F&W’s Masters Series: Lessons from Salt Guru Mark Bitterman

When a question comes up about salt—and there are so many—some of the country’s best chefs and food artisans turn to one man: Mark Bitterman. Here, the author of a historical manifesto called Salted answers our essential questions about the mineral—from how salt is made to which one’s the best for popcorn. Salt expert Mark Bitterman answers essential questions about the mineral, from how salt is made to which one’s the best for popcorn. Photo © Anais Wade and Dax Henry.

What is salt? Chemists would say it’s sodium chloride, but why does it come in so many shapes and sizes? Mark Bitterman’s salt obsession began in France more than 25 years ago, when he met Michelin-starred chefs who traveled with their own precious supply. Along with his wife, Jennifer, Bitterman now owns a store called The Meadow, with branches in Portland, OR, and New York City that sell salts from all over the world. Many are tracked down by Bitterman or custom-made, like his house fleur de sel.

Historically salt is made by one of three ways: solar evaporation, fire evaporation or mining.

Solar salt is made by bringing sea water in from the ocean and passing it through a series of ponds. As it goes from one pond to the next, the sun and wind evaporate out the water, leaving behind a concentrated brine that begins to crystallize. Solar salts include fleur de sel and sel gris (see below.) Solar evaporation is the old-school way almost all salt in the world came to us. Now there are huge industrial solar-evaporated salt farms—Cargill has the biggest sea salt farm in the US, in the San Francisco Bay. So just because someone called it sea salt doesn’t mean that it’s something beautiful made by handsome blue-eyed men with rakes on the side of the ocean—it can also be harvested by bulldozers.

Fire-evaporated salt is made by boiling the water out of a brine solution to form salt crystals. This can be done in a low-tech, artisan way over open vats, as with flaky salts, or it can be done in a mechanistic, mass-production way using vacuum evaporators. (Vacuum evaporators are more fuel-efficient, because water boils faster at lower atmospheric pressure.) A couple of artisan salt producers like Quoddy Mist in Maine make a hybrid salt by pre-evaporating a brine in vacuum evaporators, then crystallizing it in open pans.

Mined salt is dug out of an ancient salt deposit that was an ocean several hundred million years ago. Most mined salts are used for roads and other big industrial applications. A small amount is used for culinary purposes, like the Himalayan salts harvested south of the Himalayas in Pakistan and the mined salts in Bolivia. They’re considered purer because their deposits predate pollution, and also healthier because of their mineral content. But most good sea salt is virtually as pure as good mined or rock salt, and many have just as high or higher mineral content. So Himalayan salt is healthy, but so are lots of other salts. Many traditional salts, below, are mined.

Artisan salts fall into roughly six categories: fleur de sel, sel gris, flake salts, traditional, rock and shio salts. Industrial salts have their own category, as do flavored salts like smoked salt. The three foundation salts for American cooking—and the ones I encourage people to stock at least one of in their pantry—are fleur de sel, sel gris and flake salt.

Fleur de sel is a solar-evaporated salt raked off the top of a salt pond. Delicate, irregularly shaped, each crystal has the complexity of a snowflake, as well as a lot of residual moisture and minerals. That moisture means the salt won’t dissolve right away, but glitters on the surface of any food. When the crystals hit your mouth, the smaller ones dissolve first, then the larger ones, to give this modulated sensation that’s much more sparkly and dynamic than shaker salt, where every crystal is identical (see Crimes Against Salt). It’s a beautiful all-purpose finishing salt, great on fish, cooked vegetable dishes, scrambled eggs, pork—any food that’s medium-bodied and not too intense. I especially love it on toast and butter, to show you how hoity-toity my tastes are.

Sel gris has these huge, chunky crystals that have a ton of minerals and a ton of moisture. Sel gris is naturally coarse, and naturally found that way. You rake it off the bottom of a salt pond every day or two. You don’t want to put this on something delicate. So you can put it on something huge and hearty—a big, juicy steak, a big piece of prime rib. It appears to deliver the salt differently. It takes longer to dissolve, it penetrates through the food at a different rate and it gives you better results. It’s great for steak, lamb, root vegetables, roasts. And if its ground more finely, it can be a great all-purpose cooking salt.

Flake salts come from all over the world—Maldon is your very middle-of-the road flake, and there are delicate, fine ones like Marlborough Flaky, and massive ones like our house, Meadow flake. A flake salt is basically a parchment–fine crystal with no moisture, or very little, and little minerals. It does the opposite of a fleur de sel or sel gris. Instead of judiciously dissolving in your mouth along with every bite, it goes pop! It sparkles. It gives you this crazy electrostatic crackle of salt that illuminates everything and then disappears. Because of the way they flash then fade to let the food shine through, I like flaky salts in lighter foods: salads, steamed vegetables, grilled salmon, baked goods like dinner rolls or pretzels, even chocolate chip cookies. Flake salts can also be good on Caprese salads, but that’s a war, because flake salts are great on tomatoes, but fleur de sel is wonderful on mozzarella. So you have to pick your battles.

