Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [71]
Marlborough flakey is more delicate in crystal and refined in flavor, and Cyprus flake is heftier and bolder in all regards. What they leave untended is a sizable middle ground—which Maldon occupies with insouciance. Crushing Maldon between the finger and thumb, and letting the flakes fall to the surface of your favorite food is almost as satiating as eating it.
Maldon sea salt is made from seawater collected from England’s Blackwater River estuary during fortnightly high tides, when the salinity is highest. After a brief stint in holding tanks to let ocean matter settle out, the seawater is filtered and passed into stainless steel salt pans. The brine is evaporated over fires mounted on an elaborate network of brick flues (natural gas has replaced coal as the fuel) that give the specific heating pattern required for the formation of Maldon’s characteristic flake crystals. Crystals form on the surface of the water and sink to the bottom. After the water cools, the salt crystals are raked, drained, and dried. Salt has been produced at or near the site of the modern saltworks since the Iron Age. Entire hills of red clay in Essex are actually formed from red clay briquetage used in prehistoric production of salt. A 1086 survey noted forty-five salt pans in the Maldon area.
Marlborough Flakey
ALTERNATE NAME(S): none MAKER(S): Dominion Salt Works TYPE: flake CRYSTAL: tufts of owl feather COLOR: high-voltage sparks FLAVOR: raindrop MOISTURE: none ORIGIN: New Zealand SUBSTITUTE(S): Murray River flake BEST WITH: snow peas; pasta primavera; mixed baby greens salad; chocolate cake
On the beach, sand twinkling on your toes, you feel the sun’s last warm exhalation before it sinks below the horizon. The sea flashes into darkness, the sky plunges into color, and the heavens’ passage through time is narrowed to a slit as the vastness of the universe condenses to a flicker. Marlborough flakey, with its blinding white, undulating, frothy crystals—unlike any other—regales you with promises of intensity that never materializes and of luminosity in shadow. The crystals torque into twisted shapes fringed with a lacework radiating ever outward with the ceaseless variation of a fractal. This is among the great salts for fresh vegetables and other foods whose flavors crave a salted contrast, but whose grandeur can only be experienced in glimpses.
The name “Marlborough flakey” provides some insight into the behavior of the salt itself, provided you are capable of burring your Rs. The salt doesn’t so much crunch as yield in a quick succession of crackles, like the brittle softness of dried flower petals. The flavor is equally elegant. Much as when you capture a snowflake on your tongue and sense only fleeting moistness, so food finished with Marlborough flakey tastes not so much seasoned as graced. It carries with it distinct mineral notes that could be trace amounts of calcium and magnesium, and it finishes with the classic double-whammy of a great salt: faint bitterness overlaid by sweetness.
Marlborough flakey harmonizes with food. While the salt maker likes to talk about crushing it between your fingers for cooking, I think he is understating the pleasure to be had from letting your tongue, hard palate, gums, and cheeks take their turns collapsing and rolling the crystals, each part of the mouth receiving slightly different information depending on where the salt is in its rapid path toward dissolution. Cast it across a salad of fresh garden greens, where it contrasts with and softens the astringency of vinaigrette and accentuates the bitter and mineral flavors of the veggies. If nothing else, try it on pasta puttanesca, or mozzarella, or poultry.
Marlborough Flakey is evaporated by the sun and wind from the clear South Pacific current that sweeps up the east coast of New Zealand to mingle with the Tasmanian Sea. It is produced by Dominion Salt