Fresh from the smoker, my latest batch of mesquite smoked salt crystals. The color of good smoked salt should be as rich as the aroma and flavor it provides, ranging from a light amber to a dark pitch, almost black color.

My first smoked salt, a hickory smoked Maldon salt I cold smoked in my old Bradley Electric. The salt lacked the taste and color I was looking for. Time, humidity and temperature all play a role in making good smoked salt.

Almost two years ago I wrote up an article on a series of experiments I was doing smoking salt. At the time I promised a follow up article posting my results in a "couple of weeks". Clearly it has taken me longer to get here than a couple of weeks, but I didn't want to post on the subject again until I sorted out some of the details and techniques and had a chance to do some research.

The art of salt smoking has prompted more inquiries than any other subject I have posted on Chilefire.com - I have received emails from both professionals interested in marketing their own smoked salt and amateur home smokers interested in making up a batch after having tasted the unique salt, all looking for a web resource on the topic. So, after experimenting for over a year and making up a few batches of really great salts, as well as a few total failures I thought it worth starting up the Salt Smoking Discussion Forum

What I Have Learned - The Basics:

There are six basic recommendations I have for the first time salt smoker outlined below. if you follow these basics you should have decent luck making up some great salts.

1. Use Long Smoke Times
Smoking salt take time, salt doesn't absorb the smoke - or cook and react in the warm environment the same way meats will. Salt absorbs flavor as the smokes resins coats the grains, and this take some time. In my experience, depending on the coarseness of the grain, salt needs at least 4 hours in the smoker, but my best salts spend 24 hours smoking.

2. Use Cool to Medium Heat, and Always Cool Your Salt in the Smoker
Heat is tricky, I have made great salts at regular barbecuing temperatures around 225°but have had better luck when the temperature is even lower. Some folks I have talked to swear by cold smoking, but in my experience anywhere from cold smoked at 85° to regular BBQ temps at 225° work well. If however you get a spike in your temperature to grilling temps - for any length of time you're gonna have to start over - the higher heats will burn off the smoky resins and leave you with salt that pretty much tastes like salt. In short - tend your fire. Finally leave your salt in the smoker until the smoker goes cold. I have 't the slightest idea why this makes a difference, but it does. Salt cooled in the smoker has a better aroma and a smoother smoke flavor, sure it takes longer - but has that ever stopped you before?

3. Soak Your Wood
This is the only time you will ever hear me suggest soaking your wood before you smoke with it. Every time I hear someone on TV or the Web say to soak our wood chips before you put them on your fire it makes me cringe - soaked wood makes nasty, bitter meat in my opinion. However when you're smoking salt - and only when you're smoking salt - it seems to work pretty well. Moisture plays a role in Salt smoking and while I have had some luck with using a pan of boiling water in the coals, my best luck has been when I soaked my wood. With salt it doesn't make for a bitter taste.

4. Use Coarser Salts
Coarser grain salts smoke better. The smoke can move through the grains more easily and the smoke seems to stick to the grains better. I mostly use a grain size I can put in my salt grinder, it seems to work best.

5. Resist the Urge - Smoking Salt when Your Smoking Other Foods is Not a Good Idea
Fastest way to mess up your smoked salt? Smoke it with a pork butt, a slab of ribs, or god forbid a fillet of salmon. Don't do it! Salt takes up the flavor of cooking meat faster than it does the smoke - and the effect is not good. If you are thinking "oohhh! bacon salt!" this isn't the way to do it, trust me. Yuck.

6. Store Your Product in an Air Tight Container
Finally, when your done, seal the salt in an airtight container. The smoky flavor you have carefully layered into your salt is sensitive to oxygen and looses it's tang, smoke flavor and aroma as the essential oils oxidize and evaporate.. Seal it up tight as soon as it leaves the smoker. I use big mason jars that folks use for canning.

You can find the complete" How-To" I have put together on the Salt Smoking Discussion - including pictures of the rig I am using and the processes that I have used to make my best salts. And if you have smoked salt - please consider joining the group and sharing your experiences, recipes, tips and tricks.

The first installment of a two part series on smoking salt. See the link at the bottom of the page to Experiments in Smoking Salt: Part II. Chilefire also hosts a Salt Smoking Discusion. Please Join us!

William Fettes Douglas - The Alchemist

The alchemists believed naturally occurring dew contained the divine salt or "thoughts of the One Mind". Dew was likened to Gods sweat, so to tease salt from it would give you quite a condiment indeed.

