With a big grilling holiday nearly upon us, home chefs who long ago traded ordinary barbecue sauce for exotic "finishing" salts face an issue that burns brighter than a 60,000-BTU Weber.
Can they still afford that $63-a-pound, hand-harvested sea salt from Cyprus?
It was just the thing for a hunk of grilled protein - last barbecue season, before home values and 401(k)s melted like Morton's in the rain.
Is it back to KC Masterpiece?
Luckily, recession gourmets can have their fancy salts and still have money left over for food. So-called finishing salts - they are sprinkled on meat, fish and vegetables after cooking to complete a dish - can be made at home by grinding inexpensive supermarket sea salt with aromatics such as herbs and edible flowers, garlic and fresh ginger.
Chef Michael Costa of Baltimore's Pazo restaurant recently demonstrated his technique, starting with coarse Baleine-brand sea salt, which sells for about $2.40 a pound.
"It's not necessarily practical [for home cooks] to bake something on a block of Himalayan sea salt, but they can go to the store and get this," he said, motioning to a red cardboard tube of Baleine.
Supermarkets sell lots of inexpensive seasoned salts. Costa admits to having had a thing for Montreal Steak Seasoning, McCormick's blend of salt, pepper and dried garlic, when he was in college. But today, he's not such a fan of anything with "dehydrated" in the ingredients list.
"You lose all the volatile oils in the [drying] process," he said. "It just tastes tired and sad."
It takes just moments to grind salt with something, be it fresh lavender from the backyard or exotic black garlic from Korea. And the taste, Costa said, is far superior to store-bought stuff.
"When you can work with fresh ingredients, the perfumes are much fresher and more immediate," he said. "You have a pretty sophisticated flavor profile with very little effort.
Costa began his demonstration by hefting a mortar and pestle onto the marble Pazo bar that served as his work space. (Though it was only 9 a.m., the kitchen was already too busy preparing dinner for Costa to have guests in there.)
Made of greenish-black Thai granite, the mortar approaches the size of a small satellite dish. It is so heavy that Costa paid more for shipping (about $60 seven years ago) than he did for the mortar and pestle (about $50 today from gourmetsleuth.com). Smaller ones can be had for $20 or less.
