For several years I have had the desire to host a salt-tasting party, I simply lacked the impetus. Until now.  You see, I’ve always felt the salty soiree should have serendipitous timing all around, and that wasn’t possible in days gone by.  For me, everything had to be essential, perfect, balanced.  The food, the guests, the salts, the level of engagement- the whole shebang.  When I finally decided a few months ago that the signs were looking auspicious to host the party, it was a right nice feeling. Right nice indeed, because I’ve been stewing over the concept for so long, there really wasn’t much to settle on.  Except for incorporating some new obsessions in terms of food (can you say sous vide?) and making sure the guest list didn’t go entirely jabberwocky with too many tasters and not enough salt, all the pre-planning was a cinch.

I planned a from-scratch menu deliberately devoid of salt to encourage tasting and pairing. Notables included sous vide custard duck eggs, sliced heirloom tomatoes, no-knead baguettes by Patrick aka best breadbaker in the world, homemade cottage cheese, homemade burrata, a slew of Italian cheeses including a three-milk Robiola and Bra Tenero, jicama, fava beans and honey, sous vide potatoes and beets, and edamame.  Whew, if that wasn’t a salt-less mouthful I don’t know what would be.  I did not forget the dessert category, which consisted of maple caramels, chocolate pavé and triple chocolate truffle tart by Patrick, and four types of ice cream: rhubarb crème fraiche, coffee hazelnut, quadruple chocolate and goat yoghurt maple.

Since many members of the Seattle fooderati scene showed for the 70+ person party, there were countless other notable culinary creations from the likes of Michael Natkin, the man behind Herbivoracious, Jenny Richards of Purplehousedirt, Lorna Yee from The Cookbook Chronicles,  Marc Schermerhorn of the infamous @marcseattle twitter feed, Keren Brown aka Frantic Foodie, and many more.  The lovely and talented Jeanne Sauvage of Fourchickens, brought me a carton of homegrown eggs that I’ve been coddling as though they were babies; I want chickens and ducks so badly I can taste them, but that’s a story for another time.

For the tasting itself, I lined my dining table with over 60 empty vessels and assigned each one a corresponding number.  We created a master list on the Ipad that contained each number, then, when attendees brought salt, they simply chose a vessel, told us the number, and we catalogued each salt into the secret master list.  This way the tasting was truly blind.  I raided my own global collection of salt and filled roughly twenty of the vessels, and once all the guests had proffered their hand-selected salts, we had 63 samples.  I established four categories for the tasting: Best Overall Tasting Salt, Best Blended Salt, Best Pairing-Savory, and Best Pairing-Sweet.  My graphic designer neighbor Cyndy created ballots so folks could cast their votes, and I’ve just tallied the results, which are molto interessante indeed.

Repurposed Aarnio Bubble Chair as Wine Chiller

Before I get to that I want to mention some of the notable salts on display that evening, representing six continents.  Janna Wemmer from Secret Stash Salts brought a dizzying array of her expertly-blended salts, including bloody mary salt, smoked chipotle, and lavender rosemary to name a few.  She is a locally-focused artisan producer of the finest blended salt available in the Pacific Northwest, and her salts should be included in any representational goodie bag of local products.  Local foodie-about-town Traca Savadogo was able to get Mark and Marjorie Fuller of famed restaurant Spring Hill to donate some of Mark’s ancestral Hawaiian red clay sea salt, aged 25 years,  which was one I made sure to sneak a reserve of for later use.  Apparently the aging process sweetens the deal, and I mean that in a literal sense.  The kind folks over at Marx Foods heard about the tasting and donated some perfectly structured Portugese Flor de Sal for our tasting pleasure. I’ve been finishing with this one for a few weeks and am very happy with the crystal structure and depth of character.

Every party is bound to have one jester, and this soiree was not immune.  Our non-food-obsessed neighbor thought it would be quite funny to cart in a salt-lick, which he did with much pride to much snickering.  We had to give it a fair tasting, so we chipped some off the old block and put it in a vessel, much to the chagrin of the poor folks who tasted it.  Oddly, it did receive one vote; some kind soul nominated it in the savory pairing category for its complementary taste with radishes.  Many of the salts travelled here from around the globe, but only a few did so expressly to be tasted at the party.  One such salt was a Waddenzout brought all the way from Amsterdam by Robert and Patrick. I sure hope that one didn’t have any extra Amsterdam-additives in it, if you know what I mean.  Another well-travelled salt came from my amazing friend Emily (Happy Birthday, Baby) who sent over some Korean Bamboo salt from Ulsan, where she is teaching for the year.  Lily and Rodney brought forth a slew of salts from Vancouver BC made by Edible Canada.  Of the twenty or so salts I personally contributed, besides my homemade salt, many of them came from the Portland-based salt boutique The Meadow.  If you think of the most esoteric salt in all the lands and are scratching your head as to where to find it, chances are you’ll find it at The Meadow, which is my go-to salt destination, both online and in the flesh.

