Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [82]
For millennia the salt trade made Timbuktu a crossroads of Saharan Africa, eventually leading to the city’s emergence as one of the world’s leading centers of Arab scholarship and literary production. Today, the universities and temples of Timbuktu seem on the brink of being consumed forever by the brutal and increasingly vast desert.
UNCONVENTIONAL SALT
Icelandic Hot Spings
ALTERNATE NAME(S): n/a MAKER: Reykjanessalt Ltd. TYPE: unconventional CRYSTAL: dried fudge COLOR: rice paper cinders FLAVOR: scissors, paper, rocks MOISTURE: moderate ORIGIN: Iceland SUBSTITUTE(S): potassium salt BEST WITH: reindeer, penguin
The idea of a low-sodium salt has been circulating for some time. The problem, of course, is that the reason we like salt in the first place is that we are wired to crave sodium. In fact, the wiring itself is made of sodium, the positively charged ion that conducts the impulses of life. Our craving for the sodium in salt is inviolable. Some folks in Iceland decided to take the salts that normally play only minor roles in natural salt and make them major constituents in a culinary salt. From a 4,724-foot-deep borehole, 563°F geothermal brine is pumped into a wild-looking array of vacuum evaporators and crystallizers powered by geothermal energy. A salt of 71 percent NaCl, 11 percent MgCl, 6 percent MgSO₄, 3 percent CaCl₂, 3 percent other minerals (including silica and calcium), and 6 percent moisture results. It is a sensation to embrace, an alkaline-tasting oddity reminiscent of chocolate with all the flavor, mouth-feel, aroma, and color sucked out of it, leaving only an ashen memory in its place. People love it.
South African Pearl
ALTERNATE NAME(S): n/a MAKER(S): n/a TYPE: unconventional CRYSTAL: hammered BB pellets COLOR: candlelit cream FLAVOR: intense; faint dry bark; hot finish MOISTURE: low ORIGIN: South Africa SUBSTITUTE(S): none BEST WITH: citrus and mint salad; steamed snow peas
Biting into South African Pearl will give you an idea of how a giant might feel biting into a geode that has been scrupulously boiled to soften it: the fascinating but slightly infuriating sensation of an innocuous little pellet that powderizes recklessly in a spangle of intensity.
South African Pearl is basically a snowball of powdered salt. As you bite, the salt’s pearllike shape vanishes before you can identify its presence; only the finest film of salt remains, and this, too, dissolves instantly into whatever moisture is present, be it your food or your mouth. My best experience with this salt has been to use it as a finishing salt at the table on the barely moist flesh of steamed vegetables. On chunks of sautéed fish it provokes thoughts of fish roe, and maximizes its tactile and visual pleasures. Invite your guests to ogle and touch it, then roll the little spheres off the tops of their fingers to fall to their plates. The salt will either bounce off dry ingredients and roll around the plate, or stick to moist ingredients and quickly dissolve, depending on its chance encounters.
An alternate way to understand this salt requires a shift in thought. Advanced mathematics postulates that time-space is actually folded, so that planes of one four-dimensional sheet of reality are actually stretched and flexed to form different shapes, like a bow on a prettily wrapped package. In this same perfectly unintuitive and utterly ridiculous way, these little orbs can be flakes. Drop one on the glistening petal of your well-dressed green salad, take a bite, and pop! a snap of saltiness not