Salted: A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, with Recipes

Salted: A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, with Recipes (Ten Speed Press

Ten Speed Press

Ten Speed Press is a publishing house founded in Berkeley, California in 1970. Philip Wood, founder and publisher, began his career with Barnes & Noble in 1962 and in 1965 at Penguin books...

, 2010, ISBN 978-1-58008-262-4) is a reference book and cookbook written by food writer Mark Bitterman

Mark Bitterman

Mark Bitterman is an American food writer and entrepreneur. With his wife Jennifer Turner Bitterman he is co-owner of The Meadow, a boutique that specializes in finishing salts, single-origin dark chocolate bars, bitters, and gourmet accoutrements...

. In May 2011 Salted won the James Beard Foundation Award

James Beard Foundation Award

The James Beard Foundation Awards were established in 1990 and are often called "The Oscars of Food." Held on the first weekend in May, the Awards honor the finest chefs, restaurants, wine professionals, journalists, cookbook authors, restaurant designers, and other food professionals in the...

for Reference and Scholarship Cookbook. It is also been nominated for the International Association of Culinary Professionals

International Association of Culinary Professionals

The International Association of Culinary Professionals is a United States based not-for-profit professional association whose members work in culinary education, communication, or the preparation of food and beverage....

Cookbook Awards for the Food & Beverage Reference/Technical category and First Book: The Julia Child Award. It is available both in hardcover and on the Kindle

Amazon Kindle

The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader developed by Amazon.com subsidiary Lab126 which uses wireless connectivity to enable users to shop for, download, browse, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other digital media...

Background

Bitterman's fascination with salt started at age 20 when, on a motorcycle trip across Europe, he stopped at a provincial French truck stop and had a grilled steak finished with a locally harvested fleur de sel
Fleur de sel
Fleur de sel is a hand-harvested sea salt collected by workers who scrape only the top layer of salt before it sinks to the bottom of large salt pans...

. In the following years Bitterman continued to travel the world while collecting artisan-made salts. He eventually went on to open a store with his wife called The Meadow, where they sell a variety of finishing salts as well as dark chocolates

Chocolate

Chocolate is a raw or processed food produced from the seed of the tropical Theobroma cacao tree. Cacao has been cultivated for at least three millennia in Mexico, Central and South America. Its earliest documented use is around 1100 BC...

, bitters

Bitters

A bitters is an alcoholic beverage that is flavored with herbal essences and has a bitter or bittersweet flavor. There are numerous brands of bitters that were formerly marketed as patent medicines but are now considered to be digestifs, rather than medicines...

, wine, and flowers. The Meadow was started in Portland, Oregon and has since expanded to the West Village in New York. Salted was released in October 2010.

The book is divided into three sections.

"The Life of Salt" – This section treats the history of salt from its supposed first use by humans for preservation approximately 12,000 years ago. Salt took on increasing importance in the Neolithic period as humans developed agriculture and domestication of wild plants and animals. Salt-preserved foods and treated animal hides enabled wider travel and the construction of empires; salt is written about in ancient religious scriptures and has played a large part in the development of some economies.

Saltmaking was an artisanal craft up until the industrial revolution, when mechanization allowed production to increase rapidly. More recently, this industrially produced salt has come to be used in chemical manufacturing as well as for clearing wide stretches of icy roads and freeways.

In this section Bitterman goes on to detail salt's role in biochemistry and addresses the controversy it has provoked in the public health sector. Lastly, he discusses the taxonomy of salt and his take on how to describe a salt.

"Salt Guide" – This chapter contains a chart of over 150 salts. Each has a macro photograph
Macro photography
Macrophotography is close-up photography, usually of very small subjects. Classically a macrophotograph is one in which the size of the subject on the negative is greater than life size. However in modern use it refers to a finished photograph of a subject at greater than life size...

of its crystals as well as columns for description, application (finishing, cooking, brining
Brining
In cooking, brining is a process similar to marination in which meat is soaked in brine before cooking.Brining makes cooked meat moister by hydrating the cells of its muscle tissue before cooking, via the process of osmosis, and by allowing the cells to hold on to the water while they are cooked,...

, etc.), flavor, and recommended food uses. This is followed by a section of longer entries on 80 salts wherein one can find more in-depth descriptions and information on a salt's alternate names and producers.

"Salting" – Here Bitterman lays out his suggestions for “strategic salting” and some pointers on key salts for the kitchen and important salting techniques. He then provides recipes for using salts in various cooking techniques (raw, curing, grilling, baking, etc.) as well as recipes utilizing Himalayan salt blocks for serving and cooking food.

Background

Contents

Press

See also