Sunday, October 25, 2009

A salty tale

This morning Ray had left the empty salt container on the kitchen counter to remind me to buy salt.

Salt is something I don't have to buy very often. I'm sure this box has lasted for more than a year—maybe even two years. Long enough that the little metal pour spout thingie fell off. Actually that might have happened the day I opened it. Not a great design in my opinion. This is the salt I use for cooking. Ray made homemade noodles yesterday and finished off the box. I have a salt grinder from IKEA that holds chunks of sea salt. If food needs salt after cooking that's what we use. They say sea salt is "saltier" and you use less at the table. I'm skeptical about that, but I like the idea of grinding salt and it is prettier than plain old salt and I like the crystalline crunch. The salt in the box cost less than $1, if memory serves. The sea salt is a little more.

I read the Sunday paper over breakfast and read this article about "artisan salt". Hmmm. Seems this couple has a store in N. Portland where they sell fancy salt. This is not like garlic salt or celery salt, this is salt from exotic locations that contains some traces of minerals from their origins. Their basic salts run between $3.50 and $11.50 for a 1.5 ounce package. (the box above holds 26 ounces). Fancy smoked and volcanic salts are quite a lot more. My eyebrows shot up as I read, "Why use artificial chemicals in your cooking when you have a 100 percent natural salt made by guys using wooden rakes along the shores of the purest oceans in the world — with methods perfected by 3,000 years of experience?" He calls regular table salt an artificial chemical. Hmm. I looked at the ingredients on my box of salt—salt.

Seems the use of regular, or even kosher salt is a mark of poor taste, as he (shop owner Mark Bittner) goes on to say, "I say if the cheese at your house is Velveeta, then the salt you keep there can be kosher. But, since salt is the most effective flavor enhancer in food and the most commonly used ingredient in recipes, why not use a good one?" By now my eyeballs were rolling like pingpong balls. When describing the "spectacular" taste of an exotic Hawaiian salt on popcorn, he finished by saying, "I have salt moments like this almost every day. When I don't, I am told that I mope." I was snorting and guffawing by now. If you can stand more, go read his wife's fantasy about salt made from Marlon Brando's tears! I'm not making this up.

I remembered a story I heard years ago. Ray's father was a prisoner of war in Japan during WWII. The survivors of that camp used to meet yearly. Theirs was a bond that kept them in contact until the ends of their lives. One year Ray and I went to their annual dinner and I sat next to one of the former POWs and he told me the one little thing he missed most during those years was salt. A diet of rice and some occasional root vegetables was almost unbearably bland. A little salt would have made a world of difference. At one point he was taken, by ship, to another camp and he said when the ship pulled into the dock at its destination, the docks were adjacent to a mountain of salt processed from sea water. He said he wanted just a handful of that mountain of salt, even a pinch, but of course had no way of getting to it, but as the prisoners were taken from the ship past the salt plant they could taste salt on their lips, from the air. "Heavenly", he said.

I got my groceries at Trader Joe's this afternoon. The salt they carry is sea salt, but the salt, itself, looks exactly like the old Western Family table salt. The only ingredient: sea salt. It cost $1.49 for 26.5 ounces. The higher price may be, in part, because of the packaging, which looks to be superior to the old paper box and metal spout. It seems like a bargain to me.


16 comments:

  1. Am I a snob because I have Hawaiian sea salt in my pantry? I was just trying to be conscientious and buy local! It does taste great, but I had to go buy Morton's too because it works better for baking. Chunks of salt in your birthday cake aren't that fun.

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  2. Oh, my! I thought the recession might put an end to some of the pretentious conspicuous consumption, but if these guys can make a living selling 1.5 ounce of "artisan salt" for $11.50 I guess I'm wrong.

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  3. There is a sucker born every minute.The POW's story is an even more sobering reminder of how silly people can be.

