Gorgonzola–Olive Oil Queso with Dipping Figs
Molten Brie with Pistachio Crumbs and Warm Salted Dates
Chèvre Brûlée and Arugula Wilted on Warm Salt with Pears
Salt-Melted Chocolate Fondue with Crisp Bacon
Bagna Cauda Warmed in a Salt Bowl, Served with Artichokes
Salt Block Raclette with Fire-Roasted New Potatoes and Shallots
e’ve been eating salt for a long time—in fact, deciding just how we’ve been eating it depends on how you define we. Ever since we became modern human beings some 200,000 years ago, our physiological need for salt has shaped where we have lived and what we have eaten. We followed animals to salt deposits, ate the animals, and then ate the salt. Eventually, as we became more sophisticated, we ate the animals and the salt at the same time, and the first cuisine was born! For hundreds of millennia before the dog was first domesticated, salt has been our steadfast best friend—as a nutrient, a seasoning, and a preservative. Now it’s time to look to salt for something new.
Audacious statement of dazzling insight: Food is often tastier served warm. And yes, food is even better warmed up and salted. Food that is warmed and salted on salt is the bomb. Different foods seem to take just what they need. Try warming chèvre brûlée and arugula (see here) on the block together so the salt and the warmth both can work their wizardry on each type of food, each in their own way. So imagine our good luck to find that salt is not only the king of seasoning, but also an absolutely top-notch hot plate to boot.
It turns out that salt’s molecular properties in the world of taste are rivaled by its properties in the realm of energy. Salt has about twice the specific heat of steel, meaning you need to put about twice the amount of energy into a salt block to heat it up 1°F as you do your steel pan. Thus a salt block at 150°F is holding a lot more energy in it than a metal pan of the same weight, so you can do things with it like heat it in the fire and then take it to the table to melt the divine Alpine cheese called raclette onto fire-roasted potatoes and cornichons (see here).
Salt also has very low thermal conductivity, so the energy that is in there is slow to come out. If you heat aluminum, the energy moves in quickly, and passes out quickly—that’s why you can touch something right out of the oven if it’s wrapped in aluminum foil. Energy passes through salt much more slowly, and conversely the heat is downright lackadaisical about coming back out.
Compounding their mule-like thermal stubbornness, salt blocks are five to ten times more massive than anything else you might have to serve food from in the kitchen. The upshot is that if you toss a salt block on the stove for 20 minutes, you will have something that will both warm and season bean dip (see here) or gorgonzola and olive oil queso (see here) at the same time, and it will do both of these things better than anything else on earth.
Apparently not done showing off, salt has one last property to flaunt, one that miraculously allows us to take full advantage of its warming and seasoning awesomeness. It can be shaped. A Himalayan salt rock can be turned on a lathe to make a rounded platter, or a dish, or even a bowl. This is the cooking utensil you have been waiting for: one simple pot for preparing, serving, and warming everything from bagna cauda (see here) to chocolate fondue (see here). Mankind’s 200,000-year-long obsession with salt has evolved to a higher level.
Gulping whole raw milk straight from the cow pushes your senses to the precipice; it is bursting with such oleaginous, silken, bovine intensity that it is no wonder few of us even think to crave such indulgence. Or perhaps it’s just that we’re squeamish about wrapping our fingers around the disconcertingly soft, turgid udder of the cow to procure it. Warming Gorgonzola in a salt bowl re-creates something of the sinful extra-virgin flavor of raw milk. Gorgonzola cheese, which is made from unskimmed milk, faithfully preserves the cow’s hugeness, and the warmth and salt from the salt bowl animates it with a vital moo. The plump figs, with their titillating softness, are the closest thing to an udder I can imagine.
1 (1- to 2-cup) salt bowl
2 tablespoons heavy cream or half-and-half
3 small oregano sprigs
4 ounces Gorgonzola dolce, cut and/or crumbled into small pieces
A few grinds of black pepper
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil (the best you can afford)
12 fresh figs (black or green), quartered lengthwise
MAKES 6 SERVINGS
Place the salt bowl on a burner over very low heat to warm to about 200°F, about 30 minutes (see Read Before Heating!). If your burner doesn’t go low enough, or you are using an electric burner, use a heat diffuser.
At the same time you set the bowl over the burner, remove the cream from the refrigerator to lose its chill.
When ready to serve, remove the bowl from the heat and put the cream and oregano in the salt bowl to warm for 1 minute. Add the cheese and stir until everything is melted and smooth. Stir in the pepper and olive oil. Serve the warm bowl of queso with the quartered figs for dipping.
