Varied color, taste and texture distinguish specialty salts
March 29, 2005
BY DEBRA HALE-SHELTON
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Adding salt to taste isn't so simple in these days of specialty foods, exotic ingredients -- and probably more kinds of salt than you, and certainly your grandmother, ever dreamed of.
Salt connoisseurs aren't just shaking out the stuff. They're carefully pinching it, savoring the texture and color as much as the taste of often-coarse, usually hand-harvested crystals of white, pink, red, gray, golden, even black salt.
Take Rob Seideman, owner of the Internet business Salt Traders, www.salttraders.com. He and his wife and business partner, Kelly Hall, keep 14 kinds of salt in their kitchen pantry.
"I have them all in my kitchen because there is no such thing as the best salt," Seideman says, interviewed by phone. "There is only the best salt for the purpose at hand."
Visit a specialty food store and you can find everything from sea salt to flake salt, smoked salt to rock salt, kosher salt to table salt. There's fine and coarse salt. There's even salt like the Vikings once made.
There's inexpensive salt for routine cooking, and wallet-busting salt best used as a precious garnish.
The salt from France known as fleur de sel is the delicate-flavored pale "caviar of salt," says Patty Erd, co-owner of the Spice House in Chicago, Evanston, Ill., and Milwaukee. It smells of the sea and violets and is excellent as a garnish on roasted asparagus or cherry tomatoes.
There's the golden-brown, almost jewel-like Danish Viking smoked sea salt. Seideman was recently selling an ounce of it for $9.75. It's so delectable and unusual in taste that Seideman says, "I don't refer to it as my favorite salt because it's so much more than a salt. I really refer to it more as my favorite ingredient." He suggests using it as a dry rub for meat. Some restaurants use it to give other foods a smoked taste.
Indeed, I found the Viking salt to be the one of several sampled that was so delicious and aromatic (it conjured up for me a favorite back-home barbecue spot) that I not only ate a few stand-alone crystals but reached for seconds.
Unlike many other salts, this one, created with evaporated seawater and a smoky fire of juniper, cherry, elm, beech and oak, has a mild yet full taste. My palate is in good company: A Saveur magazine article described the Viking salt as tasting "like a bonfire."
Some salts are as exquisite in color as in taste.
There's peach-colored salt from the Australian Murray River, which gets its water from the snowy Australian Alps. This salt's light flakes have a mild flavor and work well as a finishing salt, on a baked potato, for instance.
There's Hawaiian red alae sea salt, which appears apricot when fine rather than coarse. It has a strong, more lasting taste and makes for a gorgeous presentation. The salt, after being dried, is combined with baked Hawaiian red clay for added minerals. Chef Tom Colicchio of New York City's Gramercy Tavern finishes white-fleshed turbot with it.
This salt and Hawaiian black lava sea salt, evaporated with purified black lava rock to add minerals and then combined with activated charcoal for color and detoxifying effects, are the hottest-selling salts at the Spice House, which offers 13 varieties of salt.
Seideman says one New York restaurant serves slivers of raw black bass sprinkled with black lava sea salt. He also suggests trying it rimmed on the glass of a mango margarita.
Seideman acknowledges that basically "salt is salt" -- more or less pure sodium chloride, to be specific.
Still, there are distinct taste differences related to the crystals' color, texture and shape, as well as to additives. Seideman likens salt to Parmesan cheese: Put cheese shavings on one salad and finely grated cheese on another, and the salads will taste different even though the cheese came from the same wedge. "Salt is the same way," he says.
"Texture is critical to all good cooking," he points out. "It's why a baked potato topped with butter and sour cream tastes different than mashed potatoes made with the very same ingredients."
Seideman explains that salts, depending on the region from which they come, have widely varying crystalline structures and, hence, the decidedly different textures and tastes.
As with good wines, pairing is important.
"If you take a hundred-dollar bottle of wine and you pair it incorrectly," Seideman says, "it is not going to taste good." The same goes for salt.
Some chefs, for example, sprinkle fleur de sel on top of chocolate cake -- a topping that in Seideman's opinion is better than icing. But take care: He warns that sel gris (gray salt) will ruin that cake, although "there's nothing better sprinkled on broiled, buttery prawns than moist and crunchy sel gris."
Or consider the lovely Peruvian pink salt, harvested from a spring 10,000 feet high in the Andes Mountains and hauled down on burros. It may look genteel. But it has a very mineral taste and would be far better on "a big fat piece of tenderloin" or on raw vegetables, such as thick slices of a Jersey tomato.
When it comes to making french fries or homemade tortilla chips, items where "saltiness is key," Seideman says you can't beat Mexican Benequenes, a white salt originating from a small brine well more than 2,000 years old. The brine is heated in iron pangas (huge skillets) atop wood-burning adobe ovens. As the salt forms, it is packed into straw-matting tubes, which form benequenes, or loaves of salt.
Erd believes smoked salts will be "the next wave of the salt movement." She recently was adding two such salts to her inventory: fumee de sel, or chardonnay- and oak-smoked fleur de sel, and a Balinese sea salt smoked over a fire of coconut shells covered with kaffir lime leaves. This latter process makes for a crispy flavor without the aftertaste that a liquid smoke might have, she explains.
Mike Zoske, too, who cofounded the Redmond, Wash.-based SaltWorks ( www.seasalt.com), which does 60 percent to 70 percent of its business on the Internet, has noticed the growing popularity of smoked salts. "Our biggest gourmet food salt right now is Alderwood smoked salt, which we smoke ourselves," also using chardonnay and oak chips, he says.
Zoske says his company's gourmet salt sales have risen fourfold in the past year. "People are always looking for something new and something different, and it finally worked its way to salt," he says.
Chef2Chef News Desk