Stitch In My Side

Salt

I am a bit of a salt nerd. Whenever I am traveling I look for interesting local specimens, some of which I add to my own collection, and some of which I give as gifts to unwitting friends who wonder what they have done to deserve a kilo of salt instead of chocolates or some local pottery. As I was cleaning my cupboard yesterday I had quite a pile on my counter, and thought it would be fun to document the array of colors, sizes and flavors that are currently found in my pantry.

So, from the top:

::Gros Sel Gris de Guerande::
Bought in Brittany for about a Euro per kilo. It is made from evaporated seawater, and is full of minerals that lend it a rich, complex flavor. It is my standby salt in the kitchen, currently residing in my salt grinder and used for everything from salad dressing to pasta water and any run of the mill seasoning. The crystals are very wet, and range in size from teeny tiny up to a nearly centimeter in diameter.

::Fleur de sel::
Also bought in Brittany, where it is harvested when the west wind blows and forms a thin layer of salt flake on the evaporation ponds. The crystals are small and flake-shaped. Traditionally this was harvested by women, as it was considered too time consuming for the men to deal with (they would get paid by weight for the salt harvested, and as you can see this is much smaller and lighter than the grey salt). The women would then use the proceeds to buy household items. I’m guessing this has changed drastically since this salt became hip- it’s now sold for enormous amounts everywhere outside of Brittany.

::Australian Macrobiotic Sea Salt::
This is a grey, large crystal salt as well, harvested in the same manner as the salt from Guerande. I use it anywhere that calls for nice big grains of salt, like roasting chicken or seasoning meat.

::Australian Murray River Salt::
I love this salt. It is my favorite these days, with a light pink color and pyramid shaped crystals. It is harvested from the Murray River in Australia, where salination is a serious problem for grazing and farm lands, so buying it helps solve some environmental problems, too. This is the salt that I sprinkled across the top of the caramels, as the grey salts were too big, and the fleur de sel too tiny.

::Pink Himalayan Salt::
This salt is harvested in the Himalayan mountains, from deposits that were at one time ocean beds. It has a lovely pink tinge to it. It is small grained, and I use it in lieu of regular fine grained sea salt.

::Hawaiian Aelea Sea Salt::
This salt is medium grained, and has a lovely vivid pink color that comes from clay and iron oxide deposits. I use it to garnish when I want something that is going to really stand out, like a bowl of steamed edamame.

::Hawaiian Black Sea Salt::
This one is from Trader Joes. The black color comes from charcoal and it ends up staining everything it comes into contact with (including your mouth). I thought it would be an interesting garnish salt, but because the color bleeds, I just don’t end up using it much.

::Truffle Salt::
This was a gift from Justin’s sister- it is a fine grained sea salt that has been infused with truffles, and it is potent. It has an incredibly rich and deep flavor that goes well with meat.

::Fine grained iodized sea salt::
Because even in a kitchen with nine (nine! how did that happen!) kinds of salt, one needs to have a plain old fine grained salt for things like chocolate chip cookies. I pretty much only use this one for baking, when I need something that is going to dissolve easily into a batter.

Caramel Ice Cream with Fleur de Sel

Inspired by the salted caramels that Justin and I made for Christmas, I decided to try making the salted caramel ice cream recipe that was published in the NYT this past October. I had all of the ingredients, and with the use of Lily's ice cream maker, I was able to pull it all together. The picture above is the first taste, as it came out of the ice cream maker, but before it was frozen, so it's a bit soft. According to Molly over at Orangette it will firm up into something even more perfect after a few hours in the freezer. I'll let you know how it was received at our New Year's Eve dinner, when it tops the bittersweet chocolate souffles that were made just to accompany it. Yum!

I have put a set of photos of the process on Flikr, to see them, click here.

