My mum grew up a Durban girl, honest and fair. She spent her days working, her holidays on the back of motorbikes in the Drakensberg and her weekends on those famous beaches, swimming in the warm, safe waters of the Indian Ocean netted off from Tiger and Zambezi sharks and their Ragged-tooth friends.
Now it’s just a theory, but I believe that in adolescence, she absorbed equal amounts of gamma rays, UV light and salt. So I entered the world surrounded by a super-saturated saline solution and it’s a chemical imbalance that affects me to this day. I grew up thinking Lot’s wife got a pretty good deal. And when I take my seat in the movie theatre, I’m secretly hoping I’ve oversalted my corn. Your ‘inedible’ is my siren song.
But there are ground rules, starting with, ‘all salt is not created equal’. You may be drawn to crystals collected from saltpans in the Kalahari desert or mined from pink mountains in Pakistan, but me, I’m a sea salt guy. And from the subtle minerality of Khoisan hand-harvested on the Cape’s West Coast to ethereal flakes of fleur de sel, gently raked from ripples of evaporating sea water on the beaches of Brittany, sodium chloride comes in all shapes and sizes and prices.
Depending on the trace minerals in the primordial brine from which they emerge and the compactness of the crystals, you will be amazed how different they can be. It’s an experiment worth trying. Buy a few different salts (not flavoured or smoked) and taste-test them to see what you like and what you think they’d be good for.
Compare the medicinal, metallic afterburn of a classic iodised table salt with something that doesn’t come in a plastic tube and you’ll stop scoffing at salty sommeliers. You’ll understand why they idolize those pyramids of Maldon, lovingly extracted from a river estuary on England’s east coast. To me they’re delicate and sweet and tangy, but also crunchy, which makes a perfect finishing salt for everything from rare meat to heirloom tomatoes.
Imagine how disappointing a pretzel roll would be without little meteors of salt embedded in the crust, or how weird a Margarita would be if those same crystals covered the rim of the glass! Think about the textural difference between my popcorn salt, made by turning a handful of that mild Khoisan into a fine powder in our coffee grinder, and the rest of it that sits in a wooden box next to our stovetop waiting for its five seconds of flame.
But above all, we keep an ample supply on hand because it makes everything taste better. Okay, maybe almost everything. Scientists will tell you it suppresses bitterness while increasing the more pleasant sensations of sweet, sour and umami. I’m just happy to know there’s always fairy dust in the kitchen and not ask too many questions.
It’s why chefs always tell you to ‘season’ everything well, which basically means, add salt. Seasoning per se is a moveable feast, but a simple description could be something like: at each stage of the cooking process, as you add ingredients, add salt until the newly added flavours ‘pop’. Most importantly, don’t taste immediately after adding salt, rather let it cook off a little so the salt can incorporate before tasting to see where you’re at, and if it needs more.
All of this seasoning is one the reasons restaurant food tastes so damn good. Put simply, chefs use a lot more salt than civilians who tend to be afraid of it, and not without reason because it turns out NaCl is a tricky character: quite literally a matter of life and death.
The pillars of salt and humanity are a match made in heaven: we need salt, we need to eat and salt makes our food taste better. But too much of it is said to cause everything from swollen ankles and high blood pressure to kidney stones and heart disease. Too little and your body will stop working as your nervous system shuts down. Arrivederci.
So here’s the moral of the story: as is the case when cooking, you need to season yourself regularly. It’s the only way to maintain the correct amount of salt your body needs. Which (fun fact) turns out to be about half a percent of your body weight, or perhaps a little more if, like me, your mum was a mermaid.
This is the first in a four-part series about salt, seasoning, and the secret to creating satisfying flavour when cooking entirely with vegetables, brought to you with a pinch of nostalgia and plenty of love for the women who raised us.
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