Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [42]
SHIO
MANUFACTURE: Seawater evaporated over fire, in a greenhouse, or other ways, then crystallized over fire to form exceptionally fine granular crystals. IMPACT: Complex, clean taste that bursts instantly from the crystals. USES: The small crystals don’t call attention to themselves, so use with any food where the ingredients should stay front and center but the fullest wealth and complexity of flavor is desired. EXAMPLES: Shinkai deep sea, amabito no moshio, sara-shio.
ROCK SALT
MANUFACTURE: Mined from the earth and ground to a desired size. IMPACT: Hard crystals with constant, relatively homogeneous delivery of flavor. USES: In salt mill when the desired effect is dissolving the salt on the surface of moist food, left whole and then grated with rock salt shaver when a fine “mist” of salt is desired on dryer or fattier foods, and in large blocks as cooking or serving utensils for many types of food. EXAMPLES: Himalayan pink, Andes mountain rose, Jurassic.
UNCONVENTIONAL SALT
MANUFACTURE: Salts that fall outside the defining criteria of other evaporative salts. May be made using unusual, generally high-tech processes such as sequence vacuum evaporation or ion-exchange membrane concentration, and/or salts with unusual naturally or artificially formed crystals. EXAMPLES: South African pearl, Icelandic Hot Springs.
MODIFIED SALT
MANUFACTURE: A sub-classification for any class of salt that is altered in some way after its creation, such as by smoking, infusing, blending, or roasting. EXAMPLE: Halen Môn oak smoked, black truffle, 7 salt, China Sea parched salt.
SEL GRIS
The name sel gris, or “gray salt,” comes from the French, who popularized it not only in Europe, but around the world. The name is also a shortened form of gros sel gris, or “coarse gray salt,” so sel gris is by definition a coarse, granular crystal. Sel gris is very rich in trace minerals; its namesake gray color comes not from minerals, but from small amounts of porcelain clay raked up from the bottom of the salt pan. Fleur de sel, which is made in the same pans as sel gris, lacks this gray color because it is harvested directly from the surface of the brine and never comes in contact with the clay. Some makers of sel gris—especially those in regions where the natural soil of the marsh is a mud or silt that would not be desirable in salt—allow a layer of salt to form on the bottom of the pan and then rake their sel gris from that layer. Such sels gris are not gray at all, or their grayness is barely discernible.
Sel gris provides enormous benefits over most other salts as an all-around culinary salt. First, it brings mineral depth to every food when dissolved during cooking. Second, its moist crystals do not overly dehydrate other ingredients in grilled, roasted, or baked dishes. Third, it lends a hearty crunch when used as a finishing salt. A few pinches of sel gris is the perfect amount for sauces (the pale sel gris varieties lack any deposits that might cloud the thoughts of the most perfidious chefs or the color of the whitest sauces), and a handful or two should be added to water for boiling pasta or blanching, brining, or pickling vegetables. Used to prepare foods for cooking, sel gris draws a small amount of moisture from the surface of food, but this moisture has nowhere to go because the salt crystals are already saturated with moisture (13 percent residual moisture is typical of many sels gris), so there the moisture stays, glistening on the surface of the food until the heat of an oven or grill sets to work browning it to a golden, crunchy crust. Kosher salt, or many other sea salts, tend to absorb all of this moisture into the salt crystal itself, dehydrating the food and doing little to brown it.