When I was a teen, my father’s favorite way to spend the day with us was to invite a few friends on a hike or a picnic where we would throw down a blanket, crack open iced bottles of Löwenbräu (it was always Löwenbräu) and open a nice, Velveeta-smooth disk of Brie cheese. He was a regular Cyrano de Bergerac with a cheese knife, and we always had to spar with him to get our share. Skip ahead 10 years. I was living in Paris when a friend at the Sorbonne invited me to dinner. There was something on the table, molten, alive, almost boozy to the nose, and it was creeping surreptitiously from the cutting board. “What in the heck is it?” I blurted out. “You don’t like?” intoned my host. With my mouth crammed full of food, I didn’t bother responding, but just scooped up some more. It was a farmhouse Brie, served at room temperature. A moment earlier I had considered myself a Brie connoisseur. A moment later I realized I had never even eaten the real stuff. Salt blocks, with their thermal mass and unassuming bulk, transform store-bought Brie into a crash course on the true flavor of good cheese.
1 (8-inch) square or (9-inch) round salt block, tempered (see here)
½ cup shelled unsalted pistachios, coarsely chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
1 egg yolk
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1 (6-ounce) wedge Brie, with rind
12 Medjool dates, pitted
Small pieces of toast, for serving (optional)
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
Place the tempered salt block on a baking sheet in the oven. Turn the oven to 200°F and let it preheat with the block inside (see Read Before Heating!).
Meanwhile, put the pistachios and garlic in the work bowl of a food processor equipped with a steel blade and process in pulses until the nuts are ground to the texture of cornmeal. Dump the nut mixture onto a sheet of aluminum foil or plastic wrap.
Mix the egg yolk and cream with a fork in a small bowl until smooth. Brush the cheese with the egg mixture and roll it in the pistachio crumbs until well coated on all sides.
Remove the warm block (still on its baking sheet) from the oven. Place the cheese and dates on the block and return to the oven. Warm until the cheese is just beginning to ooze and the dates feel warm to the touch, about 20 minutes.
Serve with toast, or just smear some cheese on a date and enjoy. The warm block will keep the cheese warm and oozy for about an hour.
It’s practically axiomatic that the simplest, humblest dishes are often the best. But on the flip side, the simplest things can undercut even the best recipes. Bean dip is a case in point. Everybody loves bean dip, for its warm melty beany cheesiness, Tex-Mex seasoning, and guilt-free (this is flat-out health food) snackability. But within minutes of serving it, your dip is cold—and cold bean dip sucks. Enter the salt bowl. The bowl heats and seasons the dip, presents it with flair, and then keeps it warm—not for minutes, but for hours. There’s no hurry to finish it. You can leave it on a table at a party, or when home alone, you can put on a game and take your sweet time with a whole bowl of perpetually warm dip waiting patiently for the next chip.
1 (2- to 3-cup) salt bowl
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 small yellow onion, finely chopped
1 medium tomato, cored and cut into medium dice
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 teaspoons ground toasted cumin
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
1 (15½-ounce) can black beans, rinsed and drained
1 canned chipotle chile in adobo, minced
2 tablespoons adobo sauce from the chipotles
Freshly ground black pepper
¼ to 1/3 cup hot water
¼ cup finely shredded Monterey Jack (1 ounce)
1/3 cup chopped fresh cilantro
Unsalted tortilla and/or corn chips, for dipping
MAKES 8 SERVINGS
Place the salt bowl on a burner over very low heat to warm to about 200°F, about 30 minutes (see Read Before Heating!). If your burner doesn’t go low enough, or you are using an electric burner, use a heat diffuser.
Meanwhile, heat a medium skillet over medium-high heat. Add the olive oil and sauté the onion until transparent, about 2 minutes. Add the tomato, garlic, and cumin and sauté just until the cumin is aromatic and the tomato loses its raw look, about 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the vinegar; set aside.
When the salt bowl is warm, add the black beans and mash with a small fork or spoon into a coarse paste (there may still be a few whole beans visible). Stir in the chipotle chile and adobo sauce, black pepper, and ¼ cup hot water. Add the cheese and heat, stirring occasionally until the cheese melts, about 1 minute. Remove the bowl from the heat.
Stir in the sautéed vegetables. Add more of the hot water if needed to reach your desired consistency. Stir in the cilantro and serve the warm bowl of dip surrounded by chips for dipping.
