Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [98]
The advent of industrially refined table and kosher salts gave cooks a standardized, characterless salt, and salt measurement has since been specified in terms of teaspoons or grams—though a substantial number of recipes still recommend salting to taste. The conceit of the modern recipe is that if you follow the directions exactly, you will get the correct result. Some recipe publishers are so good at testing and adjusting their recipes that it seems no matter who you are and what you do they come out great every time. Even so, there is a drawback to this approach. If instead of food that is predictable and uniform, you would rather taste the seasonal and regional qualities that make foods special, you will get much better results by paying close attention to the character of the ingredients and adjusting your recipe accordingly. If the tomato is plucked warm from the sunshine of your backyard garden and smells like it’s about to burst with sweetness, you should not follow a recipe developed for people who have ice-hard supermarket tomatoes artificially reddened in a haze of ethylene gas. Show the true colors of your food by touching it, smelling it—knowing it. Assist it with any shortcomings and give it room to show its virtues. Pinching salt onto your food not only gives you a better connection with your salt, it encourages you to think about the individual character of each of your ingredients. The gram figures are the number of grams in each type of pinch, whereas the teaspoon measurements indicate the number of each type of pinch it takes to make up the measurement.
HOW TO SALT A SOUP
The proper salting of a soup requires a genuine sensitivity to the nature of the soup. The traditional way is to add all the salt needed to fully season the dish into the liquid. The result is that the first bite and the last have identical flavors of salt. But stratified, clustered flake salts like Halen Môn and Cornish sea salts have the potential to change all that.
Make your soup, adding less than half the salt that you normally would. When you serve it, pass flake salt at the table. The right flake salt (or even sel gris) sprinkled on your soup will float on the surface for minutes before dissolving. So when the liquid with this crystalline flotilla slips off the spoon across your tongue, the crackling mineral architecture of the salt catches your attention. Your tongue then presses the salt up against the roof of your mouth, arresting its movement toward your throat, and the liquid around it glitters, an eddy of freshly salted intensity, until it is swirled away by the next sip. Finishing a soup with salt tunes our senses to the singular sensation of salt and frees the rest of the soup to tell a tale of its own quieter mood.
UNCOOKED
Quails, ducks and smaller birds are salted and eaten uncooked; all other kinds of birds, as well as fish, excepting those that are sacred to the Egyptians, are eaten roasted or boiled —Herodotus
Salt breaks down the cell structure of most fresh raw ingredients, which is why salt breaks down the cell structure of most fresh raw ingredients, which is why salt lingering on lettuce will turn it limp, and burying a fish in salt will cause it to experience the kinds of changes usually associated with cooking (firming flesh, loss of moisture, changes in color and opacity) without ever exposing it to heat. The changes become noticeable the second the salt starts to dissolve and progress steadily but slowly as long as the salt stays in contact with the ingredient. This is yet another reason why I suggest salting raw food just before eating it: to get the greatest sensual pleasure from the salt while impacting the physical nature of the food as little as possible. This is especially true when you are preparing fresh raw ingredients. There are times when you want to take advantage of the physical effects of salt on food (when curing salmon or pickling cucumbers, for example) by letting the elements commingle