My first smoked salt: The smoke and taste this salt provides is shocking, just a few grains as a finishing salt has a remarkable impact on flavor.

2 hours of smoke & these crystals are beginning to color a slight amber with deep smoke aroma.

I am surrounded by wisps of the sweet smoke of orange and mesquite woods, it is a windy spring night aboard the boat, blustery, with a slight chill that is unique to spring on the water. Tonight the smoke from the onboard cooker adds gravity to the evening, seemingly weighing down the passage of time.

As Spring opens this year I look forward to more nights like tonight, spending time tending my smokers. In the coming months expect to see a bit more exploration around here on the fine art of wood smoking; tonight I am working something I have never tried in the smoker before,

Salt

Salt is fascinating. Like water, salt is an absolute essential, without it ultimately we will die; and yet natures only guarantee that we seek it out is our "taste" for it. Unlike water, food or air, our bodies do not symptomatically crave it. We go without ever craving it until we become ill, and ultimately die.

This basic relationship we have with salt has created an incredible and epic history. Politics, religion, science, human history is as intimately intertwined with salt as our biology; and culture is full of hidden references to salt that we take for granted in today's relatively salt rich world.

Roman soldiers were paid at least partly in salt, it was their salarium, or 'worth in salt'. The tradition of paying soldiers in salt is not at all unusual, It is said to be from this that we get the word soldier - 'sal dare', meaning to give salt. In many times and places around the world salt has been used as currency. In Latin, salt is Sal which is the root for many familiar words, including Salary, Sale, and even Salvation. The Bible makes a number of references to salt, and generally held it to be incorruptible - thus a covenant of salt is one that can not be broken [2 Chronicles 13:5]. (1) Salt is strongly symbolic in Judaism and Islam as well and appears equally in eastern religions.

This is illustrated by a story in the Hindu "Chandogya Upanisad" which is one of the oldest and largest works of Hindu mystical teachings. “A boy at the age of 12 years left his family to learn from a school. On returning at the age of 24, the young man's father realized that his son had learned the scriptures without understanding the nature of Brahman. He therefore asked his son to sprinkle some salt in a glass of water. The next day the father asked his son to find the salt in the water. As the salt had dissolved, the search proved to be futile. The father asked his son to taste the water from the top, middle and bottom of the glass and asked him how it had tasted. The son replied salty and the father asked where is the salt the son replied he could not see the salt. His father replied that just in the same way you cannot see the spirit, the Brahman, which encompasses the universe but it is there. That is the reality, that is the truth and you are that truth”.

Salt was used symbolically in a very similar way in the middle East and West in the traditions of alchemy. Alchemy, in it's most common and romanticized understanding is of course, the pseudo-science of "transmutation", of changing of lead into gold. Alchemy however was also the foundation of what led ultimately to what has become modern Western science.

The alchemists believed naturally occurring dew contained the divine salt or "thoughts of the One Mind". Dew was likened to Gods sweat, so to tease salt from it would give you quite a condiment indeed.

The Art of Smoking Salt

I have scoured the web looking for information on smoking salt but thus far I have been unable to find anything of interest or utility. Smoked salts are beginning to appear on shop shelves however, being offered by 4 or 5 different salt crafter's. Rather than pay the $15.00 an ounce that Whole Foods was asking, I decided to try to make it myself. What I have come to find is that smoking salt is something of an art.

While I have many many times cooked with salt, this last week has been the first time I have cooked salt, and my first experiments have been of mixed results. My very first try I smoked kosher salt for about two hours in a hot ( 225° +) smoker, with a pan of water, orange wood chips following the smoking of a rack of lamb. We didn't try the salt until the next day , and when we did, it was amazing! The smoked salt brought a really pure smoke flavor to whatever it was sprinkled on.

I have spent the last several days trying to reproduce the same thing again, with significantly less luck. I am not sure what it was that I did right that first time, but I have been unable to reproduce the effects, so I am going to get more systematic going forward. I received neary 7 pounds of salt in the mail today, just over a pound and a half of Maldon sea salt, and about 5 pounds of Himalayan pink salt. I am planning on working a series of small batches until I have mastered it and I will post the results and the methods I find successful here.

My goal is to create a series of finishing salts from different woods. My first experience with smoked salt suggested that salt is a unique carrier of the smoke flavor, and I would like to make a set of jars, each containing a sample of salt from a different wood, hickory and mesquite are what I am working with until I have a system down; alder, orange, cherry, lemongrass, and cedar are to follow.

