Where there’s a trend, there’s a backlash

Artisanal salt can be like a party in your mouth, the way the crystals break against your tongue and the flavor is almost pyrotechnic. Unfortunately, if you’re not in the mood it can seem like a party where everyone is socking back margaritas and banging on bongos. Subtlety gets lost.

I had that reaction one morning when I unthinkingly sprinkled my well-buttered toast -- a thick slab of nubbly olive bread -- with bliss-inducing chunks of Sicilian sea salt. I was looking forward to a blast of flavor but instead heard my tooth crack on what sounded, explosively, like an olive pit. I had my dentist on auto-dial before I calmed down and realized the little bits were salt, not molar, and were already dissolving into loveliness.

Legendary cooking teacher Anne Willan of La Varenne in France has an even more vehement reaction to the notion of using salt formed like boulders rather than sand, especially in delicate green salads.

“I hate it,” she says. “I hate whole salt for seasoning things, unless it’s going into a liquid and has time to dissolve. You get dots of salt in the food and on the tongue, and I don’t think one wants dots of salt on the tongue. I like flavors on the tongue to be mellow, or melded, not separate dots of sensation.”

I thought only the two of us shared this view, until I asked a French friend who grew up virtually in the salt pans whether she minded chunks. At first she politely said no, then she paused and blurted: “Yes. I hate it.” After that it was hard to stop the rant that poured forth about all the friends who had given her fancy salts as housewarming gifts and how some could not even be broken down in a salt grinder, let alone in your mouth. “You have to pound it to make it small,” she said.

Ludovic Lefebvre, the flavor-happy chef at Bastide, has a different reason for avoiding chunks, and a more practical solution than pounding. At L’Arpege in Paris, he worked with Alain Passard, who is from Brittany and used nothing but fleur de sel, which is produced there. Unfortunately, this salt is so damp and delicate that “it’s easy to overseason” when added all through the cooking process rather than only at the end, Lefebvre said. Worse, “if you have big chunks, it doesn’t season the whole surface” of a piece of meat or fish.

From Passard he learned to spread fleur de sel on a sheet pan and dry it in the oven into a “big rock” that could be broken up by hand and ground in a food processor. The technique is detailed in his new cookbook, “Crave.” And what he ends up with is more like kosher salt, he said, easy to sprinkle evenly over food with a sure hand.

Lefebvre swears the drying intensifies the unique flavor of fleur de sel, just as it does with wild mushrooms or fresh fruit. But when a salt is priced like silver flakes, turning it into a fine, dry powder almost sounds like reverse alchemy.

-- Regina Schrambling