You may (or may not) have noticed, but salt is all the rage. There seem to be two parts to the trend: high-end salts with interesting provenance and even more interesting colors and textures, as well as the salting of all things sweet.
Have you tried a chocolate chip cookie with a sprinkle of salt on top? If you haven’t, you’re missing out. Ditto salt in caramel. I even tried sprinkling some on a batch of brownies a couple of weeks ago, and was quite pleased. I mean–they were brownies–what’s not to like?
Salt balances sugar, bringing out nuances that would otherwise be masked by unrelenting sweetness. As a garnish on savory foods, salt highlights the flavor of the food itself.
And the choices are mind-boggling. Remember when we were kids, and the choice was the blue cylinder (“when it rains, it pours”), or the blue box (Kosher)? Now you can buy pink salt from the Himalayas, black lava salt from Hawaii, or grey salt from France. You can buy fine, damp grains, big flaky crystals, or a solid chunk that you have to grate over your food.
It’s all mildly interesting, but only mildly. I have enjoyed, for several years, having a larger-grained “interesting” salt on hand, to sprinkle over some things as a garnish (tomatoes, especially), but I recently found myself in a spice shop that sells tiny quantities of a whole range of salts. I bought several, for comparison purposes, and I’m hooked. My favorite is the combination pictured above: a plain flake salt, and the same thing, dried in lava beds to make it black. They’re (according to the label) from Cyprus, in the Mediterranean.
But what I like about them is the flavor–clean, bright, . . . salty.
I’m having all kinds of fun sprinkling little contrasting lines of salt on our food, or using black salt on pure white things, or little crunchy flakes on an squishy soft tomato. Not a bad deal–hours of entertainment from $5 worth of salt. Cheaper than a movie!