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Mark Bitterman, selmelier (think sommelier for salt), is trying to conduct a salt tasting for 30 food writers, chefs and other culinary professionals gathered for a symposium at The Greenbrier, a West Virginia resort. It’s long after dinner and the writers are in full party mode, making this an extremely difficult audience. But Bitterman smiles shyly and continues his disquisition, waving a bottle of fleur de sel.

As food professionals, we’re all way beyond iodized table salt. Boxes of kosher salt fill our pantries and flavor our recipes. But are we ready to abandon kosher salt, as Bitterman advises, in favor of a good sea salt?

Since this is an improvised tasting, there are no vegetables or bread and butter on which to taste the salt. Instead, a volunteer passes through the crowd, spooning a tiny pile of salt on the side of each attendee’s fist in a manner reminiscent of other parties, a fact not lost on the crowd. A waiter circulates with bottles of water.

As we work our way through the salts, Bitterman describes, and we taste and ask questions. Since most finishing salt comes in larger crystals, one cookbook author wonders, “What about baking?” There is a ground fleur de sel, Bitterman answers. “If you could only pick one salt, which one would it be?” asks an editor. Bitterman points out the Fleur de Sel de Guerande from the Loire-Atlantique region of France.

Try as I might, it’s going to take a far better palate than my own to distinguish the minerals among the various salts. They seem mostly to vary in the shape of their crystals, which affects the intensity of their saltiness.

Bitterman moves on to the specialty salts: Turkish black salt, mixed with a touch of charcoal; smoked salts, dried over smoky wood fires; and an amazing truffle salt, containing small pieces of truffle that have infused the salt with an intense woodsy flavor. “That’s the one for scrambled eggs,” observe several authors almost at once.

Kosher salt is made for kashering, the process which draws blood from meat. It is 100 percent dry and absorbs moisture more rapidly than the moist sea salts. Bitterman recommends avoiding it in favor of a good sea salt. A number of chefs, no doubt thinking of the cases of kosher salt in their pantries and the cost of sea salt, seem reluctant to throw away their kosher stash. However, we all agree that a good finishing salt belongs on the table.

The next morning, I wake with a tongue that feels like the Bonneville Salt Flats and a newfound respect for salt.

Salt, the only mineral we eat in its raw form, is a simple chemical compound, sodium chloride. Both sodium and chlorine are essential for proper body functioning. Our bodies lose salt daily, through tears and perspiration, and we need to replenish it. There’s an old story about 18th-century bread recipes: They did not call for salt, because enough sweat dripped from the kneader onto the dough. In recent years, salt has been linked to high blood pressure and limiting salt intake has become something of a fetish. The culinary writer Jeffrey Steingarten, a contrarian to the last, has cited studies that seem to vindicate salt and instead blame fat and lack of exercise for health problems. Try telling that to Attila the Dietitian, my wife, for whom salt is only slightly less poisonous than arsenic.

Salt is hygroscopic — that is, it draws moisture out of plant and animal tissue. It also slows the rotting process long enough for the bacteria responsible for fermentation to grow, which is why salt preserves foods. Virtually every culture in history has used salt to preserve vegetables, fish and meat and created condiments with high salt content (soy sauce, fish sauce, the Roman garum, to name a few). What would prosciutto, herring, Maryland crab boils, bacalau, kim chee, sauerkraut, pickles, soy sauce or Tabasco be without salt? The Egyptians used natron, a naturally occurring mixture of sodium bicarbonate, sodium carbonate and sodium chloride, in the mummification process, although cut-rate mummies were preserved using only sodium chloride. If you are interested, I recommend Mark Kurlansky’s book “Salt” for a detailed look at its history.

In the earliest days of the planet, moisture washed away the soluble minerals which collected in depressions of exposed rocks. As the oceans formed, water evaporated, but the dissolved minerals stayed. Sodium chloride was among the most common of these minerals, and the oceans became increasingly salty over time. In fact, one method used to estimate when amphibians evolved is to measure the salt content of their blood and calculate when the ocean was that salty.