    In the UK in the 70s, we had a brief sugar shortage, and there was panic in the city where I worked when a rumour then went round that there was to be a world-wide shortage of salt. The supermarket shelves were cleared in the space of 2 hours. I often wonder what people did with all that stockpiled salt.

    Great post, Terry - thank you!

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  4. What a crock! Am I low brow because I use kosher salt I wonder?

    Now, you wanna talk wine...?????

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  5. what a funny salty tale!!! Thanks for sharing it!

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  6. I've been using a lot of kosher salt lately - with fabric paints! I like to save the used salt, which has soaked up color from the paint, and use again to adde little flecks of color to another piece. Don't use much in actual cooking, when I have to do that :-).

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  7. Now what kind of salt does this dude use for his cheap tequilla shots? :)

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  8. A friend received a package of 'selected' salts as a hostess gift. She gave me one jar to try on the tops of homemade crackers. The larger chunks didn't stay on well unless I pressed them into the dough and the taste was no different than regular table salt. I don't think she has ever used any of the other jars. Del
    [Serendipity? The 'secret word' on this comment is "porse". Even when it rains?]

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  9. So Terry did the article bother to mention the state of the oceans. How close is the native with the wooden rack to the raw sewage outlet, or the ship graveyard? Seems along the lines of advertising which is build on fear, fear we smell, fear we have wrinkles, fear we can't get a young hottie without the right beer, car and then of course fear we can't satisfy her/him without "enhancement" ...sigh I am tired.

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  10. I bet he can taste "saddle leather" too. LOL Though I gotta say that I was sorely tempted to buy hickory smoked salt to put on grilled ribeye steak. Except that the little bottle was $16. Doh! Still. The little sample I had at New Seasons was really amazing. Who knew you could smoke salt?

    Cook's Illustrated did a test on the various salts. No difference could be discerned between the various expensive ones and kosher. The Morton's type with iodine tasted a bit chemically to some depending on use (baking vs sprinkling). Essentially, for sprinkling on food, if you just had flake or slightly chunkier salt, then it tasted "saltier".

    Perhaps Mr. Bittner has more salt-sensitive taste buds? Or maybe he gets his salt 'downstream' of the farmed fisheries so it had solid 'enhancements' in addition to the minerals. LOL!

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  11. Thanks Terry,
    What a bunch of snobby crap these foodie people try to get over. I have to wonder, in this increasingly polluted universe, what comes along with the salt gathering. I guess I just don't measure up since I use Kosher salt. I was given a Malden salt caramel to try and it was delicious but I couldn't help wondering if it needed to be $15 salt to taste that way.
    Thanks for your tips regarding the computer.

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  12. I had to be on a salt-free diet for a month before having a radioactive iodine treatment. I'm not sure which was worse -- the month without salt or the week in isolation. I love the taste of salt on my food!

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  13. Terry, I am scared to ask this, but have you received your quilt yet? It was mailed two weeks ago!! Email me please... fmarnold.cpa@gmail.com

    Frances

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  14. I guess it is a good idea to use sea salt because it contains the full range of minerals that also we came from in the evolution. But as the seas are also polluted today, the even better idea is to use the socalled Himalayan salt from Pakistan (the orange or pink kind). It is also used for lamps; actually, you can eat such a lamp by and by. I believe that the taste of this salt is softer and rounder -- that's how it seems to me -- and I don't use any other if I can. The white salt, after all, is an industrial dump which has been freed from all the other minerals in order to allow chemical processing. So the most clever way to dispose of it is to sell it in the food sale...
    By the way, it is not the butter that causes cardiac infarction; it is the salted butter.

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  15. Mrs Salt-Snob had better hope that Marlon Brando had not been using contact lens solution before he started crying.

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  16. There must be something to our need for salt - it's in our blood and tears. I think about the expression that someone is "worth their salt" - a reference to the fact that Roman soldiers were paid in salt. I've been using kosher salt to carry dye powder over my fabrics and I know I spilled some out on the deck because a squirrel has been busily chewing at the wood in that area.

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