The select flake salt: 'A few grains can transform anything'

AIGUES-MORTES, France — Knee-deep in the impossibly pink marshy waters of the Camargue, off the southern coast of France, I shoveled fleur de sel crystals to shore in glistening mounds, just as the sauniers, the workers traditional salt workers working around me on a hot summer morning have been doing so in that region since Roman times.

Eric Beaumer, saunier master at Le Saunier de Camargue, sprinkled warm, wet salt on my hand. I licked my palm and the shards crunched, dissolving in a saline explosion. It was the same mineral boost I'd experienced that morning when I sprinkled fleur de sel over my eggs, and would experience again two hours later with a tomato salad. The brittle crystals made the eggs seem creamier and the tomatoes more ripely sweet. That's the magic of flake sea salt: it makes food taste more deeply like itself.

Countless chefs and home cooks have fallen in love with fancy flake salt, even though it can cost more than 10 times more than that found in a salt shaker. But 30 years ago, here in the Camargue, only a few devoted sauniers bothered to harvest fleur de sel.

“They didn't even want it as a gift,” Beaumer said.

That's because, for most of the 20th century, salt was just salt, mostly industrial table salt—tiny white grains of nearly pure sodium chloride, the salty version of factory-sliced ​​white bread. Cheap and modern, it wore its sterile absence of color and variability as a badge of purity.

But around the same time as the organic food movement emerged, chefs began rediscovering salts with character: snowflake Maldon, mineral fleur de sel, Himalayan salt with its dawn glow.

Innovators discovered that flake salt made a big difference in their cooking. A few grains sprinkled at the end could transform anything—pastes, roast meats, broths, chocolate desserts—in a way that granulated salt simply couldn't.

Today these select salts are easier to find than ever, both in supermarkets and online.

To really understand salt, a little history helps. Its production has been at the center of human culture for thousands of years. Biologically, we cannot exist without salt. Sodium chloride regulates our body fluids and is essential for nerve, muscle and digestive function.

Early humans got all the salt they needed by eating animal meat; There is very little salt naturally present in plants.

No one knows exactly when or how people discovered methods of producing salt—by evaporating seawater or extracting rock salt from the earth—but it most likely happened with the rise of agriculture and livestock farming in the Neolithic period. As humans increased their dependence on vegetables and grains, they had to start salting their food.

And, as early civilizations developed, salt became one of their main economic drivers, said Mark Kurlansky, author of “Salt: History of the Only Edible Stone.” “Before the Industrial Revolution, most international trade was in food, and you couldn't trade food without first preserving it in salt.” And in ancient Egypt, Kurlansky said, people didn't just use salt to preserve their food; They used it to preserve their dead.

“A mummy is a salty product, like a cod,” he said.

Until its mass production in the early 20th century, salt necessarily expressed the geography and climate of where it was produced. The mineral content of the salt, the evaporation or extraction techniques used to collect it, and local traditions produced wildly different results, from blood-red Haleakala crystals from Hawaii to gray pebbles from Brittany to glassy white Hana flakes from Japan—all still produced. , at least in small quantities.

“Most salt has no headquarters,” said Mark Bitterman, author of four books on salt. “It's an industrialized product and it can come from anywhere,” he said of modern varieties. But a salt made in a traditional way connects us with its origin in a vital and immutable way. “You can grow a San Marzano tomato in California, but you can't make Guérande fleur de sel in the San Francisco Bay.”

By: MELISSA CLARK