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You may have heard the saying "When in Rome..." used to justify or support activities undertaken abroad which might usually be considered out of character. I seem to carry my interests with me and pursue them wherever I happen to be - more along the lines of, say, when a Martian might find itself in Rome.
I like salt, much to the consternation of my father. But not so much the ordinary iodized, granulated, abrasive stuff that food distributors sell in unrefillable plastic shakers. Rather, I am intrigued - nay, fascinated - by the incredible variety of edible salts that exist. Some among you may say, "For Pete's sake, it's SALT!" And to a point you would be right, but the chemists among us would remark that pretty much any combination of cation and anion can be considered a salt, whether these ions are single atoms or charged molecular fragments. There are some exceptions - please explore. But I like the ones we can eat.
With little exception, the one we can eat and which our bodies require (to a point) is sodium chloride (Na+, Cl-). But rarely in the wild can it be collected in pure form, and hooray for that! Otherwise we would not get pink salt from the Himalayas, grey salt from the Norman coast, pink and yellow salt from Australia, black salt from Cyprus, "black salt" from India, or red salt from Hawai'i, just to name a few... In reality, these are all mostly Sodium Chloride, but either they contain "impurities" in the form of other mineral or salt compounds or they exist in a mixture or matrix with things like charcoal, certain types of dried algae, seaweed, or clay. Any of these additions change the flavour of the salt. Some processed salt is iodized so as to prevent goitres, but rarely does this have much of an effect on taste unless way too much iodine is used.
The other widely variable quality of salts is the texture. Most people are familiar with granulated table salt, rock salt for melting the ice on the stairs, and maybe the superfine variety sometimes used on popcorn. But when salt crystallizes on its own and is then subject to meteorological or geological forces it comes out in amazing shapes (all admittedly based on the cubic crystal structure of NaCl.) Salt from deep underground comes in great big lumps and slabs, solid as the rock it is. Tidal rivers leave thin, wispy crystals along their edges. Salt pools drying in the sun produce the delicate flowers of salt - fleur de sel, and also hollow pyramids that grow upward on their own. And further slow drying produces smaller, crunchy crystals that are fantastic in salads. Each of these textures adds a different something to the dishes to which they're added. Cyprus Flake on a slice of radish, French grey salt on a salad, Hawai'ian red salt as a garnish on sesame noodles or roasted fish.
And I'm not even going to get into the myriad flavoured salts - the most incredibly deadly (in a good way) being black truffle salt. SaltWorks is a good place to get some idea of the global variety.
All of the aforementioned salts exist in the rarefied reaches of the gourmetosphere. Salt as a commodity and ingredient is seemingly commonplace (even if it was not always so - see Mark Kurlansky's Salt.) But as you'll see below, people sometimes bypass the processor/middleman and get their salt directly from the source.
I was recently in The Gambia, where they dearly love their salty food. And not just NaCl, but NaC5H8NO4, otherwise known as MSG. [Aside: when it is used in such prodigious quantities, you can definitely taste MSG...] Leaving MSG aside, since that must be commercially produced by distilling fermented algae, for example, salt in The Gambia can be taken directly from the river Gambia, which is long, flat, tidal, and brackish for more than half the length of the country. The village I stayed in was close enough to the river (and to large salt flats) that raw gathered salt was sold in the daily women's market for the price of roughly 18 cents for a large coffee can full of crystals. Women in the village would sometimes process the salt with iodine but usually would use it raw. And in this case I do mean raw.
The Gambia river is not exactly the cleanest, though there is little, if any, industrial pollution because most industry of any kind happens within about ten miles of the coast. As you go upriver there is little besides fishing villages and one town on an island far upstream. Parasites and bacteria abound, as does very fine silt and some larger particles of plants and plastic. The additional challenge is that often the salt was simply scraped from the top of the salt flats, bringing some of the riverbed with it. 
Being the cook, chemist, nerd, salt-lover, and perfectionist that I can be, I decided to purify and refine some of the salt to bring home. In the process of doing so I thoroughly grossed out some of my friends, covered much of the kitchen in super-saturated salt water, and produced a mountain of tiny, fluffy, pale-grey crystals. Here's the process:
Step 1: Get salt. I bought two cans-full of raw river salt from a woman in the market, mostly using gesticulation to communicate. It was grey-yellow-brown and in lumps.