Holiday sweets

Candied and chocolate covered orange and lemon peel
(Orangette and Citronette)
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Chocolate covered caramels with Australian Murray River salt
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::Truffles::
Cardamom and Black Pepper topped with Vanilla Sugar
Lemon Myrtle and Verbena topped with Meyer Lemon zest
Kahlua topped with Espresso bean

This Christmas, I decided to stop my cycle of wanting to find the perfect gift for everyone in my life, and being willing to spend more than I probably should to get it. Justin and I took a look at our finances, and decided that we wanted to give gifts that were thoughtful and lovely without having to spend beyond the disposable income in a pay period (no debt!). So we decided to make a gifts for our nearest and dearest- an assortment of truffles, caramels and candied citrus- all handmade with fresh, fair trade and organic ingredients.

It was a fun process, aside from the first failed batches of caramel (note to self- there is a reason that all of the recipes call for heavy cream, and as it turns out half and half is not an adequate substitution!). It took three days of solid kitchen time, and probably about 3 pounds of holiday weight gain to properly do quality control, but it was well worth it in the end. All of those sheets of treats were just beautiful to behold, and it was utterly satisfying to send them off and know that we had created every last bite that our friends and families would enjoy.

What's in your kitchen?

Justin gave me three fabulous foodie presents this Christmas:

-A pass for cooking classes
-An anthology of the best food writing of 2006
-The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollen

I love to cook, and love to eat. I am also a well-educated consumer, and choose to make thoughtful choices every day about where I buy my food, how it has been grown/raised, how far it has traveled to arrive at my door, and how processed it is.

That is not to say that I adhere perfectly to my principles- one can occasionally find me at my local Trinidadian eatery, enjoying a succulent curry chicken Roti and choosing not to think about the fact that the chicken I am currently consuming is most definitely not organic, nor was it free range or even humanely slaughtered for that matter. If I was more principled, I would either not eat out (the horror! all that food not tasted! all those things gone undiscovered!), or I would only eat at restaurants that serve local and/or organic ingredients. We have one of those in Baltimore, and it is horrible. Actually, I take that back. The food is fantastic- the service and the prices are outrageous (and not in a good way).

But I digress. I am only a couple of chapters into the Michael Pollen book, but I am already horrified in ways that I didn't expect to be. So far there has not been a lot of new information for me to digest, it is rather that all of the disparate facts that I have already read are all presented together in one place, so that the connections cannot be ignored. That we are ruining our individual and public health, our environment and our economy all in one fell swoop with the batshit crazy ways that food is raised in this country makes me so angry.

I felt this way after reading Fast Food Nation, and was gratified to know that I was already on the right track, and that there were simple choices that I could make to ensure that was not contributing to the problems described in the book. However, I feel that the issues raised so far in The Omnivore’s Dilemma are much harder to resolve. Only buying meat and dairy products that were raised on grass- not corn, soy, animal products and byproducts, or some other food that was never intended to be consumed by those animals- not totally simple, but since the stuff I buy from our local, organic producer already meets those standards it’s possible. Not eating any corn or soy products ever again- not so much so.

Short of never buying anything that has been prepared or preserved in some way, I don’t know how to avoid contributing to the industrial agricultural complex. I am now reading my food labels even more closely, which is kind of exhausting. I am all about being a conscious consumer, but sometimes I just don’t want to have to think about whether something contains a certain product, or if it is fair trade, or if it is organic, or any number of things. I would like to be able to just take that jar of olives off the shelf and know that when it says ‘kalamata olives in olive oil’ on the label, that doesn’t mean ‘kalamata olives in oil, with some corn byproducts, and unpronounceable chemical compounds, that a little kid was forced to pick for pennies a day’. It doesn’t seem like much to ask, really.

I know that most of what I buy contributes to an alternative economic and moral landscape than that of factory farming and industrial agriculture, but what worries me is the cumulative effect of the complacency that we all have. When I look in my fridge and cupboards I can see that most of what I have in my house will meet the standards that I have set for myself, but what is even more obvious to me are the items which don’t meet those standards. Those items that were bought because I was in a hurry, or short on cash, or just feeling too lazy to read the back label to see if the front was lying to me. Those are the items that I know most people are buying for those same reasons, and I worry that the negative effect of contributing to the mainstream ends up exponentially greater than the effect of supporting an alternative. Like adding a drop of water to a tsunami, instead of a ripple, so to speak.