Cooking is an emotional experience, and because salting is a culinary fundamental, changing our notions of salting changes our emotional relationship to food at a primal level. Most of the time salt is either added during cooking, in which case its sensuality invades the food deeply, or it is scattered on the finished dish, creating a luster of flavor on the surface. Serving goat cheese on a warm salt block uses salt in yet a third way, raising the cheese’s temperature and melting its fats to release all the unctuously feral flavors that previously lay cloaked in its chemistry. Because goat cheese has very little available moisture, the salt block barely seasons the cheese. Adding some moist fruit and salad to the block gives the salt an opportunity to shine in its seasoning role, providing just enough salinity to wrap everything up in a warm embrace.
1 (4 by 8 by 2-inch or 6 by 6 by 1½-inch) salt block, tempered (see here)
1 (4-ounce) log fresh goat cheese, halved, well chilled
1½ tablespoons light brown sugar
2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons red wine vinegar
½ garlic clove, smashed
2 ounces arugula
½ Bartlett pear, cored and thinly sliced
Small pieces of toast, for serving (optional)
MAKES 2 SERVINGS
Place the tempered salt block on a baking sheet in the oven. Turn the oven to 200°F and let it preheat with the block inside (see Read Before Heating!).
Coat one side of each piece of cheese with the brown sugar. Press the sugar into an even layer.
Remove the warm block (still on its baking sheet) from the oven and put the cheese, sugar side up, on the block. Return to the oven until the cheese is just beginning to go soft and the sugar melts, about 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, mix the oil, vinegar, and garlic together in a small bowl.
When the cheese is ready, remove the salt block setup from the oven. Toss the arugula with half of the dressing and make two mounds of greens on the block. Top each mound with the pear slices.
If you have a kitchen torch and you want to crisp the sugar a bit more, you may run a flame over it until the sugar bubbles and browns, about 10 seconds.
To serve, you may either smear the cheese onto toast or on the pear slices. Either way, top each bite with a small forkful of the wilted arugula.
There is only one reason why you don’t eat chocolate fondue several times a week: It’s a pain. Double boilers, pans to clean, burned bits at the bottom of your fondue pot, Sterno cans running out, drying out, leaking. Sure, liquid chocolate ecstasy is something we could all use more or less intravenously, but who needs the aggravation? Making fondue in a salt bowl is so much more convenient, so technically superior, that you will find yourself making it way more often. The bowl is thermally stable, so it acts like a double boiler, allowing you to make it in the same bowl you serve it in, and it will stay warm and delicious for hours. We’ll add a few dashes of orange bitters to fruit things up. Dip into it with bacon (strawberries, bananas, graham crackers, and pretzels are also good) in order to better represent the food groups, and now there really is no reason why chocolate fondue can’t be a mainstay for your household.
1 (1- to 2-cup) salt bowl
¼ cup heavy cream
8 to 12 pieces (8 to 12 ounces) thick-sliced bacon, cut into thirds
2 teaspoons orange bitters
1 cup bittersweet chocolate chips (64% cacao or higher)
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
Place the salt bowl on a burner over very low heat to warm to about 125°F, about 30 minutes (see Read Before Heating!). The bowl should feel just hot to the touch. If your burner doesn’t go low enough, or you are using an electric burner, use a heat diffuser.
At the same time you set the bowl over the burner, remove the cream from the refrigerator to lose its chill.
Meanwhile, cook the bacon in a skillet over medium heat until crisp. Remove from the pan using a slotted spoon and place on paper towels to absorb excess fat and keep warm.
When ready to serve, put the cream in the salt bowl and warm for 1 minute. Remove from the heat. Add the bitters and chocolate chips and stir until everything is melted and smooth. Serve the warm bowl of chocolate fondue with the bacon strips for dipping.
The American Midwest has hot dish, with its disconcertingly ambiguous name. Italians have “hot dip,” or bagna cauda, which doesn’t sound disconcerting because it sounds Italian. Both are essentially a hodgepodge of ingredients combined and served hot, but while the former is a deeply pragmatic affair, the latter is all about celebration. Preparing the bagna cauda in a salt bowl lends a striking salinity to the dish that first unifies and then time-warps the flavors to another plane. If this isn’t enough, it amplifies it progressively, each bite you take sizzling with more clarity and exuberance. You don’t need to know exactly what bagna cauda means, but, when served in a salt bowl, there’s nothing ambiguous about it.
1 (1- to 2-cup) salt bowl
3 globe artichokes, trimmed
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
20 garlic cloves, minced
4 ounces (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
10 anchovy fillets, finely chopped
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
Freshly ground black pepper
Pinch of cayenne pepper
½ baguette, cut into cubes or slices
MAKES 6 SERVINGS
Place the salt bowl on a burner over very low heat to warm to about 200°F, about 30 minutes (see Read Before Heating!). If your burner doesn’t go low enough, or you are using an electric burner, use a heat diffuser.