Traditional salts are made the most old-fashioned way: Take a bunch of sea water, bring it into a basin, let it evaporate until there’s nothing left but a foot or three of salt, scrape it all up, grind it down and sell it. Traditional salts make up the bulk of all sea salts. They’re probably the most varied category because so many different people make them. There’s the simple white Trapani salt from Italy with only 3 percent mineral content, all the way to the vibrant Hawaiian red salts with closer to 15 percent minerals. They also range from very fine to chunky. They’re historically made in countries where the weather is constant—Sicily, Tunisia, Spain, Portugal, Ghana, Tanzania, Brazil, Argentina—all these places with phenomenal climates, where salt makers don’t have to worry about rain like they do in France.

Rock salts are mined salts (see above). They’re often very pretty. And people like them because they’re pure and unrefined, though sea salts are often just as pure. Rock salts work wonderfully if you’re making a drink or boiling pasta water, anywhere they get dissolved. But to sprinkle them on top of something, they have to be very finely ground before they cease to present a chunky obstacle to your teeth.

Shio salts are all but unknown in America, but shio means “salt” in Japanese. These are simmered over a cauldron until they form these superfine crystals. They’re often made with deep ocean water, because the Japanese recognize the oceans have different bands of minerals at different depths. The water is also purer because there’s less pollution down there. To form the crystals, the salt makers put the ocean water over a wood fire and stir it with a paddle. This frustrates the crystallization, forcing the sodium chloride to take up more of the minerals. Shio salts often feel like snow on the palate. They’re great in a delicate sauce or broth, and on steamed vegetables, though their grains are so fine they’re better tossed with the vegetables than sprinkled onto them, to avoid clumping.

Salt manufacturing has changed dramatically in just the last 150 years. Humans have been eating salt for a couple of hundred thousand years; for millennia salt has been this natural, hugely complex ingredient with 84 minerals, residual moisture and irregular, complex crystals. It was only 150 years ago, with the advent of the modern chemical industry, that we invented table salt. Made by injecting water into a salt deposit underground to form a brine, that brine has what salt normally has—trace amounts of magnesium, potassium and other minerals. But it is refined through added chemicals to form pure 99.99% sodium chloride crystals. Most of this refined salt is manufactured for huge industrial applications. But they also package some of it up in a box and call it food for human beings. To talk about that as a norm, as the definition of salt—even as a food to be eaten—is crazy.

“My go-to chocolate chip cookie salt is Bali Rama flake salt. I think it means ‘Balinese daddy salt,’” says Bitterman. “It looks like hollow, arrowhead-shaped pyramids, which provide a really wild, pop-rocks, explosive crunch.” Here, more genius seasoning tips. READ MORE »

Photo courtesy of Mark Bitterman.

“Sins against salt? I should come up with seven so we can make it Biblical,” says Bitterman. Here, he shares six shameful salt mistakes. READ MORE »

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F&W’s Masters Series: Lessons from Grilling and BBQ Maven Elizabeth Karmel

“I use tongs like an extension of my hand,” says Hill Country chef and barbecue/grilling expert Elizabeth Karmel. Here she explains the difference between the two crafts and how to perfect both. Hill Country chef and barbecue/grilling expert Elizabeth Karmel. Photo courtesy of Cramer-Krasselt.

Whether it’s a tip on testing a gas connection or knowing when your brisket’s done, few know more about cooking over flames than Elizabeth Karmel—and fewer still can explain the hows and whys as clearly. The North Carolina native has been obsessed with fire cookery for nearly two decades. In the 2000s she brought Texas barbecue to the Northeast as the executive chef of Hill Country Barbecue and Market in New York City and Washington, DC. The author of three books on the subject also keeps a trove of information on her twin websites, elizabethkarmel.com and girlsatthegrill.com. Here she shares the differences between a rub, a mop and a sauce, plus why you should oil your food, not your grill grates.

I was living in New Orleans, and I was missing my North Carolina pulled pork. I realized that I was going to have to teach myself how to make it if I was going to have it more than a couple of times a year when I went home to visit. So I decided to give it a try in my backyard. I took a Boston butt (and I’ll tell the blasphemous truth: I put it on a gas grill with some wood chips) and basically let it cook using indirect heat until the whole outside was covered with beautiful rendered fat that looked like cracklins. The outside was crunchy, and inside the meat was so tender, all you had to do was use two forks to pull it—into pulled pork! Then I made the Lexington-style dip, a.k.a. the vinegar barbecue sauce, which I grew up with. I made that by taste memory, too. I loved what I tasted, and I fed a whole houseful of hungry folks who proclaimed it just as good as any pulled pork they’d had in North Carolina. That was the beginning of my barbecue love story.

