One of the first meals I comprised of an thrilling new cookbook was a easy stir-fry, however I’d by no means have executed it with out the nudge that the ebook gave me. Another dish I made, Chinese brined eggs, was surprisingly simple; they merely sat in a salty bathtub with a couple of different elements for a pair of 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 Techniques to Preserve, Ferment, and Transform Your Food, a powerful single-ingredient journey all over the world. Readers could surprise the place it is going to go—maybe taking deep dives in pink Himalayan, or visiting with the sauniers of France as they skim for fleur de sel. While salt varieties and specialists like which might be current, this ebook focuses on how you can use salt and methods to create extra scrumptious meals. In different phrases, it is a cookbook, and we’re within the succesful arms of veteran cookbook creator and journey author Naomi Duguid, whose Burma: Rivers of Flavor cookbook is amongst my favorites. She makes use of Salt’s recipes to deepen our data of an ingredient utilized by nearly everybody. This is a feat, as globetrotting cookbooks can really feel like they poach little bits of info from right here and there, creating a complete that is lower than the sum of its components. (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.)
Right once I obtained the ebook, I acquired a couple of issues rolling, as they required time to mature. Along with these eggs, I made preserved lemons, principally simply to attempt a North African twist that Duguid likes the place, as an alternative 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. This is nice when you simply need 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 day by 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 full of salt, then added extra crystals to cowl them fully. After per week, they emerged like apricot-colored gummy discs, earlier than air-drying in cheesecloth the fridge for one other week, which readied them to be grated like Parmesan onto cooked veggies or add lingering depth to pasta.