Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [96]
If dealing with a finer salt like a shio or delicate fleur de sel, care needs to be taken to avoid dissolving the delicate crystals. Fill a cup with 1 tablespoon of water and stir in a few pinches of the salt until the water is saturated with it and a small amount of salt remains undissolved on the bottom. Now spoon the saturated brine into the salt and stir or gently shake as described above. Because the added liquid is already saturated with salt, it will not dissolve the crystals of your finer salts.
FINISHING SALT
Three things are good in little measure and evil in large: yeast, salt, and hesitation —The Talmud
All conversations on salting should start with this most ancient and effective, yet most radical and mistrusted, idea: you make the most of the natural character of food—and even improve it—when you finish it with salt. Finishing with salt is the linchpin of strategic salting: it’s a versatile cooking technique and one of the most effective ways we have of playing sensually with what we eat.
The idea is simple: bring food, salt, and your palate into the most intimate possible contact, and the relationship of salt and food evolves with every bite. As you eat, food and salt combine—first a flash of salt … then the food … a flicker of salt … now fuller food flavors … then a faint spark of salt catching at the complex afterglow of the food.
The practice of finishing with salt is straightforward: choose an artisan salt, scatter it across the surface of your food, and eat. The goal is to enhance both the intensity and the subtlety of flavors, illuminating their full panorama. The rewards are increased intensity and complexity of flavor, surprising textures, unexpected aromas, and a heightened awareness of the process of tasting food.
Three characteristics of salt come into play when it’s used to finish foods: crystal, mineral, and moisture.
Crystals are complicated beasts. The size of the crystal, its shape, and how it is composed have a variety of implications ranging from how it catches and refracts light to how it perches on top of or dissolves into a food to the texture it provides in your mouth. Granular crystals are firmer and more substantial than flake crystals. Solid crystals are harder than composite crystals. Larger crystals communicate more autonomy than smaller crystals. Flake crystals burst in an instant of irrepressible enthusiasm while granular crystals can be more urbane, taking their sweet time. Within an artisan salt of any given type, subtle or not so subtle variations from crystal to crystal can span an entire spectrum of texture and flavor combinations.
Mineral composition varies enormously from salt to salt. The minerals in some salts lend a sweetness, in others they have the effect of bitterness. The many types of fleur de sel on the shelves at The Meadow are arranged loosely from the super mineral-brine flavors of the North Atlantic, to the spicy notes of the mid-Atlantic, to the neutral complexity of the Mediterraneans, to the warm Indonesians, to the sweet Adriatics. The minerals in salt provide a variety of sensations, some of which progress while you taste them. A salt could start buttery and finish sweet. It could start out bitter and trickle off to a springwater freshness. Mineral composition often shapes the subtlest qualities of a salt.
Every salt also has a characteristic water content that influences its texture and how it interacts with food, from saturated sel gris at 13 percent residual moisture to desiccated Cambrian era rock salt at 0.01 percent residual moisture. Moisture provides two major things: mouthfeel and resiliency on food. The moister the salt, the less it will interact with the moisture in your food. Sprinkle supermoist sel gris on a juicy steak and the salt will just hang out, doing nothing, waiting for you to bite. A dry salt will instantly