Brownie Points

Immediately after buying our overpriced box of chocolate covered macadamia nuts, I regretted not sharing a more unique Hawaiian souvenir with my friends and coworkers. I had fanciful images of bringing home clusters of apple bananas, branches of rambutans, wedges of sugar cane, and bundles of lychee to pop in our mouths.

The chocolates were quickly scarfed, and I felt less guilty about holding back my personal Hawaiian souvenirs of specialty salts:
Blocky chunks of orange Alaea Sea Salts await my culinary inclinations. Colored with red iron oxide laden Hawaiian clay, I wonder if I could transform them into fluffy red flakes with a boil down? The bag of Hawaiian Isle Seasonings Chili Salt is beautifully studded with chili flakes, and perfumed with ginger and garlic. These would be great to toss into poke to lend a crunch of texture to the smooth fish, like we enjoyed up at Mashiko in Seattle.

Not only are these salts gorgeous, they pass through air port security in a breeze.

Food Bloggers’ Further Adventures in Specialty Salts

• I’m Mad and I Eat: Worth My Salt
  Scaling down our ambitions a bit, we gathered a mere three liters of water. I filtered it through cheesecloth and then set about boiling it on my gas range in a stainless steel pot. Two hours later, I had about three ounces of handmade fleur de sel!
• Portland Food and Drink: The Meadow: Singing the Praises of Salt
  When you visit The Meadow, be prepared to learn more about salt than you ever thought possible, and be prepared to be wowed. I went in as a skeptic and came out a convert, albeit a thirsty one.
• Accidental Hedonist: Salt Taste Test
  Slices of cucumbers were cut up and sprinkled with it with a type of salt. From there, results were tabulated, notes were compared, and conclusions were made.
• Spicelines: Salt, Salt Everywhere: The Five Salts You Really Need
  The secret to salt sanity is to pare down. Kurlansky quite sensibly has gravitated to three major categories: An elegant finishing salt, a fine salt for baking and a coarse salt for a bit of crunch. I’d add two more: a basic everyday salt and fifth category of fun salts for fooling around.
• Lindy’s Ono Recipes: Feeling Salty?
  I love to eat different types tsukemono (Japanese Pickles). When I first got married, my husband and I had this in common and if you had opened our refrigerator, you would have thought that an old Japanese couple lived there.
• Nordljus: Chocolate Caramel Tartlettes with Sea Salt - SHF#9
  After filling the shells with the gooey caramel, pour the chocolate ganache over, and of course, the sea salt. In the recipe, she suggests using fleur de sel but I used Maldon sea salt this time. As soon as you cut into it, the filling oozes out and you’ll be in caramel heaven!
• The Traveler’s Lunchbox: the Well Salted Tart
  the biggest culinary divide is far more fundamental. In fact it’s so fundamental that many of you reading this may have never even noticed there is a divide. Basically, it all comes down to this: do you like salt in your desserts, or don’t you?

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