Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [77]
THE MAKING OF A MASTERPIECE: THE THREE MUSES OF THE SALT WORLD
An appreciation for the care that goes into making Shinkai deep sea salt may help prepare you for the mad rush of tasting it (and the equally mad feeling that may strike when you first encounter its price tag). The process for making Shinkai was developed by a man named Shoji Koyachi; it originated in a small research project aimed at bring a salt-making business back to what had been a historic salt-producing region. While salt has been produced in Noto since the sixteenth century, industrial salt manufacturing brought an end to artisan production by the beginning of the twentieth century. After three years of research and development, he founded the Shinkai Shio Sangyo Company in 1998 to initiate production based on forgotten techniques.
Shinkai comes from the Noto Peninsula, where the waters are among the cleanest in Japan. 20,000 gallons of ultraclean seawater is harvested four times a month from more than two thousand feet beneath the surface of the ocean at a location where warm and cold currents of the Pacific Ocean collide and salinity is especially desirable. Waters at this depth part of the high salinity halocline, especially rich in ions like magnesium. For a week to ten days, this salt water is sprayed over bamboo mats suspended from the ceiling and reaching to the floor of specially constructed greenhouses, evaporating its moisture, until it reaches 10 to 11 percent salinity. The brine is then placed in a large stainless steel cauldron and boiled vigorously over a wood fire, to a concentration of 20 percent salinity. Next, the concentrated brine is tended constantly as it is slowly simmered over a low wood fire for twenty-five hours. A mound of salt slowly emerges from the steaming cauldron. This is raked off by hand and carefully dried.
The result is a single four-hundred-pound batch of salt that is exceptionally rich in minerals, with 16.2 percent of its content comprised of trace elements and moisture. The primary elements, magnesium (0.80 percent), calcium (0.19 percent), and potassium (0.40 percent), with dozens more in lesser quantities, give shape to a cleansing freshness on the palate, a subdued sweetness that commingles easily with the gentle turmoil of ocean bitterness. The crystals are formed in exceptionally fine, almost invisible flakes. Three women do virtually all the work: Junko Tsunetoshi, Tadako Shimo, and Eiko Miyashita. Dazzling and at the same time delicate, wild and yet measured, Shinkai is the distilled taste of nature’s majesty coupled with human craftsmanship.
ROCK SALT
Bolivian Rose (coarse)
ALTERNATE NAME(S): Andes Mountain Rose MAKER(S): various TYPE: rock CRYSTAL: gravel COLOR: liquid cotton candy FLAVOR: salt spring with a lollipop dissolving at the bottom MOISTURE: none ORIGIN: Bolivia SUBSTITUTE(S): Himalayan pink BEST WITH: chiles rellenos; fried plantains; river trout fried in butter
If you believe that satisfying passions is an unnecessary indulgence, this salt is not for you. If you had a million dollars and you spent it all on Bolivian Rose, you might come away with more than you need, but you would still need all of it. When it walks into the room, you might have a hard time not staring at it in an inappropriate manner.
Bolivian Rose is not to be confused with the evaporative salt from the Salar de Uyuni, the vast remains of a prehistoric salt lake that once covered most of southwestern Bolivia. But Salar de Uyuni offers a glimpse at the origins of Bolivian Rose. A chalk-colored crust of a salt pan formed from an ocean evaporated eons ago was buried under ten thousand feet of shifting continental plates, only to emerge three million years later as a stone that can be ground up and eaten with butter-fried