Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [67]
Scattered on food, Bali Kechil is a train wreck of crazy popping as the tiny crystals implode between your teeth. There is nothing cute about it—dazzling is more like it. Few salts offer a more vital experience of salt’s physical presence with so light a flavor. Bali Kechil’s little box crystals communicate in crystalline verbosity the pure essence of traditional Balinese flavors, like kaffir lime leaves, blue ginger, coconut, and bird’s-eye chiles. In fact, eating the salt brings new sensations to the deeper regions of the mind (ones you may not even know you possess), like the puffy-crunchy texture of krupuk melinjo crackers made with gnetum gnemon fruit, or the earthy-sour flavors of tamarind pulp and pandan leaf. Bringing these sensations back home to your daily life, Bali Kechil is the best salt available for salted bagels, pizza crusts, pretzels, and focaccia.
Bali Rama Pyramid
ALTERNATE NAME(S): coarse Balinese salt MAKER(S): Big Tree Farms TYPE: flake CRYSTAL: architecturally implausible Aztec pyramids COLOR: rippled water FLAVOR: electrified frost; potato chip of minerals; faint bitter aftertaste MOISTURE: low to moderate ORIGIN: Bali, Indonesia SUBSTITUTE(S): Halen Môn; Cyprus flake BEST WITH: roasted cherry tomato salad; all roasted and pan-fried seafood; oatmeal cookies
At the birth of a first child, there is no sudden parental transformation from self-centered dope to enlightened sage. You are just as self-centered; it’s just that your self has now been expanded to include the wriggling critter in your arms. You are still a dope, too, and your materialistic obsession with glowing baubles and whizzing machinery persists, or may even be amplified. After days and weeks and months of sleepless nights spent obsessively staring at a new baby, you keep thinking, “Wow, this thing is German-engineered and superbly built.” Bali Rama Pyramid provides the same materialistic rush of admiration coupled with unmerited pride.
Each grain of salt is a structure of starched crystalline sheets tautly strung against a sharply inclined pyramidal armature. As clearly as the salt sings of island flavors like galangal, coriander, salam leaves, and lemongrass, you need not limit its use to tropical seafood, pork, and fruit. The visual and textural luxury of Bali Rama Pyramid should be enjoyed like any baubel: often, but without betraying just how much you adore it.
Cornish Sea Salt
ALTERNATE NAME(S): n/a MAKER(S): Cornish Sea Salt Company TYPE: flake (barely) CRYSTAL: medium-coarse adhesion of cubes and micropyramids COLOR: pond ice FLAVOR: sharp, metallic, and clear, but not entirely unbalanced MOISTURE: medium-low ORIGIN: England SUBSTITUTE(S): Halen Môn; Japanese nazuna BEST WITH: herbaceous pie of leeks, butter, and lardoons; steak and kidney pie; fried liver and onions; cottage potatoes and scallions
Each salt crystal is made up of a number of small, firm grains stuck together by tantalizingly close to nothing—static electricity, perhaps. Whatever the mechanism, the salt has an agreeable bulk, a weightiness that makes it pleasant to hold in the hand, something unsupervised children might be compelled to scatter like birdseed. The combination of crystalline heft and delicacy lends the impression that the very existence of this salt is fleeting.
With enough moisture to provide body on food, Cornish sea salt does everything in its power to seduce. But the flavor of the salt is less wondrous: flat, faintly bitter, and metallic: a shrill voice issuing unexpectedly from a pretty face. Yet for all that, when harmonized with other assertive ingredients, the salt communicates a certain sense of place.
Cornish food tends toward the substantial, and this salt fits right in. Good hiking and farming foods,