Meanwhile, boil or steam the artichokes until the flesh at the base of the leaves is tender, about 30 minutes. Drain, cut in half lengthwise, scoop out the choke, and cut each half in half lengthwise; keep warm.
To make the bagna cauda, add ¼ cup of the olive oil and the garlic to the salt bowl and warm the mixture, stirring occasionally, until the aroma of garlic is intoxicating, about 4 minutes. Add the remaining ¾ cup oil and the butter. Stir until the butter is melted.
Stir in the anchovies and keep stirring and mashing until they dissolve, about 8 minutes. Stir in the lemon juice, black pepper, and cayenne.
Using two oven mitts, transfer the warm bowl of dip from the burner to the center of a heatproof ceramic platter and surround it with the artichoke quarters and bread cubes. Provide shrimp forks or skewers for dipping and a side bowl for the artichoke debris.
Salt lovers have a tough time of it. We don’t want to admit that we simply thrill to the taste of salted food; because salt is so primal, just talking about it makes us seem like compulsive maniacs. Eaters of sweets who can eat just three potato chips and then move on will never understand. Or will they? Smashing buttery potatoes down on a salt block is like making potato chips in surround sound, with big, thick, crispy skins warmed to salty, buttery perfection. There is nothing like it in the world, and if this doesn’t unite us all as one smiling salty-sweet mass of humanity, I don’t know what will.
1 (8- to 10-inch) square or (9-inch) round salt block
4 baking potatoes, about 8 ounces each
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
Freshly ground black pepper
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
Preheat the oven to 400°F. Bake the potatoes until the largest one can be pierced easily, about 45 minutes.
Meanwhile, put the salt block on a burner over low heat to warm to about 200°F, about 30 minutes (see Read Before Heating!). If your burner doesn’t go low enough, or you are using an electric burner, use a heat diffuser.
When the potatoes are fully baked, remove from the oven and cut into quarters. Working with one potato at a time, lay the quarters, skin side down, on the block. Put a portion of butter on each potato quarter and season liberally with pepper. Use a knife to chop and smash the potato, still in its skin, scraping it up off the block as it breaks apart. When the potato is roughed up good, put it in a serving bowl. Smash the other potatoes in the same way.
Raclette was born to run. French shepherds shivering in the Alpine cold would hang the cheese from the hearth and hunker down literally inside the fireplaces, stropping the cheese onto hot potatoes as it melted. This recipe revels in the smoky rusticity of the original dish, but the introduction of a nice warm salt block lets you enjoy it at the dining room table instead of inside the gaping maw of a medieval fireplace.
1 (8- to 10-inch) square or (9-inch) round salt block
24 small new potatoes (red, golden, or fingerling)
1 tablespoon mild vegetable oil, such as canola
Freshly ground black pepper
12 shallots, unpeeled
12 cornichons (small pickled gherkins)
1 cup pickled vegetables, giardiniera, or Quick-Cured Vegetable Pickles
1 pound raclette cheese, rind removed, cut into 2 thick slices
Paprika, for sprinkling
1 small baguette, sliced
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
Light a charcoal or wood fire to medium-low heat (see here). Leave the grill grate off the grill so the coals are accessible.
Put the salt block near the edge (the cooler part) of the fire (see Read Before Heating!). After 10 minutes, move the block into a hotter part of the fire. If you have heavy fireproof grill mitts (see here), it’s easy (and oh-so-manly) to grab the block and move it with your hands. You can also use two sturdy metal spatulas to lift and move the block.
While the block is heating, coat the potatoes with the oil and season liberally with pepper. Wrap individually in small squares of heavy-duty aluminum foil. Put the potatoes directly in the coals and cook until they can be easily pierced with a fork, about 20 minutes, turning once or twice.
About 5 minutes before the potatoes are done, scatter the shallots in the coals and cook until the skins are charred, turning several times, about 5 minutes.
Using long-handled tongs or heavy grill gloves, transfer the potatoes and shallots to a large heatproof serving platter or board. Put the salt block on the platter and scatter the cornichons and pickled vegetables around the salt block on the platter.
Put the slices of cheese on the block and cook until melted and brown on the edges. Flip the cheese with a sturdy spatula.
To serve, sprinkle the cheese with paprika. Portion out 6 potatoes and 3 shallots per person. Scrape some cheese over the top of each serving, being sure to include some of the browned edges. People may help themselves to the pickles. Serve with the baguette.
