Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [44]
BODY: The feel of salt as it dissolves in the mouth and the way it crunches between the teeth or grazes the palate comes from its body. Salt can penetrate sharply into your tongue, or just float around warmly. The concept of body also relates to a salt’s staying power. If the salt has the wherewithal to stick around and do good things as it interacts with your food and your palate, it has body. When we talk about the body of salt, we are talking about how it feels physically. A salt that is dry and dusty may have little or no body. A salt that is moist and chunky probably has a lot of body. Moisture is the most potent force lending body to a salt, though mineral content and crystal structure also contribute.
TASTE: We don’t normally eat salt by itself, so talking about the taste of a salt involves physical and psychological gymnastics, like talking about loneliness while you’re pressing your lips against someone’s warm neck. Making matters more difficult, the physics of salt on the tongue—whether smacking rudely or simmering tantalizingly or sizzling painfully or whispering caressingly or bubbling gleefully or gushing excitedly or hiding coyly—is more than just flavor. Salts have behaviors. Combined with food, these behaviors translate into something societal, with varying degrees and styles of manners and social verisimilitude. But all that said, any talk of a salt’s taste should place the emphasis on mineral balance—the combination of flavors produced by the unique chords struck by minerals as they strum your mouth. From there, we imagine and experiment our way toward understanding how these subtler characteristics will play out against its texture and other qualities, and how all this will unite in support of the pleasure of eating.
MEROIR: Whenever something of the sea’s character is revealed in a salt, we call that character meroir. An adaptation of the French word terroir (used to describe a wine’s mineral inheritance from the earth), “meroir” is also used to describe variations in the briny flavors of seafood, such as oysters. Like the earth, the sea comes in different flavors. The salinity of seawater can vary considerably. The Mediterranean Sea, for example, has about 3.8 percent salinity compared to the open Atlantic, which has about 3.5 percent. Moreover, the salts themselves vary from place to place. The salts of the Dead Sea are primarily magnesium chloride, compared with sodium chloride in the Atlantic and Pacific.
In addition to the proportions of various minerals making up salt water, ecology also plays a role in determining merior. Most seas support myriad micro-and macroorganisms that contribute organic and inorganic nutrients to the water. Shrimp in a salt pond contribute carotene to the water, and microscopic halophytes produce a host of amino acids that find themselves in the source water for salt. The roles that all of these elements play in the characteristics of a salt are vast and complex, and can be as vital to the salt’s character as the soil of a vineyard is to a wine.
COST: I don’t talk about the cost of salt. It is hard to find examples of where it is relevant. Finishing salt is the most effective, most natural, and least expensive way to improve the flavor of your food. A meal for two seasoned with a hefty two-grams ( ounce, or six two-finger pinches) of the most expensive salts in the world costs about twenty cents. Americans spend 9.5 percent of their annual income on food—less than anyone in history. The French and Italians, by comparison, spend between 15 percent and 17 percent. If you are what you eat, good salt is a bargain investment no matter where you live.
Making valuations based solely on price is an exercise in false assumptions. Is a vintage 1960 Alfa Romeo Duetto Spider for $40,000 a better deal than a new Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport for $2 million? I suppose