Barbecue is a culture and a lifestyle, it’s not just about the food—it is an authentic community. Even at competitions, which are very competitive, everyone is family. If you run out of something or forget a spice or a tool, your neighbor will loan it to you if they have it. Nobody’s trying to sabotage anyone—or if they do, they don’t stay in the community for very long.

And I have never seen anything in my life that melts the demographics the way barbecue does. It doesn’t matter who your daddy is, what your educational level is—if you like barbecue and the other person likes barbecue, you’re fast friends. It’s a genuine community in this complicated world.

In this country, we refer to grilling as “hot and quick” cooking and barbecue as “low and slow” cooking. That’s actually the subtitle of my first book, Taming the Flame: Secrets for Hot-and-Quick Grilling and Low-and-Slow BBQ, because it is easy to understand. But the real difference is that authentic barbecue is only cooked with indirect heat (no heat directly underneath the food), often for long periods—and it has to involve wood. I often say that real barbecue is seasoned by time and wood smoke. That wood smoke is different region to region, but a kiss of natural wood smoke is what makes barbecue barbecue.

Direct heat is cooking directly over a heat source; indirect heat is cooking food by convection or hot air rotating around the food. I tell people who cook indoors that direct heat is like sautéeing or broiling, and indirect heat is like roasting or baking. The combo method is my favorite way to grill: sear over direct heat, finish over indirect. For indirect heat, if I’m cooking with coals, I’ll arrange the coals on either side of a drip pan. Some people say to pile all the coals to one side, but one side is inevitably hotter than the other, and you have to rotate the food to cook it evenly. If the heat is even, you don’t have to touch the food. With a gas grill, I turn the burners off under wherever I place the food but make sure that I light at least two burners on either side of the food. It’s all about making sure that the heat is even and consistent.

Charcoal can be either preformed briquettes or natural hardwood charcoal, which is irregular in size. The best charcoal is pure hickory hardwood char that has been formed into equal size briquettes. That’s literally hardwood that has been burned in the absence of oxygen. Charcoal was actually discovered by Henry Ford—he burned the leftover wood paneling from his cars and created charcoal.

Gas can be either liquid propane or natural gas.

Wood is hardwood—logs. Traditional barbecue uses either all wood (but not pine, because of the acrid sap) or a combination of either charcoal and wood or, today, even gas and wood.

A rub is a combination of spices—dried spices mostly, unless it’s a wet rub—that may or may not have salt in it. If you make a rub without a salt, then you need to season with a little salt just before cooking. A dry rub can be thought of as a dry marinade that adds flavor and promotes a crispy crust or bark. (One of my favorite dry rub spices is dehydrated garlic, because it imparts a pungent garlic flavor in a dry form so it won’t scorch, unlike fresh raw garlic when exposed to the heat.) Wet rubs have a thick, wet consistency and are applied much like a thick marinade.

A mop is thinner than a sauce. They’re both flavoring liquids, but a mop is a thin, savory basting sauce that’s mopped or dabbed. It doesn’t have as much sugar in it, so you can put it on much more frequently during cooking. Mops are used a lot in authentic barbecue to keep the meat moist during the long cooking time, and will add layers of flavor to the bark. One of the easiest and best mops can be made with your favorite barbecue sauce, a couple pinches of your favorite barbecue rub and a can or a bottle of beer, whatever you drink. The reason they’re called mops is because the thin sauce was traditionally mopped—literally mopped onto the food with a cotton mop. In parts of the South, they actually use a full-size cotton mop when they’re doing whole animals, to get the sauce in there. I actually created the first-ever silicone barbecue mop because I wanted to be able to wash it, and I didn’t want the fibers of the mop to stick to the food. There’s no good way to wash a cotton mop or keep it from shredding.

Barbecue sauce is a highly flavored liquid that’s brushed on the food at the end of the cooking time to add another layer of flavor. It also adds moisture, and very importantly, it gives it great visual appeal. A slather of sauce will make any piece of food glisten and glow—it brings out beautiful colors in the food.

It’s interesting because it doesn’t only take smoke to make a smoke ring. Gas, charcoal and wood all do the same thing: They emit nitrogen dioxide, which reacts with water, oxygen and proteins in the meat to turn them pink. The same reaction happens when nitrates turn cured meats pink. It even happens in home gas ovens, when a big enough piece of meat is cooked at a medium-low temperature. A lot of times when people roast their turkeys in the oven at Thanksgiving, they think that their turkey is undercooked because it’s pink close to the skin, but it’s actually a kind of smoke ring.

