Salt Archives - Page 3 of 3 - attheitaliantable.com

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.” Isak Dinesan

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to visit the largest salt flats in Europe, second biggest in the world, located on the east coast of southern Italy at Margherita di Savoia in Puglia. More than 3000 years old and located on the very salty Adriatic sea, these privately owned salt flats cover 4000 hectares, which is almost 10,000 acres.

The Adriatic is noticeably saltier than the Mediterannean, which is saltier than the Atlantic Ocean. You taste it when you swim and see it on your skin after you dry off, a fine dusting of white salt. That may be the reason there are so many places on the Adriatic coastline here where they make salt by evaporating sea water. In addition to Puglia, there are salt flats farther north in Slovenia as well as in Cervia, just south of the Italian city of Ravenna, both on the Adriatic Sea. read that blog here

margherita di savoia — salt drying in the sun

The salt flats on the east coast of Italy aren’t nearly as beautiful as those in Trapani, Sicily, but then again not much is as gorgeous as the island of Sicily itself. Location, location.

I’m fond of sea salt and love to visit the places where they make it, picking up momentos of the visit that I can use later in the kitchen. So when I planned a visit to Puglia, an incredibly beautiful region in southern Italy that you really must consider for your next Italian vacation, I knew my trip would center around getting to the salt flats.

sea salt in puglia — just pick it up and use it…

Even though Margherita di Savoia is a beach resort area, I found the salt flats rather deserted, which gave me license to walk around and take pictures. Finally coming across some men who worked there, I asked where one could purchase the salt, thinking perhaps there was a small store on site. They looked at me like it was a trick question and answered “at the grocery store?” In fact, the excellent salt they produce is widely available all over the region. You find it in any grocery store or food shop. It doesn’t come in a fancy expensive package, no one buys it as a momento or gift. It comes in a 1 kilo, brown cardboard box with one ingredient listed: whole sea salt.

So much that is incredibly good and delicious and wholesome in Italy is such a natural part of life that it almost seems taken for granted. Excellent wine, bread and olive oil are all found for relatively little money and wholesome natural sea salt is no exception. Whereas in America whole sea salt has become a gourmet product which sells for considerably more than processed, adulterated table and kosher salt, in Italy regionally produced, unprocessed sea salt retails for as little as 40 cents a kilo. That’s less than 50 cents on the US dollar for over 2 lbs of sea salt.

Now tell me you can’t afford to salt everything you eat with that!

In a store the other day I saw three different boxes of salt, all unprocessed sea salt from Margherita di Savoia. One box was sale grosso, or big kernels for tossing in pasta water; another sale fino, fine for regular use; and the third sale iodato, where they’d added iodine. The most expensive was the one with iodine. In America it’s just the reverse.

I’m working on getting some of this excellent inexpensive salt imported to a store near you and will keep you posted!

You can’t open a magazine or newspaper these days without seeing an article about natural and organic foods. The focus on eating wholesome food runs the gamut from shopping at farmers markets to keeping chickens in the yard for eggs. It’s all about wholesome ingredients.

Yet when we get all that beautiful, expensive, organic food in the kitchen we are told that our best option for seasoning it is industrially processed kosher salt. For years, kosher salt was considered purer than iodized table salt, but in fact, kosher salt is just as processed. A better choice, one that honors our desire for wholesome food, is natural sea salt. It has better flavor and it is better for you.

Recently two on-line articles comparing kosher salt to sea salt were brought to my attention, one in the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/03/kosher-salt_n_1471099.html , the other on the Food Network site http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes-and-cooking/kosher-vs-table-vs-sea-salts/index.html. Making a pretense of discussing the issue, both articles concluded the same: salt is salt so the choices of sodium chloride are equal, and as sea salt is more expensive and its flavor qualities are lost in cooking, cheaper kosher salt is the better alternative. This is an important discussion that we must help to a different conclusion.

Salt is the most important ingredient we cook with and we can’t survive without it. Salt helps our taste buds to experience all the nuances of flavor. All salt is originally from the sea, whether harvested today on the coast or mined from a mountain with a 10 million year old sea at its heart; the difference is what we do to it before it hits our plate.

Kosher salt is made by processing out all the naturally occurring minerals and moisture that is inherent in sea salt, and then fabricating it into flakes. Usually an anti-caking chemical is added. More than 99% sodium chloride, it is a dead white color with an acrid and bitter taste.

Natural, unprocessed sea salt has been harvested and used by mankind for thousands of years. As a whole food it contains all the minerals of the sea; not just sodium but also potassium, magnesium and calcium, as well as dozens of trace minerals such as boron, selenium and iodide, all of which the body needs to survive. Its balance of minerals helps the human body to maintain its own balance when it is ingested.

Whole, unprocessed and unrefined sea salt is easy to find in health and natural food stores. I don’t mean the artisan sea salts available on the market that are used to accent cooked foods, though they are endlessly beautiful and evocative and important in their own right. I’m proposing the use of whole, natural sea salt that is affordable to use in bulk to salt pasta water, soups or stews, one that costs little more than the processed salt we use now but is infinitely healthier to eat.

When we choose an artificial, processed salt, we let go of everything we’ve embraced about natural and healthy food. As Mark Bitterman states in his book Salted, “When we cook with kosher salt we sanctify the artificial.”

Frankly, it astounds me that so many educated and experienced food professionals, who spend their days thinking about and making food, still extol the virtues of kosher salt. It is not a natural product, it is not healthy and it’s definitely not gourmet.

Why do chefs and professionals like to use kosher salt? Because it’s easier to handle and it costs less. True, sea salt costs a little more. But since when in this whole national discussion of eating natural vs. processed, organic vs. chemical, harvested locally vs. shipped from China, have the words “it costs less” been the most important factor?

Health benefits and cost aside, the gentle taste of natural sea salt and the sweet, soft, complex flavor it imparts to your food is the biggest reason to stop using kosher and start using whole sea salt. After many years of eating and cooking in a country where kosher salt doesn’t exist, my palate has become accustomed to the pleasantly rounded saltiness that sea salt imparts to a dish. I notice the acridity of kosher when I return to America and eat in restaurants, even great ones. That is what has convinced me.

Saying you choose kosher is like saying you’d rather eat fruit roll ups than an apple. Whole natural sea salt is a fitting and respectful companion for the fresh food we pursue, healthier for you and better tasting.

Salty seas in Puglia

Whole food vs. kosher salt