Alright, enough of me waxing lyrical about one of the greatest substances on earth- let’s see the results.  The winner in the best overall finishing salt category is the timeless classic, Maldon Sea Salt. It’s crystal structure alone is a thing of marvel; I really believe this salt should be one of the wonders of the world because it comes in the form of little dissolving pyramids. I love other salts equally for different things, but I am not surprised that Maldon unanimously won the grand prize.  There were four salts tied for second place in this category: Trapani Sea Salt, my own sea salt, Secret Stash Salt’s Lavendar Rosemary, and Pangasinan Star.

The winner of best blended salt goes to Black Truffle Sea Salt.  A very close second goes to Secret Stash Salt’s Lavender Rosemary Salt.  Tied for third place here are Evergreen Edible Salt and Wreck Beach Edible Salt.  Best Pairing-Sweet has three salts tied for first place. They are: Murray River Pink Salt, Maldon Sea Salt, and Tahitian Vanilla Salt, all being paired with caramels. In fact, caramels were the favored vehicle with which to sweetly taste salt.  The trickiest category was Best Pairing-Savory.  I think it’s because there was so much food it was difficult to get consistency.  Five salts tied for first place in this category. They are: The Drive Edible on heirloom tomatoes, Tahitian Vanilla on Eggs (maybe these voters had a few glasses of wine?), Sale alle Erbe delle Mar Lunghe (salt with herbs from the long sea) on Patrick’s bread, Haleakala Ruby on heirloom tomatoes, and Murray River on mozzarella and edamame.

these glasses did not stay empty for long

Alright, this was a bloody long-winded post, so I’m going to wrap it up.  It is my goal to showcase the winners in all categories and do some refined tasting with them in a more controlled environment. I’d like to perfect some pairings and suss out which qualities about each of the winning salts made it memorable for tasters.  Expect to see more salt in this space soon, but then, you probably already knew that.  Have a salt-sational day!

all the salts- the morning after

PS- special thanks to Lisa Page Ramey for providing some of the mid-party action shots; there was a lot going on and our camera languished in the corner for much of the evening.

Pierogi are similar to the Italian pastas I am very familiar with making, and yet oh-so-different.  Stylistically, the dough is more like a hybrid between biscuit and pasta dough, for one thing.  With typical tagliatelle, ravioli, lasagna, etc, the dough benefits from extreme manipulation. Biscuit dough (and similarly pie crust), on the other hand, should be touched as minimally as possible in order to ensure an airy texture.  Pierogi dough falls into the latter category in that its texture is better if it’s handled as little as possible, and yet you still have to roll it down to about an eighth of an inch thickness in order to cut rounds in order to form the individual pierog.  Yes, you heard me right, singularly they are pierog, and plural they are pierogi. Yes, you’ve undoubtedly heard American bastardizations including but not limited to perogis, perogies, perogy, pirohi, piroghi et cetera, but the accepted and accurate pluralization and spelling is pierogi.  I’m not sure why I’m going all soapbox on this word- it’s not as though I’m any kind of expert either by birth or experience, I just find it interesting I guess.

Anyway, in my effort to conquer the world of pasta I’ve decided to branch out beyond the land of Italia which I know and love so well into other areas with rich traditions of unleavened dough.  I’ve always admired the standard pierogi in all its cheesy potato glory, though I can’t exactly be trusted to leave well enough alone. Luckily this time the resulting pierogi were unimaginably spectacular, but traditionalists, you’d best turn back now.  Those of you who have read this blog for any amount of time know that I have an (un)healthy obsession with eggs.  I also happen to love tucking them inside dough. Pierogi and eggs are downright meant for one another, though the dumplings are small enough that the eggs must be of the quail variety.  I also decided some shaved raw asparagus would spruce things up a bit and help remind me that it is springtime, after all. It was a good call.

This recipe makes 12 pierogi.  The basic pierogi protocal is make the dough, make the filling, assemble, boil and finally fry.  The first thing to do is caramelize an onion by slicing it and putting it into a lidded dutch oven along with some butter.  Slide it into a 400° oven and don’t fuss with it for an hour.  You can make the dough and soften the potatoes however you see fit (I sous vide them) in the interim.  Once the onion has spent an hour sweating all its troubles away, transfer it to the stovetop and remove the lid.  Deglaze the pot with a generous splash of vermouth and scrape up all the fond that has developed.  Evaporate the vermouth, stir it all together and you have your caramelized onion.