One of the things I love most about grilled food is that nice, dry, crispy crust that develops during cooking. In barbecue the “best bite” for me is always the bark, or burnt ends, because it’s a combination of many flavor seasonings: The rub, mop, et cetera, the meat protein and the wholly rendered-out fat that has cooked long enough to turn almost burnt.

In a blind taste test, most people can’t tell the difference. In fact, the opposite almost always happens: With their eyes closed, people think what was actaully cooked on gas was cooked on charcoal. Gas is a very clean medium, so you can really taste everything else more clearly—the smoke, the caramelization, the wood if you use wood chips (and it’s very easy to use wood chips on a gas grill). These days, almost 80 percent of Americans use a gas grill, so gas is where it’s at. Good gas grills changed the game. These grills, which often performed better than indoor ovens, brought more and more people to the backyard. More people are cooking whole meals from the grill, going way beyond classic campfire food. When I’m baking a cobbler or a pie, I prefer a gas grill to a charcoal grill, because gas heat is going to be consistent and clean. But generally I use both. I’m an equal-opportunity barbecuer—both in what I eat and what I cook on!

The great thing about natural gas is you can hook a grill up to a gas line so you never have to refill a tank. Most standard size gas grills use 20-pound propane tanks that last for 20 hours (the general rule of thumb is one pound of propane for one hour of cooking). There’s no real difference in how either one cooks, but the higher the BTUs on a gas grill, the more fuel it will use, so the 20-pound tank might not last as long as it’s meant to.

It’s very important to follow some routine steps when you’re using a gas grill. I list them all on my site. A key one to start: Check that a gas line is secure: Pour soapy water on it. If it bubbles up, that means it has a leak.

I always tell people to buy the best and the biggest grill they can afford. When people buy their first grill, they often think, “Oh, we’ll just do a few sausages and hamburgers, we don’t cook very much.” But you want a grill that will be big enough to cook a turkey for Thanksgiving, because once you learn how to grill, you’re going to use it more than your oven.

Those are kamado grills, and there are two major brands: The Big Green Egg and Primo. I love the Primo Oval XL because it has almost the same real estate as a gas grill. Some of the other kamado grills are only 18.5 inches in diameter, so it’s hard to cook lots of food or barbecue big pieces of meat.

Just make sure you get a high capacity chimney starter, so that you only need one of them. You should have about 50 total or 25 gray-ashed briquettes on each side of your kettle if you’re cooking indirectly.

They’re ready to go when there’s no longer a flame and they’re coated with a white gray ash.

All you need are wet wood chips and a metal container. You can use a smoker box, a small aluminum-foil drip pan, or you can fashion your own smoker box out of heavy-duty aluminum foil. You soak the chips in water for 30 minutes, place them in the foil or an open smoker box and set the box on the back-left corner of the grill while you’re preheating it with all burners on high. That gets the chips smoldering and smoking. Once you put the food on, reduce the heat and close the lid, the food will be infused with the great flavor of smoke.

I always travel with a silicone-coated blending fork and two pairs of 12-inch locking chef tongs. One has red duct tape on it, one has green duct tape on it. Red means stop: Raw food touched these. Green means go: Cooked food touched these. I created the “stop and go” tongs to prevent cross contamination.

I use tongs like an extension of my hand. The best are 12-inch locking chef’s tongs that don’t open more than six inches. People think the longer the tongs are the better, but the truth is the longer the tongs, the less control you have. Our wrists aren’t that strong. If the tongs splay open too much (and a lot of them open to 12 inches or more), you can get a cramp from having to hold them closed. I sell tongs, and I literally measured the distance of a hand at rest so that they wouldn’t open any more than what was comfortable if you were holding tongs for hours, like I do.

How to avoid grill “stickage,” secrets to perfect beef brisket and more essential lessons from Karmel. READ MORE »

“A lot of people marinate raw food in barbecue sauce, because they’re thinking, Oh, I want barbecued chicken,” says Karmel. The problem is that sauce often contains sugar, which burns quickly, resulting in a lackluster version of the classic dish. Here, more ways home cooks ruin great ingredients, and how to avoid those mistakes. READ MORE »

“Barbecue is like religion and politics: People are passionate about it. There are many regions, and every region thinks they are the best,” says Karmel. Here, the North Carolina native offers a mouthwatering regional barbecue guide, which explains how she became an “all-encompassing, equal-opportunity barbecue lover.” READ MORE »

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F&W’s Masters Series: Lessons from Bread Artisan Chad Robertson

The co-owner of San Francisco’s Tartine Bakery and the restaurant Bar Tartine with his wife Elisabeth Prueitt, Chad Robertson has baked bread for over 20 years. And not just any crusty loaves: Naturally leavened, exquisitely flavorful, often incorporating unusual ancient grains, they’ve made Robertson one of the most sought-after bread authorities in the world. Here, he explains how bread is made and what goes into a perfect loaf. Tartine Bakery's bread genius Chad Robertson explains how bread is made and what makes a perfect loaf. Photo courtesy of Chad Robertson.

