Interview with Mark Bitterman, Leading Expert on Culinary Salts

 
So many great finishing salts to try!

I've been fascinated with the wide variety of salts available for cooking and especially finishing your dishes for years. After I wrote about the importance of salt, I learned of The Meadow, a shop in Portland, Oregon that carries a large and beautifully curated selection. I visited their brick & mortar store a few months ago and came home with some incredible items.

The Meadow's owner is Mark Bitterman. He's not in this just to make a buck; he's insanely, utterly passionate about salt. I recently had the opportunity to interview him. If you find his thoughts interesting, you might like to pre-order his book, Salted: A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, with Recipes, which will be out in the fall, and I highly recommend you pick up one or more of The Meadow's salts.

I think my current favorite is the Haleakala Ruby, which I brought to Salty Seattle's recent taste test, and I hear it won one of the best pairing categories! But it would be hard to pass up the Iburi Jio cherry-smoked salt from Japan or the Black Diamond. You can find them all on The Meadow's website.

Here is the interview with Mark Bitterman:

Me: You've had quite a varied career! How did you go from editing a journal on superconductivity to salt expert?

Mark B: It was the superconductivity effort that was a lark, not the salt. I've worked as a writer for much of my life, but I've been an avid traveler and eater since forever. I discovered salt when I first visited France about 25 years ago, motorcycling around the countryside and eating. I later lived in the south of France for a number of years restoring a chateau, and eating incredible food. Chefs would come visit and they'd actually bring their salt with them! I took note: salt was a core ingredient, an ingredient with place, purpose, and its own majesty.

Me: Other than flavored salts, do you find that different salts have a strongly different taste, or are the main differences in texture and color?

Mark B.: The most important thing to take into account when thinking about salt is that the flavor of the salt itself is not what matters. Nobody eats salt by itself. What matters is the interraction of the salt and the food. Three main things that determine how salt will play up the flavors of food are its crystal shape, its mineral content, and the residual moisture caught up in the crystals. Delicate moist clean flavored fleur de sel is the go-to salt for all the subtle to medium bodied and flavored foods, from buttered toast to steamed veggies to fish to caramels. Snappy bright flake salts are great for fresh vegetables and green salads, or anywhere that you want a spark of salt to contrast vibrantly with the food. Coarse minerally sel gris is the best salt for finishing red meats, root vegetables, and other heartier foods, and this is also your go-to salt for most cooking uses, from boiling pasta water to rubbing the cavity of a chicken before roasting.

Me: The Meadow has one of the most extensive and best documented collections of salts that I've seen. How do you go about finding new products?

Mark B.: We scour the earth, we read everything, we have friends and customers from all the corners of the globe that bring us stuff, and sometimes we just get lucky. But I'm always looking for salt, ALWAYS.

Me: What are the best uses for salts with very large flakes, like your Black Diamond?

Mark B.: Those hefty flakes salts are great for adding drama to a dish. Peas and flake salt give geometric electric pizzaz to the spherical sweet vegetables. Black Diamond salt is a great salt for sprinkling atop any pasta dish, risottos, polentas, on baked potatoes, grilled salmon and other fish. I make a pumpkin soup topped with toasted sesame seeds, guacamole, crème fraiche, and Dlack Diamond salt and it ROCKS.

(Me: Indeed it does! I hope you all enjoyed the interview with Mark and are motivated to try some new salts. They can really be an easy way to make your dishes sing. It takes only tiny amounts to finish a plate, so although you might think they sound a little pricey, you'll find that they last a long time.)

The Newlywed Kitchen - Book Review with a Recipe for Zucchini Fritters

Zucchini fritters from The Newlywed Kitchen

I love a cookbook that has a unique point of view, and Lorna Yee and Ali Basye's Newlywed Kitchen: Delicious Meals for Couples Cooking Together has that in spades. They have created a beautiful, charming book for couples just starting out in marriage to explore cooking together.  You'd be crazy not to give it as a shower gift to every couple you know who is getting married this summer.

Along with the recipes are endearing stories from a wide range of culinary professionals about their experiences cooking with their beloved in the first years of marriage. I love Chef Ethan Stowell's story of how he came to throw the soup his wife Angela requested for their wedding over a cliff!

When I first flipped through the book, I was immediately attracted to this recipe for zucchini fritters. I'm pretty much a sucker for any sort of little crispy pan-fried fritter, and I could tell this one was gonna be good. Lorna was happy to share it with our readers, so it is reprinted below. Serve them fresh out of the frying pan for maximum crispy goodness.

