Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [43]
Sel gris is also an excellent finishing salt. While the crystals are large and can be intimidating, the moisture in them makes them supple, each one yielding with a tantalizing, unctuous bite. With its ample moisture and toothsome crunch, sel gris is the ultimate salt for finishing hearty foods like steak, lamb, veal, roasted poultry, and root vegetables. Some sels gris can be mild enough for finishing subtly flavored foods like eggs, steamed vegetables, and fruit.
TRADITIONAL SALT
Traditional salt is the broadest category of salt, and is proportionately resistant to generalization. The most conventional examples are solar evaporated sea salts that are harvested only one or two times a year after they collect in a thick layer along the floor of the crystallizing pans. The resulting coarse salt is then dried and ground to a usable consistency. Some traditional salts are rocky, but others can be delicately crunchy and, when finely ground, even silky. Many traditional salts make excellent all-around cooking salts.
The difference between sel gris and traditional salt is that sel gris is harvested more or less daily, and its crystals are left in the shape and structure formed naturally during the time between harvests. Sel gris that is ground to a fine texture is referred to simply as sel marin, or sea salt, and is classified as a traditional salt.
FLAKE SALT
Flake salt is a very different animal from the more or less granular, mineral-rich, and often moist salts like fleur de sel, sel gris, and traditional salt. Some flakes form in thin, sculpted shavings, as if the ocean were frozen in time and then spun on a lathe. Others are pyramidal in shape, crystalline representations of life’s molecular soul.
Flake salts are lower in trace minerals than most other salts, which can make them more pungent and bold. Thin crystals have a large surface area and low mass, so they snap into bright sparks in the mouth, then dissolve almost completely, vanishing as quickly they appeared.
The taste sensation of flake salt is interesting: rather than chat amicably with the flavors in your mouth like the urbane fleur de sel or the powerful but good-natured sel gris, a flake salt jolts your tongue with all the subtlety of a frayed wire yanked from an electrical socket. When in league with fresh vegetables, herbed seafood, or chocolate mousse, flake salt provides voltage that illuminates other flavors with contrast and dazzle.
THE POETRY OF DESCRIBING SALT
CRYSTAL: The class of salt is the primary determinant of its crystal. For example, fleur de sel is almost always granular. For this reason, I would not bother to describe a fleur de sel as granular unless there was something characteristic about the granularity. The irregularity of crystallization is the opposite of homogeneity. It is usually desirable for crystals to be heterogeneous rather than homogeneous because crystals of different sizes and shapes contribute in different ways to the flavor dynamics between food, salt, and mouth. Irregularly-shaped and -sized crystals are good. On the other hand, a “fractured” salt that is too irregular will have an unappealing broken-upness that prevents it from resolving to a particular purpose. This is a salt that has no sweet spot where it contributes something special.
COLOR: Perfect salt crystals are transparent, but most salts are not perfect crystals, and it is the imperfections that make each salt unique. Qualities that help in describing the whiteness of salt include brightness (the amount of light it reflects); hue (tonal variation from pure white); and translucency (the amount of light that passes through the crystal or is refracted within it). The aesthetic determination of a salt is predicated on there being some way to turn its color to the benefit of a dish or the stimulation of an appetite: “grayish chalk” is not particularly appealing; “halogen-lit aquarium