A West Texas native, Chad Robertson first chose to pursue the craft of baking in 1990 as student at the Culinary Institute of America, when he was an apprentice to the renowned Richard Bourdon at Berkshire Mountain Bakery. When he was only 23, after working in bakeries in Provence and Savoie, France, he and wife Elisabeth Prueitt opened a small bakery in Point Reyes, California, where he spent the next six years “in a sort of solitary baking trance,” as he wrote in his book Tartine Bread. Using nothing but flour, water, French sea salt and wild yeasts, he made hundreds of loaves a day in a wood-fired oven, all by himself, all by hand (with help from one very gentle diving-arm mixer.) In 2002, he and Elisabeth brought their breads and pastries to San Francisco, when they opened Tartine. A gifted writer and photographer as well as baker, next year Robertson will release a book on breads and pastries made with ancient grains like kamut and spelt. Here, waxes lyrical on the ideal loaf.

When I was still in culinary school, we went on a field trip to visit Richard Bourdon. On the drive there, Liz remembers me saying, “Hmm, I wonder if I’m going to want to become a bread baker and start working with him.” That’s crazy, because I was just a little kid, and it’s not like I had been there before. But that’s exactly what happened. There were three bakers, but a lot of the time you were working alone—one person was on the oven, and two people shaping—in a huge brick barn. And the smells: Any fresh, baking bread smells good, but walking into a huge bakery that only makes naturally leavened bread was completely new to me. It had the smell of caramelized crust that all bread has, but on top of that there was a sweet, almost yogurty smell from the lactic fermentation, definitely not sour but a little funky in a good way. Another thing about Richard: at the time maybe 60 percent of his baking was whole grain, and all stone-milled. With the whole grains and long rising time, there was a depth of aromas and flavors. It wasn’t a lot by industrial baking standards, but for a small shop they made like 3,000 loaves a day.

Making bread is not just blending together flour, water and salt, and letting it ferment a little before baking it off. It should go through this transformation where its textures and flavors become much more than an embodiment of its parts. The mixing, fermenting and baking, all of those things should work in balance so you end up with something that transcends the simplicity of its ingredients.

Everyone has a different theory about this. Some people call leavens starters and vice versa. But technically there are three stages to harvesting wild yeasts to make a naturally leavened bread. In the first stage you make a pretty sour starter that has a lot of acid by mixing flour and water and letting it ferment. Then the next two stages you feed the starter with more water and flour to cut that acid down and promote the growth of wild yeasts. Then you add the final stage to the dough. You need some of that acid to give wet doughs the strength they need—acid conditions the gluten. Acid also provides a sour flavor, which is important to get the right balance for the taste. But to promote the wild yeast you want a less acidic environment. Some people also think wild yeasts prefer certain temperatures. I keep everything at a pretty warm temperature—the starters and the ingredients I feed them—since my experience is that it best promotes the wild yeasts. But as for what they’re called, some call the first stage a starter, and the second two stages leavens. Some call the first two stages starters and the last one a leaven. Some call all three stages starters, and some call all three stages leavens. Technically, I think the leaven, or levain in French, is the last stage that goes into the final dough.

A pan loaf is baked in a pan; a hearth loaf is baked directly on the floor of the oven, or on ta stone. Pan loaves tend to have less crispy crusts than hearth loaves, but not always.

Once you add flour to water, proteins in the wheat will start to form gluten strands almost immediately. A good bread should have tender, extensible glutens. If you don’t mix dough gently, you can overwork, overtighten and even start to break down the gluten before you’ve even started the dough rising. The whole web of gluten that you’re trying to develop will already peak and try to degrade. So you’ll get smaller, tighter and—worst-case scenario—flat breads that are really dense.

More and more people are using longer rising or fermenting times now. People see how important it is, and how their customers appreciate it. A longer rise definitely improves flavor. It also helps break down the grains to make the bread more digestible. And it tenderizes the gluten, though if you over-ferment the gluten can become so tender that the bread comes out flat. But the longer you ferment, the more sugars are more available to caramelize during the baking. The loaves brown faster and the crust gets darker.

