Friday, October 05, 2018

The other day I realized how bougie I'd become by the amount of different types of salt I own.

Two kinds of pink salt. Large and small grain. Yeah.

Black, regular table salt, large flake sea salt for steaks. I think when you reach around five different types of salt in your house - you've become super bougie. No one on earth needs this amount of salt. I think I've been working on the same table salt container my whole adult life. It takes forever to get rid of it.

Oh wait... One of our restaurants has started handing out wine soaked salt. So I have a bit of that.
Posted by at

7 comments:

  1. Capital of Texas RefugeeFriday, October 05, 2018 2:05:00 PM

    Sorry, this is no longer "bougie" ...

    "Bougie" now involves owning a large slab of pink Himalayan salt that you change out regularly just so you can use it for seasoning meats and fish. (And just to make the point of how "bougie" this really is, I've linked one of these at the "bougie mall rat" kitchen shop Williams-Sonoma.)

    I never see any actual chefs using one of those, but I'm probably not "bougie" enough.

    I do have all of the following salts: "Redmond Real Salt" (in a shaker), "Celtic Salt" (which isn't from a Celtic country), Maldon flake sea salt, Maldon smoked flake sea salt, Spanish paprika-infused flake sea salt, Polish seasoning salt, Hawaiian alaea sea salt, pink Himalayan flake sea salt, bacon salt (which has no bacon in it), and at least twenty pounds of regular Hain's sea salt with and without iodine in it.

    Oh, and a bunch of smoked salt made in the Pacific Northwest, because for some reason only people in the Pacific Northwest and Texas actually make deep smoked salt, but the Pacific Northwest versions are better ...

    In my defense, I bought the Maldon, Spanish, and Polish salts in the countries where they were produced, and I bought the Pacific Northwest smoked salt and the bacon salt in the Pacific Northwest where they're made, so I'm all authentic and shit, yo. :-)

    The mass quantities of salt are for pickling and brining, BTW.

    I also don't have to worry about freak snow storms in North Florida. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. she said:Friday, October 05, 2018 2:31:00 PM

    Hahahahahaha. Well if there is anything you know I like - it's authenticity. ;)

    Hey - have you heard of Scandinavian coffee?

    Now I feel like I'm only midway to bougie. That helps. But I did just buy some honey comb from Georgia.]

    I did think about getting one of those pink salt slabs - but I don't know where I'd put it. Now Hawaiian salt - that sounds pretty cool.

    I tried the salt in one the of local tide pools at the beach once and it was pretty good. I mean, it didn't kill me or anything.

    I'm not counting the brining salts because I only do that once a year and pretty much clear that salt out. I'm fully kosher there.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Capital of Texas RefugeeSaturday, October 06, 2018 12:35:00 AM

    "... have you heard of Scandinavian coffee?"

    Yes ... I lived in Sweden, you know. :-)

    Although one of the better and more obscure brands (in the US, anyway) is Robert's Coffee of Finland. There's only one of these in all of Sweden and none in North America, but the one in Sweden is near my favorite book shop in Stockholm.

    Gevalia isn't too bad for a medium roast, BTW, although my favorite medium roast in Sweden was Löfbergs Lila coffee.

    IKEA in the US once stocked this stuff, but IKEA in their ever-advancing drive to be cheap decided they'd sell their own branded coffee instead.

    Arvid Nordquist is pretty good stuff as well, but it costs a bit more and I actually preferred the taste of the somewhat cheaper Löfbergs Lila instead.

    Here's the secret to why this stuff tastes so good in general ...

    Scandinavian roasters generally don't rely on fussy traditional timing to stop the roast like a lot of French and Italian roasters (and their American hipster roaster wanna-beez counterparts).

    Instead, they rely on carbon dioxide dry ice or liquid nitrogen to stop the roast at exactly the right point. There's a discernible difference in taste between which of the two is used.

    So the coffee is roasted exactly right every single time.

    And now you know. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. RuthSaturday, October 06, 2018 7:49:00 AM

    Heh.

