Read Online What Einstein Told His Cook by Robert L. Wolke - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Robert L. Wolke
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Sorry, Chef, but salt doesn’t release heat when it dissolves; it actually absorbs a little bit of heat. What you undoubtedly observed is that when you added the salt, the water suddenly erupted into livelier bubbling. That happened because the salt—or almost any other added solid particles—gives the budding bubbles many new places (Techspeak: nucleation sites) upon which to grow to full size.
Another theory (everybody has one, it seems; is boiling pasta such an Earth-shaking challenge?) is that the salt is added for more than flavor, that it toughens the pasta and keeps it from getting too mushy. I have heard some plausible but quite technical reasons for that, but I won’t trouble you with them. Let’s just add the salt whenever and for whatever reason we wish. Just make sure we add it or the pasta will taste blah.
OH SAY, CAN YOU SEA?
Please tell me about sea salt. Why are so many chefs and recipes using it these days? How is it better than regular salt?
T he terms sea salt and regular salt or table salt are often used as if they denote two distinctly different substances with distinctly different properties. But it’s not that simple. Salt is indeed obtained from two different sources: underground mines and seawater. But that fact alone doesn’t make them inherently different, any more than water obtained from wells and springs are inherently different because of their sources.
Underground salt deposits were laid down by ancient seas that ultimately dried up at various times in Earth’s history, from a few million to hundreds of millions of years ago. Some of the deposits were later thrust upward by geologic forces and are quite near the surface in the form of “domes.” Other salt deposits lie hundreds of feet below ground, creating a bigger challenge to mining.
Rock salt is chopped out by huge machines within caverns carved into the salt. But rock salt isn’t suitable for food use because the ancient seas trapped mud and debris when they dried up. Instead, food-grade salt is mined by pumping water down a shaft to dissolve salt, pumping the salt water (brine) up to the surface, settling out the impurities, and vacuum-evaporating the clear brine. That creates the familiar, tiny crystals of table salt in your salt shaker.
In sunny coastal regions, salt can be obtained by allowing sunshine and wind to evaporate the water from shallow ponds or “pans” of contemporary seawater. There are many kinds of sea salt, harvested from waters around the world and refined to various degrees.
There are gray and pinkish-gray sea salts from Korea and France, and black sea salt from India, all of which owe their colors to local clays and algae in the evaporation ponds, not to the salt (sodium chloride) that they contain. Black and red sea salts from Hawaii owe their colors to deliberately added powdered black lava and red baked clay. These rare and exotic boutique salts are used by adventurous chefs. They have undeniably unique flavors, of course; they taste like salt mixed with various clays and algae. Each one has its fervent partisans.
In what follows, I am not writing about these rare, expensive ($33 or more per pound) multicolored boutique salts, which are not easily available to the home cook. I am writing about the wide variety of relatively white salts obtained by one means or another from seawater, and which for that fact alone are revered because they are believed to be rich in minerals and universally superior in flavor.
MINERALS
If you evaporate all the water from a bucket of ocean (fish previously removed), you will be left with a sticky, gray, bitter-tasting sludge that is about 78 percent sodium chloride: common salt. Ninety-nine percent of the other 22 percent consists of magnesium and calcium compounds, which are mostly responsible for the bitterness. Beyond that, there are at least 75 other elements in very small amounts. That last fact is the basis for the ubiquitous claim that sea
Another theory (everybody has one, it seems; is boiling pasta such an Earth-shaking challenge?) is that the salt is added for more than flavor, that it toughens the pasta and keeps it from getting too mushy. I have heard some plausible but quite technical reasons for that, but I won’t trouble you with them. Let’s just add the salt whenever and for whatever reason we wish. Just make sure we add it or the pasta will taste blah.
OH SAY, CAN YOU SEA?
Please tell me about sea salt. Why are so many chefs and recipes using it these days? How is it better than regular salt?
T he terms sea salt and regular salt or table salt are often used as if they denote two distinctly different substances with distinctly different properties. But it’s not that simple. Salt is indeed obtained from two different sources: underground mines and seawater. But that fact alone doesn’t make them inherently different, any more than water obtained from wells and springs are inherently different because of their sources.
Underground salt deposits were laid down by ancient seas that ultimately dried up at various times in Earth’s history, from a few million to hundreds of millions of years ago. Some of the deposits were later thrust upward by geologic forces and are quite near the surface in the form of “domes.” Other salt deposits lie hundreds of feet below ground, creating a bigger challenge to mining.
Rock salt is chopped out by huge machines within caverns carved into the salt. But rock salt isn’t suitable for food use because the ancient seas trapped mud and debris when they dried up. Instead, food-grade salt is mined by pumping water down a shaft to dissolve salt, pumping the salt water (brine) up to the surface, settling out the impurities, and vacuum-evaporating the clear brine. That creates the familiar, tiny crystals of table salt in your salt shaker.
In sunny coastal regions, salt can be obtained by allowing sunshine and wind to evaporate the water from shallow ponds or “pans” of contemporary seawater. There are many kinds of sea salt, harvested from waters around the world and refined to various degrees.
There are gray and pinkish-gray sea salts from Korea and France, and black sea salt from India, all of which owe their colors to local clays and algae in the evaporation ponds, not to the salt (sodium chloride) that they contain. Black and red sea salts from Hawaii owe their colors to deliberately added powdered black lava and red baked clay. These rare and exotic boutique salts are used by adventurous chefs. They have undeniably unique flavors, of course; they taste like salt mixed with various clays and algae. Each one has its fervent partisans.
In what follows, I am not writing about these rare, expensive ($33 or more per pound) multicolored boutique salts, which are not easily available to the home cook. I am writing about the wide variety of relatively white salts obtained by one means or another from seawater, and which for that fact alone are revered because they are believed to be rich in minerals and universally superior in flavor.
MINERALS
If you evaporate all the water from a bucket of ocean (fish previously removed), you will be left with a sticky, gray, bitter-tasting sludge that is about 78 percent sodium chloride: common salt. Ninety-nine percent of the other 22 percent consists of magnesium and calcium compounds, which are mostly responsible for the bitterness. Beyond that, there are at least 75 other elements in very small amounts. That last fact is the basis for the ubiquitous claim that sea
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