Sunday, December 12, 2010

Salt is not always white.

Salt has always been white to me. I could even tell you right now two tales about salt and its whiteness. Whenever I was asked to name things in white, salt was always one of them - until today. I was reading the February volume of Restaurants & Institutions* magazine and for the first time in my life saw that salt could be found and served in different colours. Hawaiian sea salts which are specialty finishing salts, for example, are red or black. Sel gris or a by-product fleur de sel are gray salts from France. Murray River is peach-coloured flakes from Australia and Peruvian pink or Pink Himalayan, as you can easily guess, are found in pink crystals. I stared at the photographs in the magazine for quite some time in amazement while all my rigid patterns along with all those ordinary images of salt were melting away. Though, the idea that a Peruvian villager or a Himalayan caravan driver would probably claim that salt is normally pink as I used to claim it's white relieved me a lot. I am far happier now both to have made a personal discovery and to have realized that I need to learn a great deal more about cooking starting with the basics. 

 Restaurants &Institutions magazine, February 2010, page 24

 Restaurants & Institutions magazine, February 2010, page 25
*a long standing publication on the food-service industry but shut down last April because  it was "no longer profitable". 

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