Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [69]
Cyprus Flake
ALTERNATE NAME(S): Cyprus Silver MAKER(S): n/a TYPE: flake CRYSTAL: heavily built hollow pyramids COLOR: shaved egg white FLAVOR: evaporated thunderbolt MOISTURE: none ORIGIN: Cyprus SUBSTITUTE(S): Hana flake; Maldon BEST WITH: canapés
Etiquette is not Cyprus flake’s strong suit. Think of it as a three-hundred-pound middle linebacker. You have food (the quarterback), you have flavor (the ball), and you have a hulking impediment that is not only ready, but able to do anything necessary to make contact. Cyprus flake is one of the few salts capable of standing up to a sports analogy.
Visually, Cyprus flake is distinctive and rather alarming, like the hourglass of a black widow or the stripes of a scorpion fish—nature’s way of alerting your mind and body to the forces of nature that are yet to unfold. The flake crystals of the salt, which measure between ⅛ to 1 inch, are among the largest, most architecturally rugged, and most regularly contoured—which is to say, perfectly pyramidal—of any flake salt. It takes work to crunch one. In your mouth, it remains defiantly voluminous, daring your teeth to bite. And when you do, its structure explodes in a mini supernova of crystalline slivers. The taste is pungent and bright; a little hot.
Cyprus flake’s strange natural architecture lends visual drama to a dish—sort of like a nuclear alternative to the trusty sprinkle of parsley—and similarly asserts the physicality of salt as a force of nature in a recipe. Perch a flake on a pearl of salmon roe sushi. Challenge your molecular gastronomy skills by suspending silver pyramids of salt in a cube of aspic. Scatter some on a homespun tuna melt, or over a thick potato-leek soup, or fissuring the skin of a crème caramel. Above all, Cyprus flake brings something refreshingly un-foodlike to blanched veggies and garden salads—a small, immaculate piece of titanium geometry unearthed in a verdant tropical chaos.
Halen Môn
ALTERNATE NAME(S): Halen Môn Silver MAKER(S): The Anglesey Sea Salt Company Ltd. TYPE: flake CRYSTAL: laminated sheets crushed into trapezoids COLOR: silvered ice FLAVOR: mineral freshness with a touch of sun; clarified butter MOISTURE: moderate ORIGIN: Wales SUBSTITUTE(S): Cayman sea salt; Cornish sea salt BEST WITH: butternut squash soup; grilled fish; garden vegetable sandwich
Shards of fractured, flat geometric crystals layer one atop the other, reflecting and refracting light into infinite gradations of translucency the color of scattered memories. These stacked strata of salt crystals yield a dazzling crunch. A pleasant residual moisture lends a mellowing effect, releasing sea and sun flavors that disband casually throughout any food it seasons. Halen Môn offers a textural dimension beyond that of most other flake salts, its crunch-upon-crunch layers vanishing before calling undue attention to themselves, leaving behind a clearly defined structure and pleasant minerality, ponderings for the mouth that are as ungraspable as string theory.
Halen môn gwyn a glan o gymru means “pure white sea salt” in Welsh. If the translation does not do justice to the salt, the lyrical beauty of the original Welsh mirrors at least some of the salt’s mysteries. For example, Halen Môn floats. Flicked across the surface of a lobster bisque or fresh corn chowder speckled with shaved truffles, Halen Môn (or Halen Môn oak smoked) stays buoyant, creating striations of mineral freshness that glide down your throat as the salt dissolves under the pressure of your tongue. My friend Christy, a Celtic raider of the produce aisle, finishes her signature butternut squash-and-every-vegetable-in-Oregon soup with Halen Môn, sparking intense bursts of flavors whenever a stray flake of undissolved salt crunches in the mouth.