Sometimes parts of the ocean became blocked and evaporated, leaving salt deposits. Sometimes brine was forced from underground up into cracks in the rock, where it evaporated and left salt domes. Oceans, mines and domes are the sources of most of the salt we use.

The process for making salt from brine is essentially the same everywhere. You find a naturally occurring source of salt water — the ocean, a salt marsh, a brine spring — and evaporate it. As the water is reduced, the salt crystals form on the sides and the bottom of the container. The crystals are then raked into piles and removed.

When salt evaporates in ponds, most of it sinks to the bottom since brine is heavier than freshwater. In France, this salt often picks up traces of clay from the lining of the salt ponds, giving it a grayish color and a mineral taste. This salt is called sel gris, gray salt. Some salt evaporates as crystals that float on the surface of the ponds. This salt remains white and is called fleur de sel, flower of salt.

Much sea salt, such as Maldon salt, is evaporated in a series of basins that use the same principle as a maple syrup evaporator. Early settlers denuded Cape Cod’s forests to make the salt used to preserve codfish until 1776, when John Sears built a salt works that used the sun to evaporate the water. Windmills provided the power to pump the brine into evaporation trays.

Salt mines, which contain a layer of salt from prehistoric sources, are often mined like any other ore. Sometimes the salt is dissolved in water, with the brine then pumped to the surface, where it is evaporated.

AFTER ATTENDING THE TASTING at The Greenbrier, I decided to conduct one of my own. I bought a starter set of finishing salts from Bitterman, who with his wife runs The Meadow, a salt, chocolate, wine and flower shop (www.atthemeadow.com) in Portland, Ore. I added the Hawaiian red salt I’ve been using for a couple of years, plus some other locally obtained sea and smoked salts. My wife set out tiny salt dishes and we spooned out 12 salts, plus slices of cucumber, tomato, and bread and butter.

As we progressed, I served grilled chicken thighs, baked potatoes and salad. For dessert, we had a selection of chocolate-covered caramels provided by some friends in the chocolate business, Cocoapelli Chocolates (www.cocoapellichocolates.com).

The results were interesting. People gravitated toward the French sea salts, especially the Fleur de Sel de Guerande and to the Maldon salt, an English sea salt with large flat crystals. Bitterman had rhapsodized about crunching Maldon salt on a salad or a piece of roast chicken. Previously, the only salt crystals I’d crunched had been on pretzels, not an entirely pleasant experience. I can say that Maldon crystals are much more delicate and that, yes, crunching Maldon salt on a salad or a piece of grilled meat is delightful.

Both the Maldon and a lightly smoked Halon Mon Gold were amazing on the caramels, especially the soft runny ones. See the tasting notes on this blog, Salt Tasting Notes.

The consensus seemed to be that finishing salts do vary enough to make the search for one you like worthwhile. The more fun salts added a nice note to the table.

For mail order, look at The Meadow’s Web site, which offers around 50 kinds of salt, including a slab of Himalayan pink salt that you heat in the oven and cook on directly. Locally, Whole Foods in Hadley has a nice array of finishing salts at the cheese counter and Cooks Shop Here in Northampton also has a good selection (I recommend the Iburi Jio, a heavily smoked Japanese salt).

Some salt-related suggestions:

Never use table salt because it is mixed with aluminum anti-caking agents and the crystals are too small. Use a crystal salt — sea salt, gray salt or, yes, kosher salt — for salting food while cooking or at the table.

Toss shrimp with a tablespoon of salt and let sit for an hour before cooking to revive the sea taste.

Toss salt on grilling chicken or steak for a simple yet powerful flavoring.

Dress a delicate summer green salad with a couple of tablespoons of good olive oil (I use an oil pressed with blood oranges), a splash or two of balsamic and a sprinkling of Maldon salt.

Try various salts on cut tomatoes.

Sprinkle a smoked salt on potato salad or grilled corn.

Don’t omit desserts from the list. My father has always sprinkled salt on his watermelon, and adding salt to chocolate or caramel has become a trendy dessert of late.

Recipes

Ma La Shrimp

Homemade Hot Sauce

Cucumber Salad

Orginally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, May 30, 2008.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Pioneer Valley Markets, Recipes, Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.