Zucchini Fritters with Tangy Yogurt Sauce
Vegetarian
Makes 10 Fritters

For the sauce:

• 3/4 cup plain Greek yogurt
• 1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
• Kosher salt and fresh ground pepper

1. Whisk together the yogurt, lemon juice and parsley. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

For the fritters:

• 3 cups grated zucchini
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 large egg
• 1/4 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
• 1/4 cup grated Parmesan
• 1/2 cup flour
• 3 tablespoons extra-vigin olive oil

1. Combine the zucchini and salt in a sieve over a large bowl and squeeze the water out with your hands. (You should be able to remove about 1/2 cup of water.)
2. Transfer the zucchini to a large bowl and add the garlic, egg, peppers, Parmesan, and flour. Stir to combine.
3. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Spoon heaping tablespoons of the zucchini batter into the pan, making sure the fritters don't touch one another. Brown the fritters for about 3 minutes, lifting the edge to check on the color. When the fritters are golden brown, flip and cook for another 2 to 3 minutes.

Stringozzi (or linguini) con funghi - Simple pasta with mushrooms - Recipe

Stringozzi con funghi (pasta with mushrooms)

Living in Seattle, we get some of the best wild mushrooms in the country at our markets, often within hours of being foraged. The bounty of morels, chanterelles, porcini, maitake, and dozens of other varieties is astonishing. Sometimes I forget how delicious cultivated button mushrooms can be.

This bag of beautiful stringozzi (a thick, square-profiled noodle) came from ChefShop.com. Owner Tim Mar sources them from Etruria, a boutique importer of foods from Umbria. Tim gave me a heads up that this pasta is unusually filling, and he was quite right. A 1/2 kilo (17.6 oz) bag would serve 6 hungry adults. (Full disclosure: ChefShop has occasionally given me sample products and I earn a small amount from sales when you click through my links.)

Stringozzi are quite a bit thicker than the average straight pasta you see. Not at thick as the Tuscan pici, but getting up there. If you want to make this dish and can't get them, use linguini or even spaghetti and plan on using a bit more per person.

This dish is super simple to make. The critical step is in the final minute of cooking the pasta together with the mushrooms. Be sure and add enough of the pasta cooking water to actually deglaze the pan and develop a bit of sauce. If you serve this dry ("tight" as chefs say), it will be bland and chewy. There should be a little shine. You never need to fear diluting your sauce with pasta water. It is already seasoned with salt and has some body from the starch shed by the noodles, so in small quantities, it won't be watery.

If you don't want to open a bottle of white wine for this dish, dry vermouth works well. It has a different flavor, but one I find appealing. I keep a bottle on hand at all times. Gotta be able to make a martini anyhow, right?

Stringozzi (or linguini) con funghi (Simple pasta with mushrooms)
Vegetarian; vegan if you omit the cheese and use olive oil instead of butter
Serves 6 if made with stringozzi, 4 otherwise

• 3 tablespoons butter, divided
• 1/2 white onion, finely diced
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 1/2 pounds white or brown button mushrooms, sliced scant 1/4" thick
• 1/2 cup white wine or vermouth
• 1/2 kilo (about 1 pound) stringozzi or other long but not wide strand pasta, preferably thick
• salt
• pepper
• parmigiano reggiano, grated or cut with a vegetable peeler
• flat-leaf (Italian) parsley leaves, minced or left whole to your taste

1. Bring a very large pot of well-salted water to a full, rolling boil. Put your serving bowl or bowls somewhere to warm up.
2. In a very large skillet (not-non stick), melt two tablespoons of the butter over a medium-high flame. Saute the onion and garlic with a pinch of salt for two minutes.
3. Add the sliced mushrooms and about 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Cooking, turning occasionally, until they release their moisture and then start to brown. Deglaze the pan with the white wine. Taste a mushroom and adjust seasoning.
4. When the mushrooms are nearly done, boil the pasta according to the package directions being sure to leave it al dente. Reserve 2 cups of the cooking water and drain the pasta. 
5. Add the remaining tablespoon of butter to the mushrooms and stir. Add the pasta to the mushrooms and mix thoroughly, being sure to scrape the browned bits from the bottom of the pan in. Add the pasta water, a little at a time until the pasta is quite lightly sauced, but there is a little sheen. You probably won't need all of the pasta water.
6. Serve the pasta family style in a big bowl, or plate individually. Be sure and get all those delicious mushrooms onto the pasta. Finish with parmigiano-reggiano, fresh ground black pepper, and lots of flat-leaf parsley.