High hydration, or a dough with a high proportion of water to flour, is very important for a lot of reasons. Texturally, a moist dough will have more volume. It will also ferment at a lower rate to take on more layered flavors, although it can go overboard and a too-wet dough can ferment too fast. But generally the combination of more water and baking to a higher internal temperature will also gelatinize the starch more thoroughly, and gelatinized starch forms an important part of the texture of the crumb.

I don’t know why anyone ever pushed bread dough out on a table; it doesn’t make sense to me at all. It’s a big mess for one thing. Then you’re not able to insulate the temperature of the dough, which you want to keep at a constant. If you’re doing it on stone or marble it will chill the dough down, which you definitely don’t want. And you’re trying to turn the flour into gluten before it’s ready, before it can absorb any water. Maybe it comes from making pasta. But bakers were using troughs at the turn of the century; it’s so obviously a better system. Kneading promotes the formation of glutens, or long strands of proteins that give the dough structure and trap air bubbles as the yeasts digest. While the dough sits in a bowl or trough, the gluten starts to form on its own and hydrate, to swell and relax without you having to do anything. It prepares itself for you to start stretching the strands, which is what makes a nice loaf of bread in the first place. Where the other way, you’re trying to pummel it into something when it’s not ready. I’ve always been taught to work with the nature of the dough, and that kind of gentle coaxing feels more true to its nature.

In the heat of the oven the loaf wants to expand; that expansion is also known as oven spring. If you don’t cut the dough, the loaf will stay smaller but still have a blowout somewhere on its side. If you cut it, it can expand to its full volume. So the slash is a decorative way to control how it expands. It can also double as a baker’s signature or brand. And it’s an important part of the bread’s flavor expression. When the baker scores the loaf, these ears curl up along the edges. Those thinner pieces of dough get dark and crusty, and provide a kind of accent of burnt flavor. It’s small related to the rest of the loaf, so it’s not overpowering.

Steam does a few things: It moistens the baking environment so that the loaf can expand during the oven spring. And it also moistens that outer layer of starch in the dough, to start proper caramelization. Without steam that caramelization can’t really happen. You’ll get a small loaf that looks muddy and chalky on the outside because it can’t caramelize. At home you can get much of the same effect by baking bread in a preheated cast-iron pan with a lid.

Crust: I don’t like pale breads, because you miss out on all the flavors of a caramelized crust. I also like a strong contrast between a crisp crust and a tender crumb. When I see a bread that doesn’t have an interesting crust, I’m not all that compelled to taste it. Ideally, I like see a range of colors—some dark parts, some golden, some light. If the crust was all dark, it would all taste toasty and burnt and be too overpowering. But if there’s a little of this and that, it’s in balance. It’s like a steak on the grill: You want some black bits, but you don’t want it to be charred all over. And if it’s pale, it’s going to be totally bland.

Big bubbles: Big bubbles in the crumb are a sign of all the other qualities: You can’t get an open texture if you overwork the dough, if the starter’s too sour, if you haven’t cut the loaves properly, if you don’t steam the oven. When I see a loaf with big holes, I can already tell it was made well without tasting it.

A glossy interior: When you cut into a loaf and it looks super-glistening, super wet and shiny, some people will think it’s underbaked—people have said this about my bread. But if you press it, it will be moist or wet to the touch, but it bounces back because the starch is hydrated and gelatinized. It’s fully cooked, it’s just wetter than people are used to.

A mildly sour taste: This is just my personal preference, but I prefer breads that aren’t too sour. I love the flavor of some acid, but I tend to agree with the traditional French view that bread is a daily part of the meal, meant to go with whatever you’re eating. You don’t want the bread to be so acidic that it’s clashing with the food. You also don’t want the acid to overwhelm the more subtle grain flavors in the bread. I can tell when my leaven is at just the right stage: The whole baking room has no vinegar smell at all, just this sweet lactic smell. That’s when I know the final bread will be exactly what I want.

The flavor of the grain: More and more I’m finding that the quality of the grain and the freshness of the milling are huge factors. I’ve eaten a lot of loaves that look beautiful, and have all the ideal characteristics of an ideal loaf, and have very little flavor. Different wheats all taste a little bit different—kamut’s very sweet, spelt’s a little nutty, red wheat has a bitterness that can be nice. It’s nice to be able to taste those qualities in the bread.

Here, Robertson reveals essential tips and techniques for bread lovers from how to revive an old loaf to where to buy an exceptional knife that will razor through a sturdy crust. READ MORE »

Robertson shares his ultimate bakery bucket list from his Peruvian cohort to a spectacular Stockholm destination where the cardamom buns are incredible. READ MORE »

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F&W’s Masters Series: Lessons from Vegetarian Blogger Dana Slatkin

Based in Los Angeles, the blogger, cookbook author and TV host Dana Slatkin brings classic technique from some of France’s best chefs to her luxurious vegan and vegetarian dishes. Here, she offers an ultimate guide to prepping, storing and cooking vegetables from a genius tip for cleaning mushrooms to how to build fantastic meals and dishes without meat. Beverly Hills Farmgirl blogger Dana Slatkin.

