Ladies and Sea Dogs

We tasted salt.  We had fancy schmanzy salt and regular table salt.

If you google salt tasting you can get a whole bunch of really good ideas regarding how to go about this.  Of course with Zena, Goddess of Fire as your tasting companion you’re going to do it with a little bit of flare, so we mixed it up with our regular appointment and did a pop up tasting at our hair stylist’s salon.

Just a moment about our Hair Stylist at High Maintenance Hair Studio:  She’s top notch. We recommend her for all your hair styling needs, manicures, pedicures – the whole shebang.  And she does a mean salt tasting too.

Of course salt is salty. But when you do your salt tasting you’ll realize that there’s more to it than that.  That’s why you do a tasting.

This is our tasting list:

Morton fine table salt 

Balene  coarse sea  salt – France

Morton fine iodized salt  

Alea coarse red Hawaii

Morton fine sea salt  

Guava lime smoked - Hawaii

Potassium Chloride

Gray coarse sea salt [unrefined] France

Saharan Desert  fine salt

Fine rock salt [unrefined] – Utah

fyi Morton Salt has a map of where they get salt: http://www.mortonsalt.com/our-company/our-locations

We added bread, butter and cucumbers to get a sense of  what the salts taste like with various foods. You can add as many foods as you like, but since we were doing a pop up tasting in a salon we kept it minimal. I think we had more than plenty of salts for one tasting. Since we only had three people I put all the little salt piles on the small square plate and set all the bags and containers with labels around the plate to show what was what. If you have a lot of people you probably want a much more spacious arrangement so that everyone can reach everything. I’d recommend that if you’re going to taste this many salts that you give yourself plenty of time and something to eat and drink in order to give your mouth a rest. Salt is strong.

Once the tasting began it was all exclamations of various kinds and speculation regarding how we’d  use each one.  Everyone was interested to find out how differently the salts taste from one another.  This is why you want to get your friends to bring over some different salts and have a tasting yourself.  Be adventurous. Since salt doesn’t spoil you can try some of those really expensive ones and divvy them out one sprinkle at a time for special occasions. Invite a goddess because that always makes the event special.

                    

The biggest surprise for me was the potassium chloride – woah.  That is some potent salt.  Definitely taste before you use it because it will easily ruin your food if you apply it like ordinary salt.  It is often used as a salt substitute for people who don't want to use sodium as an additive to food.

We all liked the Alea Red Hawaiian and would use it for all kinds of things. In the photo you can see how we sprinkled it on a little bread and butter.  I liked trying them with both the bread and butter and then the cucumber. The moisture in the raw cucumber produced a specific effect.

Zena, Goddess of Fire, recommends the guava lime smoked salt for margarita glass rims.  To me the coarse salts provided a more intense experience and the fine salts spread across my tongue very quickly. You will find out for yourself the very interesting effects of each kind, so get out there and get tasting and let us know what you find.