Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [92]
Those leveling criticism at strip malls need some perspective. They need to look at so-called sea salt.
Two hundred years ago, there were dozens of salts for every region and culinary tradition—tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of salts. Each artisan salt was the singular reflection of a specific geography, climate, technology, diet, culture, and even individual. Salt and people were intimately linked, so we could explore entire worlds of flavor diversity through salt. Mechanically harvested industrial sea salt put an end to that.
Most artisan salts are sea salts, but most salts that call themselves sea salts are actually industrial salts made from seawater. The term “sea salt” has been co-opted by industrial salt manufacturers, who do nothing to disabuse us of the impression that theirs is a natural salt crafted for culinary purposes. Vast evaporators collect water from any available source regardless of the purity of the water. (For example, sea salt made in America comes from the industrial heart of San Francisco Bay.) Popular brands may contain additives such as magnesium oxide and/or sodium ferrocyanide. Ninety percent or more of the salt made in typical industrial sea salt evaporators goes toward deicing, the chlor-alkalai chemical process, and other industrial markets. A small amount of the remaining salt gets washed down and purified to make it safe for human consumption. Go shopping elsewhere.
Table Salt
ALTERNATE NAME(S): iodized free-flowing salt MAKER(S): various TYPE: industrial CRYSTAL: homogeneous cubes COLOR: abandoned factory windowpane FLAVOR: phenolic paint followed by rusted barbed wire MOISTURE: none ORIGIN: various SUBSTITUTE(S): anything BEST WITH: shuffleboard lubricant
Digital audio systems are an amazing deal. For less money than it takes to buy a steak dinner, we can have an entire stereo system manufactured by robots. Automated factories in a country ten thousand miles away can stamp out products on an inhumanly vast scale with inhumanly perfect precision, all from thousands of inhumanly perfect parts provided by undifferentiated suppliers located anywhere.
Standardization → Optimization → Perfection: the calculus of industrial logic. We have a word for the sensuality of industrial logic when applied to food: processed. Make a perfectly standardized product on an inhumanly global scale from unnaturally pure chemicals and you get … I leave it to your imagination. Iodized salt is a processed chemical. And it tastes like it: harsh and bitter, with such perfect homogeneity that your tongue actually recoils from the encounter. Parching your flesh, the flavors evolve from bad to worse, gaining an intense acridness.
The free-flowing salt crystal is crystal identically cubic, dull, 99.5 percent or higher sodium chloride. The only reason it isn’t purer is that it needs additives such as 0.04 percent dextrose (the sugar in corn syrup) and/or sodium thiosul-fate, sodium carbonate, or sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) to keep the potassium iodide, potassium iodate, sodium iodide, or sodium iodate from breaking down into iodine and evaporating away.
To keep this refined chemical amalgam flowing smoothly—for instance, in a salt shaker—iodized salt needs anywhere from 0.5 percent to 2 percent anticaking agents such as calcium silicate, sodium ferrocyanide (yellow prussiate of soda), or magnesium carbonate to absorb water from the atmosphere so the salt crystals do not glue themselves together. Aluminum calcium, ammonium citrate, ferric silicon dioxide, magnesium silicate, propylene glycol, silicate, sodium aluminosilicate (sodium silicoaluminate), and calcium phosphate are also anticaking agents. But that’s not all. The anticaking agents may also need chemicals of their own because they too are prone to caking. Any number of humectants (anticaking compounds for anticaking chemicals) may be added to them to facilitate