire-evaporated salts start with naturally concentrated brines, such as from a salt spring, well, or marsh, or use the limited available sun and wind to pre-evaporate the seawater to concentrate it before boiling off the remainder to crystallize salt. After 100,000 years of exploitation by Neolithic and post-Neolithic people in France, Le Briquetage de la Seille was developed and run as a major industrial salt works, boiling salt spring brine in earthenware vessels, breaking open the vessels to remove the cake of salt, and then discarding the vessels in heaps, converting at least 200 acres of the once flat countryside into a land of sprawling hills. People in China’s Sichuan province have for millennia been pumping concentrated brine from 2,000-foot-deep wells in the earth. Neolithic England was home to salt making in its southern salt marshes—a practice that continues there today.

Where naturally concentrated brines are not available, ingenuity is required. The Japanese spray water onto bamboo mats suspended from the ceiling of a greenhouse, or drizzle water down long rods of bamboo, or even strew saltwater over seaweed or sand to allow it to quickly dry in the sun, then rinse the salt from the sand in seawater. A salt maker in Norway harnesses freezing weather rather than hot sun to concentrate saltwater. As seawater nears freezing, the water molecules crystallize, pushing the heavier saltwater to the bottom and yielding a concentrated brine that can then be evaporated by fire.

Some of the most desperate populations lack saltwater or salt deposits of any kind. In Paraguay, trees with a high salt content are burned, and the residual salt is rinsed from the ash and then boiled off. This same technique is practiced in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, each locale burning its indigenous salty trees and grasses. One particularly innovative method, in the Philippines, involves soaking coconut husks in seawater for several months, drying and burning the coconut husks, washing the ash with saltwater to create a concentrated brine, and then boiling it off in a pot over a fire until nothing is left but a big round ball of salt. If you weren’t convinced that mankind will do anything to get salt, these methods are proof.

The upshot is that spectacular salts can be made using either solar, fire, or hybrid methods. Solar (and geothermal) salts tend to be less expensive and more environmentally sustainable. For these reasons, solar salts are generally the best candidates for everyday cooking salts. Rock salts are also worth considering for use as an all-purpose salt, though for reasons we shall explore below, they may not be the ideal choice for many people.

Rock Salt

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the earth contains 332,519,000 cubic miles of water, 97 percent of which is saline. Every square mile contains 120 million tons of salt. Millions of years ago, much of the earth that today is land was buried under this saltwater. On occasion these ancient seas would become isolated as landmasses arose around them or as sea levels dropped during ice ages, stranding inland seas. These seas evaporated, leaving vast salt deposits that would eventually get buried under sediments and other geological formations. Under the tremendous pressure of the earth above, salt deposits would solidify into solid rock called halite, the mineral form of salt. The earth contains countless such salt deposits.

The Hallein salt mine in present-day Austria shows evidence of salt being evaporated from salt springs dating 4,000 years before organized rock salt mining of rock salt began there, around 600 BC. Two of the most famous salt mines in the world are the Wieliczka mine in Poland, near Krakow, and the Khewra mine in Pakistan’s Punjab province. The Wieliczka mine (pronounced vee-LEE-ska) has been in operation since the 12th century. Intellectuals, dignitaries, and industrialists from around Europe have visited for centuries, and it is home to some of the most astonishing feats of minecraft anywhere. Caverns the size of small stadiums are buttressed by timbers stacked like Lincoln Logs. Animals were lowered down to the mine to work out their natural lives. Pulley systems, pump systems, stairways, elevators, tunnels, and halls weave throughout the byzantine maze of the mine. But here art rivals engineering for impressiveness. Miners, a religious and superstitious bunch, carved sculptures of everything from religious icons and personages to mythical dwarves, whom they believed contributed a helping hand, secretly working the mines at night. Mining of rock salt in Wieliczka recently ceased, but tourism continues.

The Khewra mine, in the Punjab region of Pakistan, is the largest of several in the region where so-called Himalayan salt comes from. The term Himalayan is a colorful one, as the mines are separated from the Himalayas by nearly 200 miles. The mines have been used since their discovery in 326 BC, and there is evidence to suggest that salt was being mined prior to that. Deep in its nearly 25 miles of tunnels winding through 43 square miles over seventeen levels, miners have carved elaborate structures and sculptures. Among them is a 350-foot-tall assembly hall with 300 narrow stairs of salt; a 3,000-square-foot mosque that was constructed over the course of half a century; and a salt bridge known as the Pull Sarat, or bridge of trial. It is 25 feet long, with no supporting pillars, spanning a subterranean saline pond. Other items include miniature versions of the Great Wall of China; the Eiffel Tower; and two Pakistani landmarks, Chaghi Mountain and Lahore’s Minar-e-Pakistan. Khewra produces 300,000 tons per year. A good-size industrial salt mine might produce ten times that amount or more.

Craft vs. Industry: The Modern History of Salt

The idea of good salt versus bad salt is not a new one. In the 1800s, the salt of choice was cheap, industrially made salt from Liverpool. Salt makers there boiled off brine using enormous amounts of cheap coal and other fossil fuels. Besides being an environmental catastrophe, the process yielded salt that many believed to be of middling quality at best. A letter circulated by the U.S. Senate in 1932 lambasted the violent boiling and hasty crystallization of "Liverpool salt, whose fair and tempting exterior renders it peculiarly imposing, whilst its intrinsic deficiency makes the delusional most pernicious and ruinous. . . . Indeed, this artificial salt is exceedingly unlike the salt formed by the evaporation and crystallization, which sea water naturally undergoes in the warmer latitudes." The letter continued on, lamenting its ruinous effect on beef, pork, and New York butter, among other foods. Such recognition is largely absent from discussions on salt today, but we are still besieged by inexpensive, inferior salt. Today it wallows in our food supply in the form of cheap sea salt, iodized table salt,