A champion of the Beverly Hills Farmers’ Market and author of the blog Beverly Hills Farmgirl, Dana Slatkin graduated of the Culinary Institute of America and spent a year in France apprenticing under two chefs known for vegetable cookery: Georges Blanc and Michel Guérard, as well as working at the famed bakeries Poilâne and Fauchon. Now a mother of three children, Slatkin divides her time between Aspen and Los Angeles, where her husband runs the Santa Monica hotel Shutters on the Beach. She’s currently at work on a television show and teaches cooking classes out of her home.

Because I’m feeding a family, I like to have at least four dishes on the table so everyone can find something they can eat: one whole-grain dish, two vegetable-based dishes, and a protein. The protein can be meat, but it can also be any number of vegetable-sourced proteins like tofu, beans or quinoa.

Sometimes they don’t. Meals at my house are more of a smorgasbord. I will mix something Asian-inspired with something Mediterranean with no trouble at all. The more you can wake up your and your family’s taste buds the better. I don’t believe any meal needs a theme.

Maybe it’s my Berkeley background, but I hate waste. I’ll do a sweep through my vegetable drawers and see what’s looking good. Then I usually turn to one of the classic trinities I learned at cooking school, like the Asian trinity of garlic, ginger and scallions, or the French trinity of the mirepoix—onions, carrots and celery—or the more Southwestern or Latin trinity of onions, garlic and tomatoes, maybe some cumin. Once I’ve got the building blocks, then I turn to my spice drawer. Much to my husband’s dismay, I tend not to make the same thing twice. Sometimes he’ll ask me, “What was that great risotto you made a few weeks ago, can you make it again?” But I’ll have no recollection! Some people have their five favorite things, but I can never stick to that. I always enjoy creating. There are some duds, and there are some hits.

Proper cooking. You really want the vegetable's personality to come through. So this is key.
Combining colors. Especially when you’re cooking for kids and picky eaters, it’s important to think about color. Like I’ll combine eggplant, which can look kind of a blah, with colorful tomatoes to make it more visually exciting. Or a bright green pesto, or maybe a dark brown or green olive tapenade.
Thinking beyond salt. It’s good to have flavors other than just salt. I’m not a big fan of plain steamed vegetables. I like to add olive oil, garlic, scallions, something to bring out more of the character of the vegetable.
Contrasting textures. Vegetables are really shining now because people are realizing that you don’t have to just slice them—you can grate them, dice them into little bits, make them into noodles, play around with their shapes and sizes. I love the idea of taking a head of cauliflower and slicing it into steaks to treat it more like the main star.

I don’t wash veggies until I’m ready to use them. The one exception: I’ll wash and dry and break down vegetables like broccoli and lettuce then keep them in Ziploc bags to save prep time later on. They have to be bone-dry, but just in case you missed a drop, it’s a good idea to put a paper towel in the bag.

I have a really good tip for washing mushrooms. I learned this when I was an apprentice at Georges Blanc: You fill a bowl with cold water, and you drop in a handful of flour and swish it around. Now you add the mushrooms and swirl them around quickly in the water, and lift them out onto a dishtowel to dry. Your mushrooms come out sparkling clean. The flour acts like Comet: it’s an abrasive that scrubs out the dirt without over watering the mushrooms, and it bleaches them. The flour is left behind in the water. Any that clings to the mushrooms can either be towel-dried off or will encourage a crust or caramelization when you roast or sauté them.

When you’re washing berries it’s important to use a very gentle stream of water, because if you turn on the faucet too strong you’ll damage them.

I pretty much put all of my veggies into the crisper drawer. If they end up looking a little sad, I’ll put them in a bowl of ice water and perk them back up—even larger root vegetables like carrots and radishes.

Stone fruits and tomatoes don’t go in the fridge.

Onions, garlic and potatoes go into dry storage, in a cool, dark, dry place. I keep them in cloth-lined baskets, so the cloth absorbs any moisture.

Tamari. I find it has more flavor over salt, where soy sauce has more salt over flavor.

I love a tomato paste that’s super concentrated with tomato flavor.

I use canned San Marzano tomatoes a lot—they have really tomatoey flavor, and the ones that are already peeled and pureed are superconvenient.

I put herbes de Provence in soups, vegetables, pasta sauce, pretty much anything where you would use herbs.

