One of many first meals I comprised of an thrilling new cookbook was a easy stir-fry, however I might by no means have executed it with out the nudge that the e book gave me. One other dish I made, Chinese language brined eggs, was surprisingly simple; they merely sat in a salty bathtub with just a few different elements for a few weeks, however in that point they reworked into one thing advanced and launched me to one thing new.
The stir-fry and brined eggs are from The Miracle of Salt: Recipes and Strategies to Protect, Ferment, and Rework Your Meals, a powerful single-ingredient journey around the globe. Readers might surprise the place it can go—maybe taking deep dives in pink Himalayan, or visiting with the sauniers of France as they skim for fleur de sel. Whereas salt varieties and specialists like which are current, this e book focuses on find out how to use salt and strategies to create extra scrumptious meals. In different phrases, it is a cookbook, and we’re within the succesful palms of veteran cookbook creator and journey author Naomi Duguid, whose Burma: Rivers of Taste cookbook is amongst my favorites. She makes use of Salt’s recipes to deepen our data of an ingredient utilized by nearly everybody. It is a feat, as globetrotting cookbooks can really feel like they poach little bits of knowledge from right here and there, creating an entire that is lower than the sum of its elements. (Full disclosure: I’ve met Duguid, talked store, and shucked oysters together with her a number of years in the past at a food-writer business occasion.)
Preserving lemon slices
{Photograph}: Richard Jung/Artisan Books
Proper after I obtained the e book, I bought just a few issues rolling, as they required time to mature. Together with these eggs, I made preserved lemons, largely simply to strive a North African twist that Duguid likes the place, as a substitute of quartering the citrus lengthwise and leaving the bottom intact, she slices them, salts either side, and stacks the slices in a jar simply large sufficient to suit the lemony pinwheels. That is nice in case you simply wish to use a bit (or rather a lot) of preserved lemon in a dish, versus the dedication of the more-common quartering approach.
I additionally used gobs of fenugreek, mustard, fennel, and nigella seeds to make a vat of inexperienced mango pickle, which sat subsequent the lemons and Acadian salted scallions (actually simply salt, scallions, and time) for a month, every one getting tastier every single day.
With these underway, I made a salad of fast cucumber pickles, the cukes sliced and salted then spending the night time within the fridge earlier than being coated with a dressing of mirin, soy, and sesame oil. Nothing groundbreaking, however make sufficient of it and, as Duguid notes, it retains within the fridge for per week. I made miso French dressing to placed on a weeknight salad, put collectively her Thai-style grilled beef as a result of I really like any excuse to make use of fish sauce as a marinade, and rounded out the week together with her spaghetti alla puttanesca as a result of I really like dinner.
I quick-salted egg yolks, parking 4 of the orbs in divots in a sq. Tupperware stuffed with salt, then added extra crystals to cowl them utterly. After per week, they emerged like apricot-colored gummy discs, earlier than air-drying in cheesecloth the fridge for an additional week, which readied them to be grated like Parmesan onto cooked veggies or add lingering depth to pasta.