Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [100]
12 ounces well-trimmed lean beef tenderloin
1½ teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
Freshly cracked black pepper to taste
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard, plus more for trimmings
2 egg yolks
4 anchovies
20 capers
½ teaspoon sherry wine vinegar
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil or anchovy oil
2 tablespoons finely chopped red onion
1 tablespoon chopped chives
2 three-finger pinches of Halen Môn
4 slices of baguette, toasted, for serving
Slice the tenderloin thinly. Cut the slices into strips and the strips into small pieces. Chop until the meat is fine enough to mold, but is still in discernible pieces. Mix in the Worcestershire sauce, pepper, and mustard until well blended. Using your fingers, shape the meat into two small rounds, no more than 4 inches across, on two plates. Make a deep well in the center of each meat patty and put an egg yolk in each well.
In a small bowl, lightly mash the anchovies and capers with a fork. Mix in the vinegar and olive oil. Dollop half of this mixture on each plate at 12 o’clock. Mix the red onion and chives together and put a small mound on each plate at 6 o’clock. Put a three-finger pinch of salt on each plate at 3 o’clock and a spoonful of mustard at 9 o’clock.
To eat, mix the anchovy-caper mixture into the egg yolk with a fork. Work the egg mixture into the meat, incorporating the onion mixture, salt, and pepper to taste. Eat on or with toast.
RADISHES WITH BUTTER AND FLEUR DE SEL
SERVES 4
Imagine a garden. In it are Black Spanish, Burpee, Champion, Cherry Queen, China Rose, Early Scarlet Globe, Easter Egg, French Breakfast, Fuego, Icicle, Plum Purple, Snow Belle, Tama—all radishes. The best way to eat all of them, to savor their isothiocyanate heat, to luxuriate in their woody density, is with butter and salt. The silken texture of the butter plays off the radishes’ crunch, and the two take a honeymoon together, visiting the sultry destinations of spiciness and cream. Fleur de sel is the key. Its moistness helps its crystals ride out the voyage long enough for the radish and butter to make their acquaintance in your mouth. It also lends mineral richness and texture to both. Fleur de sel, a pat of butter, and a radish—a poem penned by summer.
12 spring or summer radishes, washed and thoroughly dried
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
French fleur de sel, such as fleur de sel de Guérande
If the greens on your radishes are pretty, leave them on; if not, trim off the greens. If your radishes aren’t completely dry, the butter will not cling to them. Arrange the radishes on a plate. Put the butter on the plate or in a small crock and the fleur de sel in a small pile on the plate or in a small dish.
To eat, spread a thin film of butter on a radish, sprinkle with fleur de sel, and insert into your mouth.
SALTED BUTTER: THE OTHER PROCESSED FOOD
Possibly the best way to experience the pleasures of artisan salt is to use it on the simplest of foods. Make toast, butter your toast, sprinkle with a pinch of fleur de sel, and bite. A shimmer of salt, a wave of butter, a harvest of grain, and your mouth is alive. Which brings me to my point:
Never, ever, ever buy salted butter. Ever. Why sully your butter with the refined industrial salt invisibly blended into butter when instead you could bless each bite with a kiss of fleur de sel and ascend to paradise?
Of course, never, ever, ever is a long time. If you go to France and have a chance to buy beurre salé, a lovingly crafted butter typically using cream from grass-pastured cattle in Normandy combined with top-notch fleur de sel from south of Brittany, do so. Beurre salé is to mass-produced salted butter what fresh sushi is to frozen fishsticks. If you are like me, you will just grab a baguette,