Dinners that elicit utter silence in guests are the ones to strive for. When the food takes precedence and words simply do not form in your head, you have achieved something great.  This was one of those meals.

It all started a few weeks ago when an amazing blogger friend stated “You cook the most exotic food. Do you ever just roast a chicken?” I decided to take it as a challenge, because truth be told, I rarely just roast a chicken. Maybe a bit of spring cleaning in the kitchen is in order to appreciate the simple wonders of classic fare.  Fast forward to a few days ago- I found myself on a lazy drive cruising the back roads of the Kitsap Peninsula in search of fresh eggs. Can I just state for the record and for the hundredth time that I desperately want chickens and ducks and I don’t think it’s fair that my evil husband won’t let me keep them on our in-city lot? Stated.  My loose goal was to end up at Pheasant Fields Farm, although I’ve never been before.  I rolled up and was greeted by dozens of friendly free-roaming chickens, who incidentally struck fear into Bentley’s little heart. He clung to my legs like never before but he was so awed he couldn’t walk away.  Come to find out, I had missed by a half hour the slaughter of a whole mess of chickens. If you know me at all you can imagine how disappointed I was to miss such a thing, but I’m told they’ll do it again soon and I’m invited to come participate. Plus, they still had all the equipment set up along with a giant bucket of heads and feet which they graciously gave me to take home and make stock. All that collagen- oh yes, baby!

I was only too happy to take one of the freshly-rigormortisized chickens off their hands along with some duck and chicken eggs right out of the nests. I learned a great tip I wish I had known when I unceremoniously killed my own chicken last fall.  Don’t cook the birds until they are no longer stiff, as rigor mortis causes toughness if you cut meat off the bone while the bird is still in that state. It takes 24-48 hours for the bird to loosen back up, though you’re welcome to brine the bird during that time.  I waited the obligatory two days and meanwhile made a batch of fresh cottage cheese.  I decided cottage cheese noodles would be a perfect accompaniment to simple chicken.  I also had some triple crème languishing in the refrigerator (don’t ask) so I tossed that in with the noodles along with a boatload of my fresh eggs, some thyme, just churned-butter and the cottage cheese.  This was my first experience making the noodles with a pasta machine. I felt a little bit like a sellout since I have hand-rolled and cut them several times a week for as long as I can remember, but I guess that fact in itself justifies a machine.  The noodles sure are nice and uniform, even if they do lack the personality of truly handmade pasta.  I will use the machine in the future but will also definitely retain my hand-rolled technique as well. Another interesting observation about machine-rolling the noodles is that it doesn’t require nearly as much wine. You simply cannot hand-make noodles without regular gulps from a big balloon wine glass in order to fortify your strength. Because you need less strength for machine-done pasta, you don’t encounter near-enough of this happy problem.

Once enough time had passed, I removed my newly-loosened chicken from her brine and fired up the smoker while her skin air-dried.  I figured one little change from roasting the chicken to smoking it really doesn’t make much of a difference to my initial challenge, as it’s essentially just cooking it in an outdoor oven over apple wood as opposed to an indoor one.  Once she was nice and dry and the smoker was nice and hot (I averaged 220° F for 3 hours for a 5.5 lb bird) I trussed her, stuffed her cavity with a bit of thyme, and rained Maldon salt and a touch of pepper over her body.  Because simplicity was the name of the game here, I didn’t want to get complicated with extra rubs, marinades, or god-forbid basting, which doesn’t work well with smoking as it lets too much heat escape.

Once my chicken was nearing completion I tossed the noodle concoction into the oven and whipped together a simple butter lettuce and cucumber salad along with some homemade buttermilk dressing.  I made a jus to drizzle over the chicken by reducing the juices collected from her cavity in a saucepan along with some vermouth and thyme.

The noodles came out, the chicken was carved, salad was served et voila- I can DO simple, damn it! And I’m happy to report it was so simply damn delicious that not a word was spoken amongst five of the most talkative people I know for over 60 seconds.  They resumed their maddening din after they recovered from their delight, but did so with a lingering smile around their lips as they licked the last of the chicken from the glistening bones.

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.

I’ve been on a frozen, sweet kick lately in my posts, but then, that’s what springtime is all about. Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll see the return of pasta and duck eggs very soon.  I am a lucky girl. Imagine stumbling upon a ripe, succulent basket of rambutans in Seattle in May. It happened to me a few days back and for that I am grateful. What, say you, is a rambutan? It’s a tropical fruit like a lychee that is all things gorgeous wrapped into one spherical, brilliant package.  I imagine you can guess what I did with said fruits if you know me at all by now. Yes, I made gelato. And it tasted like a little scoop of tropical paradise. As it should. 

I probably sing the praises of Uwajimaya market in Seattle entirely too much on this blog, but I can’t help it. It’s like a giant cornucopia of amazing ingredients with which to endlessly experiment.  I don’t often have the chance to bite into the spiky splendoriffic rambutans, so when I do I really maximize my mouthful, if you know what I mean. 

Uwajimaya gets little shipments of precious produce in frequently. You never know what you will find.  More often than not you find something utterly addictive, yet upon returning to the store, alas, it is no more.  Ah well, the name of the culinary game is versatility, and this rambutan gelato speaks volumes to that. 

It almost tastes grape-like, if the grapes were in their especially succulent, very raw state. No amount of fermenting or cooking would benefit the rambutans in gelato, so I made sure to keep them in merely a cold yet pureed form.  Texture is everything when it comes to frozen custard, and this fairly safe rendition of a classic custard ratio does not disappoint.  In the words of Yo Gabba Gabba (you will get this reference if you are the parent of a small child) “Try it. You’ll like it.” 

Rambutan Gelato

• 16 rambutans,  shelled and pitted
• 2 c milk
• 3 egg yolks
• ½ c sugar
• Salt- pinch
• 1 tsp vanilla

 Blend rambutan’s with ¾ c milk.  Place blended mixture in a mixing bowl with a fine mesh strainer set over the top.  In a medium saucepan warm the remaining milk with the sugar and salt. Once it’s nearly boiling, quickly whisk it into the waiting egg yolks and transfer the mixture back into the saucepan, whisking all the while. 

Stir constantly until the custard thickens enough to coat the back of your spoon. Pour through the strainer into the rambutan mixture, add vanilla, and chill over an ice bath stirring occasionally. 

 Chill custard in the refrigerator thoroughly before churning into ice cream/gelato following your ice cream maker’s instructions.