Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [66]
Vietnamese Pearl
ALTERNATE NAME: Vietnamese traditional MAKER(S): n/a TYPE: traditional CRYSTAL: immense, sheer-faced fortifications COLOR: sunlight seen from inside a glacier FLAVOR: steel; pepper skins; baby chickens MOISTURE: high ORIGIN: Vietnam SUBSTITUTE(S): Jewel of the Ocean BEST WITH: sweet vegetables like pumpkin, butternut squash, creamed corn; infernally spicy foods; charred freshwater fish
Danger is the chief attraction of Vietnamese Pearl, like a cliff that beckons to your every suicidal tendency. Touch, bite, savor the sharp spicy flavor, and maybe you will survive. Vietnamese Pearl has two sides: on a good day, it’s soft and bouncy, pliant as bubble gum, imploding into chewy, tropical-ice sunshine as you go merrily on your way. And on a bad day, things get scary. Suddenly the steering wheel comes off in your hands and you’re hurtling toward the guardrail as a burst of sharp, rock-hard safety glass erupts like a car wreck in your mouth. Either way, it’s fun.
Few salts can compete with Vietnamese Pearl for the sheer magnitude of its crystals, which can easily exceed a half-inch, and sometimes get much larger. For years, its structure found endless diversion in the geometries of the triangle. More recent batches seem inclined to pursue iterations of the triangle. The closest salt to Vietnamese Pearl, Jewel of the Ocean, occupies itself exclusively with the square. Either one will make any sane person quail. The saving grace for both salts is their very substantial residual moisture, which makes them crunchable, instead of hard and sharp, though Vietnamese Pearl is generally more malleable.
The trick to using Vietnamese Pearl effectively is to learn how it reacts in different conditions. Experienced users describe (in Vietnamese) heating it in a wok to the point where it explodes on contact with your mouth. This makes no sense to me. A quick hit with a mortar and pestle, however, tames reduces the pathological bulk of the crystals without diminishing its fractured intensity. Meals brainstormed up from extreme ingredients are the natural stomping grounds for this salt: chiles (Hanoi, hahong ku chu), pungent spices (fenugreek, coriander), cloying herbs (basil, tarragon), and singed bits of meats and vegetables fused into perfection by the natrium stridency smoldering within.
FLAKE SALT
Bali Kechil Pyramid
ALTERNATE NAME(S): coarse Kechil Balinese salt MAKER(S): Big Tree Farms TYPE: flake CRYSTAL: heavy-bottomed shot glasses for mice COLOR: rippled water FLAVOR: bright; tidy; but with bitter aftertaste MOISTURE: moderate ORIGIN: Bali, Indonesia SUBSTITUTE(S): Halen Môn silver BEST WITH: shrimp and snapper satay; Balinese smoked duck; green papaya soup; tarte Tatin; the ultimate salt for home-made pretzels, bagels, and rolls
Kechil means “young,” or “small.” When I look at the salt, “cute” is the first word that comes to mind—in all the cuddly, gushing, annoying senses of the term. In some cute little atelier somewhere, little beings—beings smaller, even more ingenious, and far cuter than elves—must have made this salt.
From a distance, the crystals of Bali Kechil are more or less cubic, and don’t ressemble a flake salt at all. Closer inspection reveals that they are in fact hollow boxes. Not neat boxes. The crystals are chunky and jumbled, with thick cubic bases and wobbly, ridged sides—childlike boxes. Getting past their adorableness is the chief challenge to using Bali Kechil. You have to put down the urge to snuggle, take a breath, stand up tall, and smack it around. Once you can do that, you are ready to enjoy the salt truly and openly.
Ten thousand feet below the base of Bali’s sacred Gunung Agung volcano, Bali Kechil is made from water hauled by hand from the