Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [72]
Murray River Flake
ALTERNATE NAME(S): Murray Darling MAKER(S): n/a TYPE: flake CRYSTAL: scales from a mechanical fish COLOR: startled flamingo FLAVOR: distinct sunshine sweetness; tingle of warm minerals MOISTURE: low ORIGIN: Australia SUBSTITUTE(S): none BEST WITH: slices of grilled lamb topped with a salad of grapefruit, mint, fennel, and shaved Parmesan; caprese salad; grated cheddar and popcorn; tostadas; seafood frittata
Murray River flake is the cotton candy-pink Lamborghini of Slow Food. Everything about it cries speed, excess, pleasure. Eat this salt blindfolded and you will know exactly what it looks like—just a glint of chrome, a blur of color, an ineffable lightness, and it’s gone.
This is among the most delicately formed flake salts, so fine and crisp and subtle that you can’t help but throw it around recklessly. The crystals are foil-thin scraps of fragmented pyramids, evaporated naturally from a saline aquifer. They take their color from the carotene produced by microorganisms living in the underground brine. This color and the fluffy feel of it between the fingers suggest using Murray River flake more as a topping than as a salt. It nontheless brings a muscular and purposeful fullness to moist foods, such as a salad of explosively ripe backyard garden tomatoes, sweet basil, and springy-yet-yielding buffalo mozzarella. Unless used on a relatively dry surface, such as goat cheese or scantily dressed greens, Murray River should only be applied at the table just before eating.
Fed by snowmelt, the Murray River descends from the Australian Alps where it joins the Darling River in a 414,000-square-mile basin (more than twice the size of California or Germany), where frequent drought has created naturally high concentrations of salt in the groundwater. In the dry season of 1829, the explorer Charles Sturt noted that the water was too saline to drink. Due to overfarming and other environmental damage to the area, salinity has only increased. Murray River salt is made from water drawn from this aquifer—one of the few salts made as part of a broader desalinization effort to rehabilitate land.
South African Flake
ALTERNATE NAME(S): South African sea salt flakes MAKER(S): n/a TYPE: flake CRYSTAL: platelets of agglomerated cubes COLOR: fractured windshield FLAVOR: hot; full; faintly aluminum MOISTURE: high ORIGIN: South Africa SUBSTITUTE(S): Halen Môn BEST WITH: dense soups; chili; braised meats
South African flake is intense to the taste, with a hotness that lacks the richer pungency of many other flake salts. Its classic translucent quartz color is pretty but a touch flimsy, and not among its chief charms. However, the salt brings a texture to the table that washes aside such shortcomings. Sheaves as jumbled and fractured as any ice floe challenge you to find a rightful place for them in the kitchen.
The salt is made from water collected at the edge of the sea—not from the ocean itself, but from an underground salt lake nearby (see South African pearl). After evaporating in a series of solar salt pans, the crystals are formed by allowing the delicate bloom of fleur de sel to continue to expand until it becomes a thin, brittle crust across the surface. When harvested, the crust crumples, resulting in shards. The outcome is flakes of salt made from several to several hundred miniscule cubic crystals—and none of them seems to want to touch, giving the impression that they could scatter at the least provocation, like minnows nibbling at the surface of a pond. Halen Môn appears similar from a distance, but seems born of the opposite inspiration: built up of flakes that are eager to snuggle and, in their eagerness, get piled up on top of each other in unexpected ways.
South African flake is an ideal finishing salt for dishes that would benefit from the obtrusive presence of a salt, such as lightly seasoned grilled