I have several basic experiments I am going to try going forward:

• Cold smoking a batch of 12 salt samples measuring 1 tablespoon each for 24 hours, removing one sample every 2 hours to find the best length of time for smoking without heat.
• Hot smoking (without steam pan) a similar batch following the same procedures as above but at 255°
• Hot smoking (with steam pan) and another batch following the same procedures as above but at 255°

This will hopefully send me in a good direction in terms of time and leaning toward hot or cold smoking. I am adding the with and without steam pan smokings to try to gauge humidity into my results. I intuitively believe that water will effect the absorption and taste of the salt. Salt and water just interact chemically too much for this not to have an effect - I have no idea which will create a better result.

The other thing I am going to try is an in smoker evaporative salt forming: boiling a cup of salt into a cup of water, and evaporating it back to salt crystals inside the smoker. This experiment would take too long for me to try it it with different techniques very quickly, so I am going start by tasting the water from the steam pan in my hot smoking experiment decribed above; marking the quality of the taste of the water as time passes, and graph when the water becomes too smoky or bitter. Then I will use the resulting time line to as a starting point for my evaporative salt forming; removing the smoke when the brine has reached the best time suggested by the graph.

Read "Experiments Smoking Salt: Part II"

The nylon body of the Flexicado™ is flexible; one scoop removes most of the flesh from a halved avocado of any size.

I would love to be able say that I don't fall for gadgets. The thing is I do, and in general I end up not liking them. I have basically never found a "handheld" to be of any use at all. I just don't pick it up, they have a terrible interface,and are just not pleasing to use. ick. Thing is, I own two of them.

In my kitchen, I don't actually have all that many gadgets. A few, that work, I do keep handy. For instance, I love my silicone spatula that I can stick in a fire and scoop out molten lead with (ok, but almost!). I like my fancy lemon zester, my bread machine, and... I do have a waffle iron. After that, its all woks and pans and knives, the essentials.

The Flexicado™ is a gadget. No question. but is it a nice one? like my ginger grater, or a another piece of junk, Like... every pepper grinder I have ever owned. After my first two uses, I think it might actually be a keeper. I picked it up after reading a review that mentioned in a magazine, and I thought - "I have to have one of those!" A trip to Sur La Table and $5.20 cents later I had one.

$5.20. That's a great price. I thought well, if this thing is junk, at least it isn't Krups junk. It's more like fru fru fancy overindulgent coffee drink junk. So I went straight to Harris Teeter and picked out 2 miracle perfect avocados.

Last night I used it the first time. The body of the Flexicado™ is made from flexible nylon, so that it can change size to help follow out the shape of the avocado; this is about 85% effective and on smaller avocados it works fairly well. On larger avocados you may need to make a second pass.

IF you are a big avocado fan the Flexicado™ is pretty cool. For salads and Guacamole this will save you time. The slices are a bit rough around the edges, though I imagine that I will get better at using it. I do fear that the nylon is going to get dull but I will have to see how it stands up to use.

First Impression: Good, though pretty function specific. Materials are a little lighter that they could be (thinking stainless spring steel and wire...) works pretty well, and has a low space impact. Probably floats (important on a boat), and looks pretty cool. I think I will probably use it until it gets dull, won't throw it away for too long, and then won't get another one.

I received the last order of chile powder in the mail yesterday before I went to work. I have decided that to introduce the first two of the chile powders today: Hot and mild Chimayó Chile Powders from The Santa Fe School of Cooking

So I am starting with the Santa Fe School of Cooking powders because they come in stainless steel resealable tins. Really it is more like a small paint can, but it's nice. I have been ordering this chile powder from the school's store for 2 years now, and each time I finish a can it is months before I can bring myself to toss out the tin. The tins are really nice.

Brennan G. Proctor (a.k.a. Uncle Brutha) sells his hot sauces in person at Eastern Market on the weekends. I have been picking up the occasional bottle over the last year on the weekends I that I am lucky enough to have the time to go by the market. I haven't been lucky enough to have his Chile Verde sauce yet but the next time that I hit the market I am certainly going to pick one up. You can also pick up Uncle Brutha sauces at his website, http://unclebrutha.com.

