sea salt Archives - attheitaliantable.com

April 27, 2017 by Gina Stipo 1 Comment

The case for using whole sea salt and not kosher

Why does every food writer and recipe I read in the US call for kosher salt? It’s so prevalent I find myself wondering who is behind the big push for Americans to be better cooks by using kosher salt? I was reading the recent NYTimes article “The Single Most Important Ingredient” by Samin Nosrat who wrote “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat”, and was super excited to hear what she said about salt. Because it truly IS the single most important ingredient you can use! And there it was – she advocated kosher salt. I was crushed.

Allow me to clarify a few things:

Kosher salt, used exclusively in the US, does not equal whole sea salt. Sea salt is made up of sodium choride (about 85%), as well as dozens of naturally-occurring minerals that help to temper and balance the sodium, both on the palate and in the body. Kosher salt goes through a process that strips all these minerals, denaturing it, leaving 99% sodium to which a chemical is added as an anti-caking agent. It renders a product far inferior to natural, whole sea salt. I call it a “dead salt”.

By the way, it’s called “kosher” because when koshering meat you needed to use a large kernel of salt, not the fine stuff that would melt. So, kosher salt has large kernels, what they call “grosso” in Italian or “gros” in French.

I lived in Italy for 13 years, long enough for my palate to change. After a few years, when I would return to the US for a visit, I was struck by how the addition of kosher salt adds acrid and bitter notes to any dish. The Culinary Institute of America did a study a number of years ago looking for the taste difference that various esoteric and finishing salts bring to food, and to their surprise they found that kosher salt was harsh and bitter, while all the other whole salts were not. I’m on the hunt for that study and will post it as soon as I can get my hands on it.

Kosher salt certainly should not be used in trying to reproduce authentic world cuisine, as suggested by the majority of current US food magazines. The Saveur magazine article on arab influences on the Italian island of Sicily I find especially egregious. The article cites a recipe from the city of Trapani on the west coast of Sicily, where they’ve been continuously farming salt since the ancient Phoenicians 5000 years ago, and yet the Saveur recipe calls for kosher salt! Why? Salt from Trapani is a main export from Sicily and it’s available in the US – in grocery stores (Alessi brand), at TJMAXX, Home Goods and Italian specialty shops near you!

There is farmed whole sea salt available in the US from around the world: France, Spain, Brazil. But even salt mined from a mountain, such as beautiful Himalayan pink salt from the mountains of Pakistan, was once a sea 10-100 million years ago.

Well I for one have had enough and am on a crusade to fight kosher salt and help whole sea salt find its place in America’s kitchen. Join me! You can use your box of kosher salt on the sidewalks next winter! As always, Buon Appetito!

April 19, 2016 by Gina Stipo 3 Comments

Why does every food writer and recipe I read in the US call for kosher salt? It’s so prevalent I find myself wondering who is behind the big push for Americans to be better cooks by using kosher salt? I was reading the recent NYTimes article “The Single Most Important Ingredient” by Samin Nosrat who wrote “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat”, and was super excited to see what she said about salt! Because it truly IS the single most important ingredient you can use. And there it was – she advocated kosher salt. I was crushed.

Allow me to clarify a few things:

Kosher salt, used exclusively in the US, does not equal whole sea salt. Sea salt is made up of sodium choride (about 85%), as well as dozens of naturally-occurring minerals that help to temper and balance the sodium, both on the palate and in the body. Kosher salt goes through a process that strips all these minerals, leaving 99% sodium to which a chemical is added as an anti-caking agent. It’s called “kosher” because when koshering meat you needed to use a large kernel of salt, not the fine stuff that would melt. So, kosher salt has large kernels, what they call “grosso” in Italian or “gros” in French.

I lived in Italy for 13 years, long enough for my palate to change. After a few years, when I would return to the US for a visit, I was struck by how the addition of kosher salt adds acrid and bitter notes to any dish. The Culinary Institute of America did a study that reflected this surprising development in their quest for taste differences in various whole sea salts; I’m on the hunt for that study and will post it as soon as I can get my hands on it.

This denatured salt is then chemically laced to reduce clumping. It renders a product far inferior to natural, whole sea salt. I call it a “dead salt”. Kosher salt certainly should not be used in trying to reproduce authentic world cuisine, such as the Saveur magazine article on arab influences on the Italian island of Sicily. Here is a recipe from the city of Trapani on the west coast of Sicily, where they’ve been farming salt since the ancient Phoenicians 5000 years ago, and yet the Saveur recipe calls for kosher salt! Why? Salt from Trapani is a main export from Sicily and it’s available in the US – in grocery stores (Alessi brand), at TJMAXX, Home Goods and Italian specialty shops near you!

Well I for one have had enough and am on a crusade to fight kosher salt and help whole sea salt find its place in America’s kitchen. Join me! Buon Appetito!

https://www.attheitaliantable.com/kosher-salt-us/

November 18, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Salt and Pepper get a Divorce

Salt and Pepper are breaking up. They’ve been together in our kitchens for too long. They have become such partners at the table that you would think they’d been officially married by some Higher Power. And although salt and pepper are essentially two separate ingredients with different roles to play on the plate and palate, somewhere along the line they got fused into one, with pepper as salt’s inevitable sidekick.

No matter what other seasoning goes into a dish, most recipes invariably finish with “salt & pepper”. Salt and pepper are eternally paired in matching shakers on the table. Chefs in restaurants mix pepper with salt together in a bowl and use it to flavor every dish that walks out the kitchen door. Waiters attempt to indiscriminately garnish everyone’s plate with fresh grinds of black pepper. We season by rote.

Well it’s time for Salt and Pepper to get a divorce!

After 12 years spent cooking in Tuscany, I found myself reaching for the pepper mill less and less until I stopped using it altogether. I began to notice this when my students started asking me why we weren’t putting pepper in anything. My answer was always “because it isn’t necessary.” I had learned to season food differently, relying on strong flavors like Tuscan olive oil, sage and rosemary.

Tuscan cuisine utilizes intense flavors like rosemary, sage, capers, wild fennel and garlic, all of which are free for the picking in gardens and fields. In addition, Tuscan extra virgin olive oil is peppery, adding a heat to the dish that renders black pepper unnecessary.

When we season with other strong spices like cumin, cinnamon, clove or cayenne, it’s because we want a particular flavor to stand out. We don’t put those spices indiscriminately in everything we eat, but use them to add sweetness, complexity or heat to a dish. Black pepper is the only spice we use without thinking. Putting black pepper in everything we cook results in both a failure to truly appreciate it as well as a sameness of flavor.

So think before grabbing the pepper mill the next time you’re in the kitchen. Set salt and pepper free from each other and see what it does for your cooking!

August 1, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Salty seas in Puglia

“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!