Naomi Duguid ‘The Miracle of Salt’ Cookbook Review: A Vital Reference for Pickling, Preserving, and Flavoring

One of many first meals I created from an thrilling new cookbook was a easy stir-fry, however I’d by no means have achieved it with out the nudge that the e-book gave me. One other dish I made, Chinese language brined eggs, was surprisingly straightforward; they merely sat in a salty tub with a couple of different substances for a few weeks, however in that point they reworked into one thing complicated and launched me to one thing new.

The stir-fry and brined eggs are from The Miracle of Salt: Recipes and Techniques to Preserve, Ferment, and Transform Your Food, an impressive single-ingredient journey world wide. Readers might surprise the place it would go—maybe taking deep dives in pink Himalayan, or visiting with the sauniers of France as they skim for fleur de sel. Whereas salt varieties and specialists like which are current, this e-book focuses on how one can use salt and strategies to create extra scrumptious meals. In different phrases, it is a cookbook, and we’re within the succesful fingers of veteran cookbook writer and journey author Naomi Duguid, whose Burma: Rivers of Flavor cookbook is amongst my favorites. She makes use of Salt’s recipes to deepen our information of an ingredient utilized by nearly everybody. This can be a feat, as globetrotting cookbooks can really feel like they poach little bits of knowledge from right here and there, creating a complete that is lower than the sum of its components. (Full disclosure: I’ve met Duguid, talked store, and shucked oysters along with her a number of years in the past at a food-writer trade occasion.)

Proper once I obtained the e-book, I bought a couple of issues rolling, as they required time to mature. Together with these eggs, I made preserved lemons, principally simply to strive a North African twist that Duguid likes the place, as a substitute of quartering the citrus lengthwise and leaving the bottom intact, she slices them, salts all sides, and stacks the slices in a jar simply vast sufficient to suit the lemony pinwheels. That is nice for those who simply need to use a bit (or lots) of preserved lemon in a dish, versus the dedication of the more-common quartering approach.

I additionally used gobs of fenugreek, mustard, fennel, and nigella seeds to make a vat of inexperienced mango pickle, which sat subsequent the lemons and Acadian salted scallions (actually simply salt, scallions, and time) for a month, each getting tastier day by day.

With these underway, I made a salad of fast cucumber pickles, the cukes sliced and salted then spending the evening within the fridge earlier than being coated with a dressing of mirin, soy, and sesame oil. Nothing groundbreaking, however make sufficient of it and, as Duguid notes, it retains within the fridge for every week. I made miso French dressing to placed on a weeknight salad, put collectively her Thai-style grilled beef as a result of I like any excuse to make use of fish sauce as a marinade, and rounded out the week along with her spaghetti alla puttanesca as a result of I like dinner.

I quick-salted egg yolks, parking 4 of the orbs in divots in a sq. Tupperware stuffed with salt, then added extra crystals to cowl them fully. After every week, they emerged like apricot-colored gummy discs, earlier than air-drying in cheesecloth the fridge for an additional week, which readied them to be grated like Parmesan onto cooked veggies or add lingering depth to pasta.