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Salt Takes on New Role in the Kitchen

 
 
  At Le Bernardin, it turns up in delicate chocolate preparations; at Beacon, it offers support and heat to oysters; at I Coppi, it does not mix with flour; at Barça 18, it makes a faint appearance in cocktails; while at Courtright’s in Chicago, it marries with vanilla or fennel pollen to then adorn savory and sweet dishes. The name of this versatile ingredient? Salt---but of course not just any salt. Maldon, fleur, rock are some of its monikers, black, gray, and pink some of its tints, Hawaii, the Himalayas, and Wales some of its birthplaces.

By experimenting with various salts, which have different crystal sizes and thus dissolving speed for example, some chefs are transforming the condiment into a lead actor in their kitchens.

“ Four out 10 desserts on the menu feature salt overtly,” said Michael Laiskonis, pastry chef at Le Bernardin, whose Mille Feuille includes Alaea sea salt, a pink salt from Hawaii. “I do a chocolate cashew and caramel tart for example, where I use salted cashews that are coarsely ground up with caramel.”

At Courtright’s, Chef Jonathan Harootunian uses Maldon sea salt from England as a basis for a large variety of flavored salts, which he uses to “augment other flavors in dishes,” he said. Because Maldon salt consists of large flakes, it retains a crunchy texture when placed upon other foods, and has a light taste that combines well with other flavors. Harootunian adds ingredients such as dried and ground violets, homemade curry powder, or black cardamom to the salt, and then uses these flavored salts to garnish dishes like butternut squash, chocolate cakes, or lobster medallions.

“ It’s exciting for the customers, and it gives me a little bit of a different element, an edge,” Harootunian explained. “We all have to find our niche, to be a little bit different, a little bit off the beaten path. Salt is something I’m kind of working on. My niche is taking very simple ingredients and elevating them.”

All salts are either mined or collected from the sea. In his opus On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, Harold McGee wrote that worldwide, salt provenance is evenly divided between both kinds, while in the United States, 95 percent of the national production comes from salt mines. Salt found in mines comes from deposits left after oceans retreated in prehistoric times, while sea salt is the product of water evaporation in (mostly) manmade salt fields.

In his BLT restaurants, Chef Laurent Tourondel smokes a crystalline salt and uses it to season steak both before and after cooking it. He also uses fleur de sel to finish dishes, and flavors salt with anise, lemon, and black pepper for a salt-baked fish preparation. At 610 Magnolia in Louisville, Kentucky, Chef Edward Lee favors Alder smoked sea salt, which comes from Maine.

“ I’m very attracted to its smoky flavor,” Lee said. “It’s very natural. A lot of smoked sea salts are flavored artificially, with color added in. Alder tastes like a camp fire. They smoke it over a very long period of time, very slowly, and the color is more like charcoal. It almost makes you feel you’re eating something that’s been roasted over camp fire.”

Chefs are not the only ones interested in experimenting with salts. The consumer market for specialty salts is booming, and home cooks are buying. “Over the last three years we’ve seen an explosion of salt,” said Mary Lou Heiss, owner of the Massachusetts’ based specialty food store Cooks Shop Here. “I think part of it is that everybody kind of has an idea of what to do with salt, a sense of how to use it. It becomes a way to add good flavors without adding too much fat. People also like ingredients that are really visual, and some salts are larger, some look like crystal. There’s also a real mystique about salt, it’s such an ancient ingredient.”

Most specialty salts come with a price that greatly surpasses the dollar or so per pound that regular table salt commands. At Cooks Shop Here, Himalayan pink salt retails for $16 a pound, for example, while half a pound of Maestrale, a fine sea salt from Sicily, costs $7.49 at Garden of Eden.

“ When salt is very expensive and special, I try not to use it as flavoring agent where it would get lost,” Lee said. “For that I use regular table salt or kosher salt. When I need saltiness I use regular salt.”

Heiss concurred: “I try to get my customers to use these as a finishing salt instead of in cooking, because of the price. It also allows you to really taste the salt. Use it like you would a really good olive oil.”
 


The Taste Test

In order to determine if specialty salts were really worth their grain of---well, you get it---the Main Course recently organized a salt tasting with ICE® chef-instructors and administrators. They sampled eight varieties of salt: handcrafted Balinese sea salt, pink salt from the Himalayas, grey sea salt from the French Island of Ré, fine sea salt from Sicily, French fleur de sel, Maldon sea salt from England, Halen Môn’s smoked salt from Wales, and black salt. To determine how well these salts paired with food, the tasters appraised them each on bites of tomato, raw tuna, medium-rare porterhouse, and bittersweet chocolate. While the Maldon and fleur de sel won overwhelming praises for their clear taste, food-friendly texture, and taste enhancing properties, black salt bit the dust. Its sulfuric notes made every other food taste like egg salad, and one taster even warned on his reporting sheet that mixing it with chocolate was something “not to try at home.” The smoked salt worked best with the steak and chocolate, but only in small quantity as it quickly became overpowering if not dispensed parsimoniously. The fine texture of the Sicilian sea salt made it dissolve too quickly on its partners, and as such did not allow for any subtlety in taste. Salts with larger crystals dissolved more slowly, which created complex layers of flavors in most of their pairings.