Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [58]
Sal rosa de Maras is pretty, its pearl-pink crystals radiating the beauty of a child’s quick laugh rippling from a hut on the banks of the Urubamba. The salt provides a zing of semisweetness and earthiness, though its chunky crystals lack the sumptuousness of the finest quality salts. This can be a good thing: think of using sal rosa de Maras atop the paper-thin, ice-hard glaze of a crème brulée. More culturally attuned ideas for the salt might trace history: sprinkled on pre-Inca dishes of tamales, potatoes, huanaco; river perch fired in a slipper of banana leaf; or an astringent ceviche. From there it finds a place in latter Criollo recipes such as lomo saltado and papas a la huancaina, based on the beef, chicken, and rabbit introduced with the influx of Spaniards, Italians, French, Germans, Chinese, and Japanese.
The salt fields at Maras lie in the Sacred Valley of the Incas at an altitude of about 10,000 feet. Water from rainfall and snowmelt higher up in the mountains makes its way through subterranean streams to a deposit of salt dating back tens of millions of years. The Salineras de Maras, comprised of about three thousand small pools, each measuring about fifty square feet, have been producing salt for anywhere from six hundred years to nearly two millennia, depending on whom you ask. The Inca, whose empire was cut short by the astonishingly bloodthirsty Francisco Pizarro, are credited with developing the elaborate system of salt pans terraced into the precipitous Andean slopes.
Sel Gris de Guérande
ALTERNATE NAME(S): gray salt; Celtic Sea salt MAKER(S): cooperative; independent TYPE: sel gris CRYSTAL: highly irregular chunky boxes COLOR: semitranslucent blue-gray FLAVOR: muscular mineral body given shape by clean brine MOISTURE: moderate ORIGIN: France SUBSTITUTE(S): sel gris de l’Ile de Noirmoutier; sel gris de l’Ile de Ré BEST WITH: medium-rare 1½-inch-thick grassfed rib-eye steak
Guérande’s name suggests the essential link between the land, the sea, and the superb salts for which the region is famed. Guérande is from gwen ran (“white land”) in Breton, the Celtic language of Brittany. It is a land ideally situated for the production of salt. Guérande’s natural estuaries, bright days, and reliable breezes have been creating brilliant white lakes of salt for thousands of years, even before being discovered by civilized man. Surprisingly, things haven’t gone too far downhill since then.
The lands surrounding Guérande have been preserved in part due to France’s resurgent artisan saltmaking industry, but also because, frankly, much of the land there is a swamp. In Guérande during low tides, the sea can nearly disappear from view altogether before rushing back in to fill the estuaries, bays, harbors, and salt fields. The combination of high tides and flat coastline has protected the salt marshes for millennia, fostering the development of elaborate, meticulously engineered solar salt evaporation schemes that have proven capable of weathering a thousand years of fierce Atlantic storms.
Sel gris de Guérande’s flavor and uses are commensurate with its history and geography. Complex mineral flavors with unapologetic briny notes contrast with and lend form to a huge variety of foods, from lean fish to fatty meats, from sweet caramels to astringent vegetables. Sel gris de Guérande (or its sisters from Ile de Ré and Ile de Noirmoutier) is also the natural choice for an all-around cooking salt. Finely ground and used in baking, it brings a barely detectable richness to other flavors—or, at the very least, that even deeper feeling of being rich yourself that great ingredients bring to the table. Thrown coarse into boiling water for blanching vegetables, rubbed whole over meats, or packed around lemons or fish for preserving,