Next, make the dough by mixing all the ingredients in a large bowl, kneading until it comes together, then allow to rest in plastic wrap while you prepare the filling.  Here are the dough ingredients:

Dough

• 2 c flour
• ¾ c sour cream
• 1 duck egg
• 3 tbsp softened butter
• ½ tsp salt

While your dough is resting, combine the cooked potatoes with the filling ingredients (except the quail eggs, salt and pepper) in a food processor and process until smooth.  Here are the filling ingredients:

Filling

• ½ lb Yukon gold potatoes
• 1 c cheddar cheese, grated
• 3 tbsp caramelized onion (or more, to taste)
• ¼ c sour cream
• 1 quail egg yolk per pierogi (in this case 12)
• Salt and pepper to taste

At this point remove the quail eggs from the refrigerator and set a large pot of water to boil.  Divide the dough in thirds and roll the first third out on a floured surface into a rectangle about 4” wide and 1/8” thick.  Using a large cookie cutter or glass (3-4” diameter), cut four rounds out of the first rectangle. You will be making 12 rounds total.  Drop a tablespoon of filling on each round and make a hole big enough for the quail egg yolk in the filling using your index fingers.  Brush each pierog with egg wash to make sealing easier.   Crack egg yolks into each pierogi (it’s ok if some white goes too- it helps bind the pierog) and seal by folding one side of the pierog over the other.  Crimping is optional, but if you want to do it you can do it with the tines of a fork.  In order to ensure even crimping, always place the first tine of the fork in the last indentation you made, like this:

Repeat this process with the remaining dough and move each batch to rest on a sheetpan lined with parchment paper.

Once you are finished filling your pierogi, boil in batches of four in lightly salted water for four minutes.  Remove with a slotted spoon.  Meanwhile, shave several stalks of asparagus and leave the shavings in lemon water to tenderize. Fry the pierogi in butter along with more of the caramelized onion on both sides until they lightly brown. Serve with sour cream and shavings of raw asparagus.

When I think of poutine I think of romance, legs in pencil skirts gracefully exiting limos, Concord dashes to Paris for a quick shopping jaunt. Those of you who have had poutine are surely shaking your heads right now thinking what it should conjure for me is glutted arteries and heart attacks at 45, but no matter. Poutine is one of those insanely attractive foods that I’ll never refuse, even if it means an extra five miles on the treadmill the next day.  A quick bit of history: poutine originated in Quebec in the late 1950’s and consists of fries, cheese curds, and sauce.  There are many variations on the sauce, but it is essentially agreed upon that the most traditional sauce is a veloute made with chicken stock (the difference between veloute and gravy being that the former is made with stock whereas the latter cream or milk).  By the 1970’s, poutine had worked its way into the hearts of New York and New Jerseyites who often referred to it by another moniker: disco fries.  I’m sure Lady Gaga would be proud.  I think this is where my non-lived-through nostalgia comes in. I just imagine the fabulous queens (gay and otherwise) of the Studio 54 set tumbling out of the club at 5 am ordering disco fries from the nearest greasy spoon to sop up all of the vodka tonics consumed during a wild night of dancing and debauchery. 

I’ve been on a bit of a poutine kick lately, which is perfectly ok since I’m also on a bit of a training for a half-marathon kick too, so there.  I’m not sure any amount of running can justify the fact that I recently bought a deep fryer, but it sure makes kick ass fries, so I’m throwing caution to the wind.  I’ve been experimenting up a storm with the Okinawan purple sweet potatoes that are flooding the shelves of Uwajimaya right now, and the true test of a good potato is to fry it straight up.  I feel like by buying a deep fryer I’ve suddenly become initiated into a secret club where I get to learn little secrets like when you’re frying potatoes you must double dip.  Yup, it’s true, the interior gets cooked but stays soft, then the second dip in the fryer crisps up the exterior and provides necessary crunch. 

I had sous vided a quartered duck the day before, so I made a veloute of the remaining jus and simply slathered it over the pretty fries. I completed the look with a smattering of fresh cheese curds from Seattle’s own Beechers Cheese.  It couldn’t be simpler, like Canada’s answer to nachos, but to my mind, much better, and irrefutably more romantic.  What are you waiting for- go out and imbibe too much of your favorite liquor and soak it all up after you’re good and drunk and danced out with a steaming plate of poutine.  You’ll be hooked before you can say “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.”