Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [47]
The medium-large crystal structure, nuanced color, and rich mineral diversity make this an elegant multipurpose finishing salt, excellent on anything from broiled fish to roasted pork. Despite its lower moisture content, it’s good scattered over a sauce or a moist food. Moister varieties of fleur de sel maintain their shape and texture in sauces, but Bali fleur de sel has the weird ability to float on the surface of viscous liquid, like crystalline buoys on a sea of cream.
Because Bali fleur de sel is drier than other types of fleur de sel, being left out on a table all day does little to diminish its natural charm. Its slightly larger than normal granular crystals provide a salt-crunch that calls attention to itself, helping to make sure that restaurateurs get credit for serving quality salt. Also, it plays intriguingly with light, its flat white crystals absorbing light so that a salt cellar of Bali fleur de sel sitting on a table seems to glow rather than sparkle.
Fiore di Cervia
ALTERNATE NAME(S): fiore di Sale di Cervia MAKER(S): n/a TYPE: fleur de sel CRYSTAL: fine; irregular granules COLOR: hints of translucent blue in silvered whiteness FLAVOR: sweet; bright; Froot Loops MOISTURE: high ORIGIN: Italy SUBSTITUTE(S): fiore di sale di Trapani; fleur de sel de Guérande; fleur de sel de Camargue BEST WITH: pasta, where its smaller crystals don’t compete with the silky glide of noodles; oily foods like olives, pickled mushrooms, and artichoke hearts where it only partially dissolves; and delicate preparations of small, tender fish
Fiore di Cervia provides a luscious and tingling pleasure not unlike diving into the scary, blue, fish-infested waters off Cinque Terre in northwestern Italy; and it is entirely possible that the fresh lemon-marinated anchovies you eat as the brine dries on your shoulders will be salted with it. The salt is in fact harvested from the placid salt pans of the happy blue Adriatic on the other side of the country by amiable Italian blokes who wield wooden rakes in precisely the fashion that their ancestors did, way back when wily, lethal Etruscans roamed the Mediterranean.
The flavors of Fiore di Cervia capture the celebratory spirit of central Italy—fruit sugars and spring water dance off the palate with an utter lack of pretense. The transparent, inscrutably fine crystals shimmer with moisture, imparting the mouthfeel of an excellent Prosecco. On the right food, at the right time, the sensation of Fiore di Cervia is innocently voluptuous, like lucking into a busy day with its agenda unexpectedly dropped.
Fiore di Cervia is a private-label salt made in the ancient salt-making region of Cervia, in central Italy. Fiore di Cervia is much like a great Brittany fleur de sel, but warmer and less briny. The absence of this fresh saltwater edge can be either a good thing—if you are open to this salt’s subtly sweet innocence—or a bad thing—if you are accustomed to a lucid, firm mineral foundation to the flavors of your food. Another great contrast is with the rare fleurs de sel of Trapani, Sicily, which are coarser, with cleaner, brighter flavors.
TEN REASONS WHY CUCUMBERS ARE GREAT FOR SALT TASTING
A cucumber, sliced into rounds and then halved, provides the perfect little half-moon surface for tasting salt. The basic cucumber, Cucumis sativus, is a classic high-potassium food with 80 milligrams per 100-gram serving, and so is always nice to pair with salt from a nutritional standpoint. It’s also high in vitamin C, vitamin A, manganese, and other great things like molybdenum, dietary fiber, and folate. But that’s not why I love serving cucumbers for salt tasting. There are more tangible reasons:
Cucumbers are moist, providing a nice example of how the moisture of a typical food will interact with the salt, and vice versa.
Nobody feels guilty eating a cucumber.
Cucumber slices are pretty.
Cucumbers are cheap.
Cucumbers are easy to prepare.
Cucumbers keep well.
Cucumbers are old school.
People bring