Step 2: Boil, boil, and boil some more. When in doubt of the sterility of something, boil the Dickens out of it. And by Dickens, I mean all of the little creatures that might want to take up an inconvenient and distressing residence in your intestines. And hot water dissolves more salt than cold, which is useful if you're trying to purify a lot of it. Thankfully I found a very large cauldron (though I didn't dance around it...much.) 
Step 3: Skim. Some of the lighter stuff floated to the top in a rather nauseating scummy film that I poured off. However, this still left a really murky brew.
Step 4: Make filter apparatus. The kitchen had a tall ceramic teapot (tea being one of the foundations of Gambian social interaction) and I combined this with an old milk-powder can, some Melita paper coffee filters (God only knows why they were there - coffee in West Africa seems to be entirely instant Nescafé), and another funny small filter funnel that didn't seem to have much of a purpose elsewhere. Ultimately, the Melita filters were the most useful and removed the most crud ("crud" being a highly technical term, of course.) I punched some holes in the bottom of the can and used it to hold the paper filters, and then also cut a hole in the can lid to fit the filter funnel. Voilà ! A two-stage filter.
Step 5: Filter! I had to pour slowly because both filters would clog and the paper filters would either disintegrate or get crusted with salt after a bit of work.
Step 6: Results. See the difference? (I actually filtered twice.) And see what the filters removed? Degutante!
Step 7: Boil dry. Or almost - it's hard to remove all of the water from a big bunch of salt by boiling. Some of it started climbing over the edge of the pot, too.
Step 8: Bake until fully dry. Baking the pan of salt produced a solid brick since I did not keep it constantly moving to break up the crystal structure as it dried. It also produced some areas of bluish-tinted salt. I found a small handful of these tinted crystals and I have no idea what caused the color. Trace minerals? Any ideas?
Step 9: Powder. I used the back of a spoon and also a wooden pounding mallet to crush the salt into a relatively uniform powder. 
It came out surprisingly light and soft. And then I packed it up - and hoped I didn't get too many questions about the plastic bag of white powdery stuff in my suitcase.
Really the most striking difference between this other salt I've eaten is the texture. The taste is slightly different - it does taste a little more like sea water - but the texture is light and fluffy, like powder snow that you can't pack into a snowball because it does not stick. I haven't had a chance to use it much for cooking or eating yet, but I'm excited to do so. And if I get the chance, I'll test it to see what makes it chemically unique.
Who knew Salt could be such an adventure?
Decadence is a term that communicates luxury and excess, richness and indulgence. So what better term to describe the ideal birthday cake. Credit for this one goes almost entirely to this post of Orangette, where a great many scrumptious things may be found. But, as usual, a twist was in order - in this case a little touch of lavender. The cake truly is sumptuous as well as scrumptious: It is light without being thin, and yet heavy without being a rock settling in your stomach. It's full of carroty goodness both in flavour and vitamins, and yet it could get anyone to eat vegetables. And it would be completely in its element in the exalted company of the Black Forest Gateaux, Flourless Chocolate Cakes, Strawberry-Caramel Cheesecakes, and Custard Cream Pies of cakey heaven. 
I very slightly changed two things about the recipe, in addition to the lavender twist. First, I baked the layers in pyrex pie-plates, since I'm increasingly uncomfortable with cheap non-stick-oleum cookware. Apparently the conversion is easy. If anything, lower the oven temperature 15-25 degrees, or shorten the baking time by about 10%. Just don't forget to grease and flour the baking dishes - I even used parchment paper in the bottom just in case, which turned out to be a good move since this cake is so moist it is a bit sticky until it cools a bit. The other thing I changed was the amount of lemon in the icing. As I was adding the lemon juice, it kept tasting better and better, so I probably ended up with about triple the recommended amount purely as a matter of taste. It did make the icing a little soft...
The lavender twist was as follows: I took a little of the plain icing, before adding the lemon, and added a very few drops of lavender oil to it. Careful! Lavender oil is strong stuff and many people think it tastes like soap if it is at all overdone. The trick is to make the flavour the same as a passing whiff of a fresh lavender field - sweet, warm, herbal, and a little dusty - with none of the astringency that comes with the concentration of the oil. In short, lots of sugar to very little oil. Once flavoured, I colored the icing to lavender purple and then used it to write on the cake. It was a little soft for cake-writing, but it worked and it gave each piece just the slightest hint of lavender, which went really well with the lemon in the rest of the icing and the deep, slightly savoury sweetness of the cake. 