    Lets see. I have the regular iodized table salt. Kosher salt. Pickling Salt. I've bought sea salt in the past, though I'm currently out. So nope, I'm good!

    ReplyDelete
  5. she said:Saturday, October 06, 2018 4:13:00 PM

    Texas Refugee - Wait... I don't get it. They can't grow coffee there.. right? And do they put eggs in it?

    I'm just wondering because 3 snooty towns over they are putting in a Scandinavian coffee joint, and I feel like it's something I should try. But what if I like it? I don't really have any reason to go to Scandinavia in case I like it too much and the place fails. You know I like authenticity.

    I didn't really know Scandinavian coffee was enough of a thing that we'd get a place here. So I'm not sure what to expect.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Capital of Texas RefugeeSaturday, October 06, 2018 8:02:00 PM

    I drink quantities of coffee that pass over the "high consumer" threshold into the "not medically advisable" threshold, which I can only get away with because I'm much bigger than the standards that these thresholds are based on ... :-)

    Finland's the world's largest coffee consumer ... and when I lived in Sweden, I would regularly out-drink the Finns when it came to coffee. The Swedes would usually come in a fairly close second, however.

    So that's why Scandinavian coffee is a big thing: have you considered what it's like to march around a town like Stockholm at street level from November through February?

    There is no such thing as too much coffee for that.

    BTW, the book shop I mentioned is in this place (and visible on the webcam), and the Finnish coffee shop I mentioned is on the back side of this near the produce market.

    Oh, right ... what to expect from the coffee: it's smooth, uniformly and properly roasted, with very little bitterness, but dark means really, really dark.

    I would usually drink "level 1" medium roast from Robert's of Finland, and just regular "mellanrost" from Löfbergs Lila, Arvid Nordquist, and Gevalia. This would equate to a medium to medium-dark roast in the US.

    If you like Lavazza dark roasted coffees, you might actually like the darker roasts more, but generally you get more caffeine from lighter roasts, and so I prefer those.

    You might like Stockholm and Helsinki to visit, BTW, but your wallet won't: check out typical mid-range hotel prices during the winter and you'll see what I mean. (The book shop is especially like that: one book I have that I just checked is 275 SEK, or around 30 USD, and it's 16 USD in hardcover on Amazon.) If you think that's pricey, check the summer prices of hotels, take a look at a few online restaurant menus, and try to recover from the sticker shock.

    A trip there can make London look like a cheaper option if you're not smart about how you're setting things up, in other words.

    What's the winter like? -25 C at night and a thick layer of snow over everything that hasn't been shoveled or trampled upon, and that's not as bad as it could get. I remember coming out of the downtown NK one evening thinking it was a bit warm inside only to discover it was -34 C outside and that another foot of snow had come down.

    But it's beautiful, and I miss it, and I may get back there once I'm done healing from Previously Mentioned Health Conditions that are finally starting to be resolved ...

    Stockholm's also a fairly compact town. I got lost once on a long walk and couldn't find where I was in Stockholm, only to find out that I'd walked completely out of Stockholm and that I was north of nearby Solna instead.

    I'm not a reliable measure of what you might want to walk, however, because one long afternoon I walked across a third of the South of England and had to take multiple trains and taxis back to my hotel, but this was nothing like that. :-)

    So if you are looking for something during the winter that's the complete opposite of your bright and sunny locale, and you have a small pile of money you'd like to set fire to, it's an option. :-)

    But as for the coffee, go to the grocery store and pick up some medium-roast Gevalia Colombian coffee, that's a good entry point for what it's going to be like.

    Skip the IKEA coffee, however, it's like the cheapest of the cheap that I'd buy at the ICA grocery in Stockholm. I don't know who actually produces it, but it isn't very good as far as I'm concerned ...

    Finally, no, they don't put eggs in it. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  7. she said:Monday, October 08, 2018 1:30:00 PM

    Thanks. ;)

    The internet seemed to think that Scandinavian coffee had you mix together grounds and egg shells and boil it up. Which did not sound great.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)