I’m a big fan of coconut milk for anything creamy, it’s so lovely and luscious. I use both regular and light. If you’re baking, you need regular because you want the fat. But light organic coconut milk is a pretty all-purpose substitute for anywhere you need milk or cream. I make a mac and cheese with coconut milk and it comes out beautifully. I use it in corn chowder, too. My favorite is chocolate coconut fondue. That’s one of my signature desserts, my kids love it, and it’s a great way to get them to eat fruit.

When it comes to olive oil, I tend to buy as local as I can, and so I look for California olive oils like ones from Ojai and Napa. I find that the regular olive oils are just as good as extra virgin. I look for an opaque or darker glass bottle, which will keep the oil fresher by protecting it from the sun and light. I generally only use olive oil in low heat cooking and salads, because under high heat olive oils can turn carcinogenic.

For high-heat cooking like roasting and frying I use grapeseed oil; it’s a great neutral oil that doesn’t have much flavor. But it heats safely to high temperatures and it’s great for frying. I love this restaurant supply store here in LA called Surfas; they sell huge jugs of grapeseed oil. They also sell them at Costco.

I’m trying not to use white sugar at all these days—I just don’t think it adds anything to our diet, and it’s just no longer necessary since there are so many alternatives. Maple syrup is my favorite sweetener—I like that it’s got other notes besides just sweet, and a little goes a long way. If a recipe requires sugar, I’ll use organic cane sugar or brown sugar, which has more caramelly notes, or honey. Or I’ll just cut way back on the sugar. But these days I find that I need more than just the flavor of sweet in a dessert.

For all of my fridge condiments, I always buy small quantities. Small jars and small containers help keep everything fresher. And they’re not as overwhelming. You can keep more variety in your fridge if they’re all in smaller containers.

I use organic white miso paste to flavor just about anything: Caesar salads, soups, or vegetable fritters, it’s a big one for me.Dill pickles are good flavoring agent for salad dressings. I’ll use a little of the brine as well as the pickles.I love tahini for making hummus and salad dressings; it adds a nice creaminess. It doesn’t last long in my fridge.Japanese Benriner mandoline. I got it at the Japanese market and it’s so easy to take apart and put back together. It’s easier than a mandolin and less intimidating.Ceramic knives. There’s nothing better for slicing tomatoes. I’m a big fan of the Kyocera ceramic chef’s knife; it’s supersharp, it’s like a scalpel.Rice cooker. I’ll cook all my grains in it. I tend to use a lot of whole grains—farro, quinoa, brown basmati rice, barley.Cast-iron pan. It’s ideal for sautéing because it has such even heat. And I fry in the same pan that I’ve been using for years. You don’t need a deep-fat fryer; a cast-iron pan with a fry cover works like a charm. A fry cover looks almost like a pot cover but it’s mesh. It allows you to keep the grease from splattering without steaming the food. Food processor. I use it all the time for grating. When I’m making latkes, it grates all the onions and potatoes in a minute flat. I’ll use it to make fritters. I grate zucchini a lot, I make zucchini and pea pancakes a lot in the summer. Roasting. I am not one to spend all day in the kitchen. I usually roast at high heat. That way the roasting goes pretty quickly, and I like that crust or crunch to my vegetables. The caramelization brings out the flavor of the vegetables. And it’s so easy: You really just need olive oil, salt and pepper, but if you want to add a little more punch, mustard seeds or cinnamon is nice. You can roast drier mushrooms like shiitake, maitake, and cremini with cinnamon to bring out their sweetness and earthiness. Steaming. Even though I’m not a fan of plain steamed vegetables, I will often steam vegetables to parcook them before I roast, sauté or grill them. The other night I parcooked some potatoes by steaming them and then threw them into a sauté for a corn salad with steamed baby potatoes—that’s a nice summer salad. It’s only important when you steam vegetables to add salt to the cooking water and to the vegetables. I prefer steaming to boiling because boiling tends to water log the vegetables, you tend to lose some of the nutrients, and it takes longer because you have to wait for the water to boil. Grilling. I grill pretty much anything—artichokes, broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, green beans. I parcook most vegetables before I grill them, especially harder vegetables like artichokes and broccoli. You don’t want vegetables to spend too much time on the grill. You want a little bit of color, but you don’t want them to be charred. Sautéing. It’s quick, clean and simple. I’ll sauté just about anything. I’ll flash-sauté green beans or broccoli florets with a little lemon zest, maybe some chile flakes and garlic. Spinach is always a good one to sauté.Stir-frying. The key with stir-frying is to make sure all the vegetables are the same size, and to parcook some of the denser vegetables, like the cruciferous vegetables, or carrots.Braising. That’s probably my least-used technique, but endive, fennel, some of the harder root vegetables that may not have as much inherent flavor are good for braising. It concentrates their flavors, and allows you to incorporate other flavors.

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