I'll not reproduce the recipe here, since the link above will suffice. If trying the lavender experiment, start with ONE drop in about 1/2-cup of icing, mix well and taste. Then increase in strength one drop at a time until you think it is good. Oh, and I also dusted the whole thing with powdered sugar when finished which helped retain the icing and also looked a bit like snow.
The natural world is full of things that resemble other things, sometimes in look, sometimes in smell, and sometimes in taste, too. And after all, human description of food often resorts to simile: "It tastes like chicken." Of course, this gives rise to the joke that God, when defining the tastes of things, ran out of ideas when it came to chicken so just made chicken taste like everything. But I digress.
Lobster would seem to be one of those very delicious, prized, and, above all, unique tastes that is not found anywhere else. Well, whether by reality of the tastebuds or by sheer power of suggestion, a non-lobster lobster seems to exist. The lobster mushroom is so named because it is the speckled orange color of a cooked lobster and also has been described as having a taste that is both earthy and lobster- or shellfish-like. I should clarify that the lobster mushroom is not actually a single species of mushroom in itself, but rather is the result of a parasite fungus colonizing a host mushroom - mushrooms on a mushroom, as it were. 
The parasite responsible for the unique coloring and flavour is Hypomyces lactifluorum and it colonizes various host species, most of which are edible. (The Mushroom Expert) This presents a challenge when determining if a bright orange speckled mushroom you happen across on a hike will make a good mushroom fry-up followed by a pleasant afternoon nap or by agonizing pain and death. In short, DON'T PICK THEM YOURSELF UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING. 
Identifying the host (and therefore the edibility) can be very hard since the parasite causes the mushroom to deform a lot as it matures. In France, you could take your mushroom to a pharmacy and they'd tell you if you could eat it, but I think bringing a muddy orange blob to your urban neighborhood pharmacy might cause some consternation. Some universities may have people in the mycology department willing to help determine if a mushroom is edible and these folks also occasionally have mushroom festivals, usually in later autumn or spring. 
But, lest we get carried away with the fear-mongering, more important is that when you find lobster mushrooms that are edible, you should eat them. They really are quite fabulous and different from other mushrooms I have eaten. My favorite mushroom preparation is to saute mushrooms in a little butter with a pinch of sugar, salt, and pepper until the mushrooms are cooked and the edges are starting to brown. Many mushrooms I have tried cooking like this have become soggy because I have messed up in one of many ways, but the lobster mushrooms did not. They stayed meaty and springy the entire time, so much so that I had some trouble determining when they were done. Finally I poured them and the chantrelles I had cooked with them out onto a bed of spinach, tossed a little salt over the top, and ate. The taste surprised me as I did not expect them to taste at all lobstery, but they did. Perhaps it had something to do with the preparation - buttery with a little salty sweetness? I like to think that somehow the mushrooms are imbued with the aura of lobster. The texture was also surprising, striking me as more bamboo-like rather than mushroom. They were not fibrous, but definitely toothsome - as in "al dente" like pasta. A little meaty even. And really really satisfying.
Not long ago, a remarkable man and dear family friend passed away. Illness prevented Gene from frequently indulging in decadent gastronomy, but I imagine that made him appreciate those experiences all the more. As it happens, I sent cookies to my mother one day and she took them over to Gene and Wendy's house for dinner. And the cookies promptly disappeared. Freed from a restrictive diet, Gene could eat what he loved and happened to love my cookies, and so did Wendy. Not only did this bring them pleasure, it made me feel good, too, to be able to help keep up their strength and spirits.
Later, as Gene's condition worsened, I told my mom how to make the cookies so she could maintain a ready supply. Gene was no longer eating very much, but apparently he kept consistently eating cookies. As did Wendy, as she later told me, who joked that they were what kept her going as she wasn't eating much, either. She closely guarded them to ensure they didn't run out.
Gene died, and while I was not there in person, Wendy tells me that I was certainly there in spirit and I feel I was, too. And that's something that I value about the experience of cooking and eating: sharing is as much a part of the experience as the actual chopping or chewing. By sharing a recipe, a flavour, a technique, you can share so much more, even across continents, becoming part of the interwoven fabric of humanity.