Throughout the country, you will find all kinds of chile peppers. Texans boast their citrus-hot jalapeños and squat poblanos. In Louisiana, cayenne and tabasco peppers are the chiles of choice. Cooks in Miami have fallen in love with the fiery habanero, and in California, the chiles selected are most often pasillas, fresnos, and California chiles. But in New Mexico, there is only one chile of any real importance, The New Mexico chile. The New Mexico chile comes in both fresh and dried varieties and depending on when they are picked are served either red or green.

The New Mexico chile comes in many different varieties. The most popular mild pepper is the NuMex conquistador, which is great for chiles rellenos. The NuMex sweet variety is used like a bell or anaheim pepper, as it has little or no heat at all. The NuMex Joe E. Parker is a medium-hot pepper that is excellent for salsas. And for the serious chileheads, there's the Sandia, a very hot southern variety, that is used in many green chiles that you will find throughout New Mexico.

This week we had our first whole weekend back on our boat since we had it put back in the water last week. After 6 weeks living away from our floating home I was ready to do some cooking.

I finished setting up my smokers on the dock in front of my boat and started them up. In the galley I had a brisket soaking in a quick rub I put together, two chickens and a mess of poblano chiles waiting.

In our time out of the water I had worked up the recipe that follows this posting for a smoked chile - and man did it turn out! Naomi and I had a couple of friends over for the results; Slow Cooked Brisket with homemade Mango Habenero Barbecue Sauce, bowls of Smoked Chicken and Pablano Chile and a mess of Green Chile Cornbread. By the end of the day the smoker had let all of our neighbors know we were home.

My father has loved Tabasco Sauce for years, and for almost as long I have been trying to convince him that while there is a place for Tabasco - it isn't on everything you want hot; because when you add Tabasco you also add a lot of vinegar, and in my opinion at least, scrambled eggs just aren't any better with vinegar on them - even if it is spicy vinegar.

Recently though my father switched from regular Tabasco to Chipotle Tabasco (which isn't really Tabasco anymore now is it?) In the last 2 or 3 years chipotle chiles have become very popular. A restaurant chain carries the name, and endless products containing some variation of the smoked chile have been put on the market, from sauces to mustards. When my father switched from regular Tabasco to Chipotle Tabasco - I saw my chance to introduce Los Chilernos Chipotle powder as an alternative to his vinegar habit.

I have tried a couple of chipotle powders and so far this is the best I have found (though the search continues!) Los Chilernos advertises itself as providing the ingredients for "gourmet" southwestern cuisine and in terms of chile powder so far as I have tried, they do sell a high grade set of products.

This powder is great stuff. The smoke is right up front, it has a sweet smell but the taste is all chile and wood. It is great sprinkled on salads, mixed with a bit of olive oil and used as a bread dip or added to soups and stews to add both heat and a great smoky quality. This chile powder is pretty hot and carries its flavor along way with just a touch, so use it carefully at first until you figure out how much you like.

I had my parents over for dinner on our boat and served a ceasars salad with a light dusting of this chile powder over the top, and ended up sending them home with an extra bottle. My dad still hasn't given up on Tabasco Sauce, but he is mixing it up now with this great powder. I totally recomend it. You can find Los Chilernos chile products at Whole Foods Markets, but more often that not they they don't carry the powder in this shaker bottle - the powder is the same either way but the shaker is a nice way of serving it up. You can order it online at http://www.888eatchile.com for about $6.00 a bottle or a 3 pack for about $17.00.

Next Chipotle Powder? Chile Today-Hot Tamale Chipotle Powder.

I ran into this plastic tub of "red chillies" at a local Pakistani food store in Falls Church. I couldn't help picking it up for two reasons. The first was the price! At 1.99 I didn't think I could go wrong and I had never seen these little peppers before and I just had to try them out.

I am not at all sure what kind of chile these little guys are, they are a bit smaller and much brighter in color than Hungarian cherry peppers or cascabel peppers. I would guess that they are related to cascabel though only about a third the size, and about twice the bite. These little chiles like Hungarian cherry peppers are loaded with seeds. Bright red , smooth, and round in shape, measuring about ½ an inch in diameter. medium fleshed and pretty hot, with a sweet fruit/raisin quality. Low in tannins, The flavors are a little smoky sweet, rather like a riesling grape. The heat is first noticeable at the back of the throat, but hangs on around the front of the mouth and lips. Great for sauces, soups, and stews, and might make a great powder if you have the patience to seed them - I don't.

I will definitely be back for more of these. They are perfect for bringing up the heat in any number of chile dishes and grind really easily, just drop them into your grinder and give them a spin - just 3 or 4 of these will add a noticeable note of heat in any