One of many first meals I made out of an thrilling new cookbook was a easy stir-fry, however I might by no means have achieved 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 a number of different components for a few weeks, however in that point they reworked into one thing complicated 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, an impressive single-ingredient journey around the globe. Readers could marvel the place it’ll go—maybe taking deep dives in pink Himalayan, or visiting with the sauniers of France as they skim for fleur de sel. Whereas salt sorts and specialists like which are current, this e-book focuses on learn how to use salt and methods 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. This can be a feat, as globetrotting cookbooks can really feel like they poach little bits of data from right here and there, creating an entire that is lower than the sum of its components. (Full disclosure: I’ve met Duguid, talked store, and shucked oysters along with her a number of years in the past at a food-writer trade occasion.)
Proper once I obtained the e-book, I obtained a number of issues rolling, as they required time to mature. Together with these eggs, I made preserved lemons, principally simply to attempt 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 both sides, and stacks the slices in a jar simply huge sufficient to suit the lemony pinwheels. That is nice in case you simply wish to use a bit (or lots) 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 on daily basis.
With these underway, I made a salad of fast cucumber pickles, the cukes sliced and salted then spending the evening 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 every 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 along 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 fully. After every week, they emerged like apricot-colored gummy discs, earlier than air-drying in cheesecloth the fridge for one more week, which readied them to be grated like Parmesan onto cooked veggies or add lingering depth to pasta.