I feel very fortunate to be woven closely with Gene, Wendy, and Eliana, and this one is definitely for you.
GENE COOKIES
A variation on the more common Mexican Wedding Cakes, Russian Tea Cakes, and Pfeffernusse that often show up among Christmas Cookies.
Note: These are basic proportions - multiply as appropriate.
1 C Butter, chilled but not cold.
1 C Flour
1 C Mixed Nuts, ground - a good mix is Hazelnuts, Pecans, Cashews, Almonds, and Walnuts. Grind them in a food processor until very fine and starting to clump.
1/2 t salt
1/2 C Confectioners Sugar, plus more for dusting.
1/2 C Candied Ginger, chopped - you can buy this in bulk in many stores now and the pieces are about 1/2 in cubes. Avoid the expensive stuff that is sold in little jars.
1 t Cinnamon
1 t Nutmeg
1/2 t Ginger, ground
2 t Vanilla Extract (NOT fake)
2 to 4 t Orange Extract
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Mix all ingredients in a bowl until well incorporated. (You can do this the quick-and-dirty "throw-everything-in-at-once" way or you can do the more formal "sift-all-powdered-ingredients-together-and-then-mix-in-butter-and-then-liquids-and-then-chunky-stuff" method but they end up coming out about the same.) The dough will be crumbly but will hold together when you roll it into a ball in your hands.
3. Roll dough into 1-inch balls and place on parchment-papered cookie sheets. They expand hardly at all and do not flatten so you can space them close together.
4. Bake for ~15 minutes (every other recipe seems to indicate too short a baking time - they should start to squat a little and turn golden, and have a dry exterior that yields to the touch only a little when hot.)
5. Transfer to cooling rack and dust liberally with more powdered sugar. Some recipes say when hot, some when cool. It's up to you.
Enjoy with a steaming mug of spiritual humanism.
It has been an eventful month since I last posted, but I hope to pick up the pace of cooking and writing about it here shortly. Here's a preview of what's to come:
The great pasta-making adventure!
In which I try to figure out how to make pasta without being an Italian grandmother and without owning a pasta-roller.
Dark-chocolate-honey-rosemary truffles.
In which my first official foray into chocolate-making turns out a little squishy and time-consuming, but rich, smooth, delicious, perplexing, and knee-weakening nonetheless.
Birthday cake.
In which I pay homage to the birth of my lovely occasional photographer with a particularly sumptuous creation, moslty from Orangette, but with a twist of my own.
Soon!
Being the cook, chemist, nerd, salt-lover, and perfectionist that I can be, I decided to purify and refine some of the salt to bring home. In the process of doing so I thoroughly grossed out some of my friends, covered much of the kitchen in super-saturated salt water, and produced a mountain of tiny, fluffy, pale-grey crystals. Here's the process:
Step 1: Get salt. I bought two cans-full of raw river salt from a woman in the market, mostly using gesticulation to communicate. It was grey-yellow-brown and in lumps.
Step 2: Boil, boil, and boil some more. When in doubt of the sterility of something, boil the Dickens out of it. And by Dickens, I mean all of the little creatures that might want to take up an inconvenient and distressing residence in your intestines. And hot water dissolves more salt than cold, which is useful if you're trying to purify a lot of it. Thankfully I found a very large cauldron (though I didn't dance around it...much.) 
Step 3: Skim. Some of the lighter stuff floated to the top in a rather nauseating scummy film that I poured off. However, this still left a really murky brew.
Step 5: Filter! I had to pour slowly because both filters would clog and the paper filters would either disintegrate or get crusted with salt after a bit of work.
Step 6: Results. See the difference? (I actually filtered twice.) And see what the filters removed? Degutante!
Step 7: Boil dry. Or almost - it's hard to remove all of the water from a big bunch of salt by boiling. Some of it started climbing over the edge of the pot, too.
Step 8: Bake until fully dry. Baking the pan of salt produced a solid brick since I did not keep it constantly moving to break up the crystal structure as it dried. It also produced some areas of bluish-tinted salt. I found a small handful of these tinted crystals and I have no idea what caused the color. Trace minerals? Any ideas?
Step 9: Powder. I used the back of a spoon and also a wooden pounding mallet to crush the salt into a relatively uniform powder. 
It came out surprisingly light and soft. And then I packed it up - and hoped I didn't get too many questions about the plastic bag of white powdery stuff in my suitcase.
