Salts of the Earth

Leviticus 2:13 - Season all your grain offerings with salt. Do not leave the salt of the covenant of your God out of your grain offerings; add salt to all your offerings.

For some reason I have been thinking and reading a lot about salt of late. When I was a kid in school I remember an old story that told us that salt was once as valuable as gold. While not entirely accurate, it was incredibly valuable and did trade for the price of gold for a time in the sixth century sub saharan Africa.

Why?

Because before the advent of refrigeration, salt could cure some food and meat and protect it from perishing. It prevented harmful bacteria in food and helped general human health. Gold can't do that.

From Wicki:

Some of the earliest evidence of salt processing dates to around 6000 BC, when people living in the area of present-day Romania boiled spring water to extract salts; a salt works in China dates to approximately the same period. Salt was prized by the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Hittites, Egyptians, and Indians. Salt became an important article of trade and was transported by boat across the Mediterranean Sea, along specially built salt roads, and across the Sahara on camel caravans. The scarcity and universal need for salt have led nations to go to war over it and use it to raise tax revenues, for instance triggering the El Paso Salt War which took place in El Paso in the late 1860s. Salt is used in religious ceremonies and has other cultural and traditional significance.

A salt war? Jeez.

It has been used in both religious rites and in war.

An ancient practice in time of war was salting the earth: scattering salt around in a defeated city to symbolically prevent plant growth. The Bible tells the story of King Abimelech who was ordered by God to do this at Shechem. Texts claim that the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus Africanus ploughed over and sowed the city of Carthage with salt after it was defeated in the Third Punic War (146 BC), although this story is now considered to be entirely apocryphal.

A few years ago I was able to visit the three Salinas or salt pueblos of southeastern New Mexico. Abbo, Qurai and Gran Quivera.

Populated by various Tiwa and Tompiro tribes back to about the thirteenth century, these pueblo indians mined the dry lakes of the region and traded the vital commodity of salt with a variety of tribes, including indians of the plains region.

The three most eastern pueblos, which were abandoned mid 16th century, made their livelihood by selling salt to many other tribes from the east including the Comanches and other plains Indians.

Zuni Pueblo was supposed to have the best and whitest salt the Spanish conquerors had ever seen.

In 1540, when Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s expedition attacked and occupied the Zuni village of Hawikku, the colonizers “found what [they] had more need of that gold silver,” as one account put it, “that is, a great quantity of corn, beans, [. . .] and the best and whitest salt I have seen in my whole life.” The invaders soon found the salt’s source, the Zuni Salt Lake. Coronado himself felt the lake—and its superior salt—worthy enough to bring to New Spain’s first viceroy Antonio de Mendoza’s attention. After seizing control of the pueblo, Coronado wrote to the viceroy of the Zuni’s “finest order and cleanliness” in their preparation of food and the “excellent granular salt that they bring from a lake one day’s journey” from the village. 

In any case I have been doing my own salt exploration. You see, we are getting more and more different salts at home and I was interested in what my friends were eating or using or if we were an anomaly? If you are strictly morton's well then god bless you.

So what do we have in our kitchen?

The salt we use the most, or at least I do, is Trader Joe's Fine Sea Salt, which is supposedly of Mediterranean origin. 

I didn't think it was kosher but I guess it is. 

But what exactly does that mean, kosher salt? 

Good question and I am not exactly sure of the answer. 

But I believe that sea salt comes from evaporated sea water and kosher salt may come from salt deposits. 

Kosher salt contains no iodine or caking agents and is typically courser.

There is no great reason I use this, I could just as well be using Morton's but it is cheap and good in a pinch. (salt humor) I use it a lot when I am baking.

Not a particularly noteworthy salt.

After baking is when the subject starts to get good, or spicy, that is when we get to finishing salts.

A tiny spritz after the cooking is done and the ordinary may become sublime.

Leslie's favorite right now is black Hawaiian lava salt. 

Hiwa Kai.  This stuff is really expensive.

I saw $54. I hope my wife isn't paying that much but somehow I doubt it.

I cook a lot of beef and like the maldon salt with its large crystals for both the pre cook rest period and the finish.

Maldon is pretty, tasty and hard to beat.

Love the big, course flakes.

We have also been heavy users of various pink and Himalayan salts.

I like the one with spicy garlic as we are heavy garlic users in our home.

One of those weird finds at Marshalls...

What else do we have hanging around?

Well, a bunch of stuff, er salt.

Hatch chili, lemon...

I opened the hatch chili the other night, smells surprisingly sweet.

You could say we are salt obsessed but Lena has way more than we do, I think she actually belongs to a salt club.

She turned us on to these samples.

These are three that she gave us that I am aching to try, the last Sel Gris Brut de Guerande being her personal favorite and one of the most prized salts in the world.

This is a lot like the Camargue salt that comes with our favorite butter, Belgium's Les Pres Sales.

And she showed us some of the other salts in her larder as well as some outrageous peppercorn from Cambodia.

I thought that Leslie and I were an anomaly in our salt craziness but I guess not. 

Melissa is the finest cook that we know and I asked her what salt she favored? She also liked the French salt but sent me this article, the 26 best sea salts in the world. You can see that there are many places in europe that produce wonderful salt. Portugal is referenced a lot.

Lena read somewhere that the best salt came from one of two places with the cleanest water in the world but can't find the citation. She sent me this article on Japanese sea salts and one on Celtic sea salt from Brittany.

So you see, I thought that I knew a little something on the subject and once again find out how much I have to learn. 😁

By the way, in my short research, this book came up several times as a good read, Salt: a world history by Mark Kurlansky.

I just ordered some of the blue Persian salt, it looks very interesting as well as beautiful.  Not sure if I should eat it or snort it.

You folks eating any special tasty salt that I should know about?