Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [80]
Kala namak is made from pink rock salt (sendha namak) from Pakistan; it is imported into India in bulk by Indian companies, though they are loath to disclose their sources. The sendha namak is converted into kala namak using a centuries-old process. Heated in the presence of spices until it melts, the resultant compound is cooled, stored, and aged. When finished, the salt is rich in iron, sulfur, and many other elements and compounds. So ask yourself, are you worth your kala namak? You know the answer.
Mongolian Blue Steppes
ALTERNATE NAME(S): jamts davs MAKER(S): various TYPE: rock CRYSTAL: coarse gravel; chunks of rock; sculpted pie wedges COLOR: blood orange; dawn reflected off wet pavement FLAVOR: sweet; starchy; complex minerals MOISTURE: none ORIGIN: Mongolia SUBSTITUTE(S): Andes mountain rose BEST WITH: seafood pasta, pasta with truffles; lemon and salt-crusted chicken thighs stuffed with cheese and herbs; guacamole and chips; duck confit crostinis; venison carpaccio
If you had only one seasoning for your kitchen, what would it be? The Mongolians, over millennia of hardship and privation, chose salt. Or rather, it chose them. The Mongolian steppes, a vast expanse of highland savannas, offer relatively little in the way of herbs and spices. Saline lakes provide one source of salt, but the most characteristic salt of Mongolia has to be rock salt, which serves not just human needs but those of the livestock tended by these nomadic herders as well.
In addition to an intensely saline lake, the great northern basin of Uvs Nuur features deposits of rock salt of the most astonishing colors, ranging from tangerine to candied orange and from steely gray to predawn blue. Chunks of the salt are often left in their coarse, rocky form, and then shaved atop everything from a glass of mare’s milk to spit-roasted meats. It can even be carved into beautiful, eminently giftable shapes that are easy to handle and easy to pack.
Some anthropologists theorize that early Neolithic people were drawn into the land that is now Mongolia by its salt resources. Grating a powdery mist of minerally, sweetly vegetal salt over the tongue gives us an idea of the primordial draw salt must have had on the first settlers of the Mongolian steppes. This is one of the most complex and unabashedly delicious salts on the planet.
Persian Blue
ALTERNATE NAME(S): none MAKER(S): various TYPE: rock CRYSTAL: gravel COLOR: sky-transparency studded with stars of tanzanite and sapphire FLAVOR: mild; silken sweetness of Popsicle on edge of porcelain cup MOISTURE: none ORIGIN: Iran SUBSTITUTE(S): Himalayan pink BEST WITH: parsnip puree; poached perch; pears
There is no nightlife in Tehran. The metropolis shuts down at midnight; people go to bed. The snowcapped crest of Mount Damavand puffs sulfur clouds like an old man blowing smoke rings at the silver moon. But within this nocturnal austerity there lurks a salt, one with a private jet and a posse. Sprinkled over Champagne from an amulet strung around the neck of a Nubian supermodel in a swishy nightclub in Moscow, Persian blue salt is a culinary bauble: rare, beautiful, and gracefully useless.
Certain mines in Mongolia, Poland, and Iran produce salts across a spectrum of blues, from gunmetal blue to topaz to purplish tanzanite to deepest sapphire. While many bluish colors can appear in chunks and even whole veins of salt, the most ferocious peacock hues, like those of Persian blue, appear only in glints suggestive of mystery. Some minerals are idiochromatic, meaning their composition is what colors them. Salt, clear as eternity, is not idiochromatic. Salt can be either allochromatic, meaning it takes its colors from trace impurities in its composition or from defects in its structure; or it is pseudochromatic,