I’ve written swooningly about fleur de sel before, but the truth is that I adore nearly all types of natural salt, not just the premium-quality French “flowers”. Yes, I said “natural” salt- not regular table salt, which is prepared thusly:
mined, heat blasted, chemically treated, and then anti-caking agents and iodine added to it (source)
Seriously, who needs all that? Natural sea salt is readily available almost everywhere now, in nearly all colors of the rainbow, from grey to pink to sparkling white…
Which brings me to the point of today’s post. It’s the height of summer where I live right now, and in this heat my strongest food cravings are for fresh, local ingredients: bright green lettuce, crunchy carrots, crispy jicama. Served raw… with nothing more than a sprinkling of good salt.
Our dinner last night, for example, was this: four large, juicy organic tomatoes. I washed them, sliced them thick, drizzled on some extra virgin olive oil, sprinkled with Japanese sea salt, and served with a hunk of toasted sourdough bread. Perfect with a chilled bottle of Pinot Noir. It was one of the best meals we’d had in a long time.
What are your favorite simple meals?
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One of the ingredients you may not be familiar with is Fleur de Sel, literally “Flower of the Sea”. It is a sea salt and as such is courser in texture that table salt with a much higher content of other minerals besides sodium chloride, thus more flavorful, yet slightly less salty.
Fleur de Sel is produced in several temperate coastal areas around the world—but particularly in France, and within France, particularly in Brittany, on the north coast across the English Channel from Great Britain. Fleur de Sel is not just any sea salt, though; it has a very special method of collection.
To get Fleur de Sel, salt farmers living along the coast allow shallow pools to fill with fresh salt water. As the water evaporates, a thin layer of salt crystals forms on the surface, but the slightest breeze will cause them to sink, and they pick up a grayish color from the clay and minerals at the bottom of the pool. The resulting salt, called Sel Gris, is highly regarded, but there’s something even better.
On a very clear and sunny summer day with no wind, the salt layer remains floating on the surface, and is harvested by skimming it off with a rake-like implement at the end of the day. Voilà: Fleur de Sel. Because conditions must be just right for Fleur de Sel to form, the yield is only about one pound for every 80 pounds of Sel Gris.
http://www.culinaryinstitute.edu