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The Rise of the Salt ToothThe craze for salted sweets |
A few of our favorite packaged salty-sweet desserts:
In New York, pastry chef Sam Mason makes a dessert that involves sprinkling salt on top of chocolate jelly. The restaurant Kyotofu features a chocolate cake with miso and sesame seeds. At Coi in San Francisco, you can find manchego cheesecake with green apple sorbet and rosemary.
Desserts prominently featuring salt have become nearly as common as panna cotta at high-end restaurants, and almost every confectioner has done his or her own take on the classic French fleur de sel caramel. But the very chefs who have embraced the salty-sweet flavor combination are loath to call it a trend.
“Everyone in the world likes sweet, salty, and fatty,” says Will Goldfarb, owner of Room 4 Dessert in New York. One of his signature desserts is an ice cream sandwich made with Époisses cheese. “It’s difficult to credit something that everyone loves.”
Indeed, salt has long been an important component of desserts. The French are believed to have created salted caramel 400 years ago, but the Chinese made salted egg custards more than 4,000 years before that. Typically, pastry recipes call for a quarter to a half teaspoon of salt. It rounds out flavors, whether they are savory or sweet. Salt is a main component of caramel because it balances the nearly overwhelming sweetness, helping bring out the smokiness. It helps brown dough and acts as a preservative.
“We’ve been putting salt in a lot of desserts, but you don’t realize it,” says Nicole Kaplan, executive pastry chef at Del Posto in New York. She makes crostata di cioccolato, a chocolate-salted caramel tart with caramel and peanut popcorn.
Now pastry chefs and confectioners are upping the salt content of their desserts, or adding it to the tops of cakes and chocolates to create a crunchy texture. No longer in the background, salt is used to sell a dish on a menu.
One of the most popular items at Baked in Brooklyn is the Sweet & Salty, a chocolate cake topped with fleur de sel caramel.
“[The customers’] reaction is ‘What? Salt in a cake?’ but when they taste it, then [they] get used to it. It’s nothing to be afraid of,” says co-owner Renato Poliafito. Salt is now cool.
It didn’t used to be.
“Chocolate mousse cakes and variations on carrot cakes were all the rage in the 1980s,” says San Francisco confectioner Michael Recchiuti. He was first introduced to the idea of overt salt in desserts during that era by a chef who had worked in Iran, where salty-sweet combinations aren’t unusual. “He was doing a plate of watermelon with pepper and salt, beautifully carved up, and I said, ‘Why are you putting all that on there?’”
Then came the ’90s, when supersweet desserts like fruit tarts and flourless chocolate cakes reigned supreme. Recchiuti credits the current infatuation with salty sweets to chefs’ interest in artisanal salts like fleur de sel, Himalayan red salt, and Hawaiian pink salt.
“People started seeing all these salts, and started thinking about what to do with them,” he says.
But like the Iranian penchant for salting watermelon, salty desserts are common in other cultures. Ta Ko, for instance, is a traditional layered Thai treat featuring a top layer of salty-sweet coconut milk custard and a bottom of sweet-corn flour pudding. As American diners’ palates become more adventurous, chefs are incorporating combinations from other cultures’ cuisines.
Karen Yoo, pastry chef at Los Angeles restaurant Sona, always adds “a decent amount” of salt to a chocolate tart she makes to balance the bitterness of the dark chocolate. “The last time I was in Spain, I had this petit four tray with a chocolate ganache coated in breadcrumbs floating in a small pool of olive oil with fleur de sel sprinkled on it,” says Yoo. “The combo is actually really nice together. Salt makes things pop. “
Try making things pop at home:
Watermelon Juice with Fleur de Sel
Pecan and Salt Caramel Cheesecake
Chocolate Mousse with Olive Oil and Flaky Salt
Sticky Peanut Cookie Bars
Salt, freshly squeezed lime juice and a light dusting of chile molido , or even a squirt of thin, sharp salsa roja is standard on fruit and fruit cups in Mexico.
In the Morelia region, a specialty is the "gaspachos", tall cups of chopped tropical fruits, layered with salt, chile, queso añejo and lime juice.
http://www.pbase.com/panos/image/5487...
Gaspachos, second row from front.
My favorite dessert of all time has to be a delicious, homemade myer lemon sorbet that was accidentally oversalted. It was heaven. Try sprinkling sea salt on a fruit sorbet sometime and you'll be pleasantly surprised.
I inadvertently discovered the salt/sweet thing when someone dared me to put Tabasco on my pancakes. A few drops of the super salty sauce mixed in really brought out the maple flavor, and you really can't taste any heat. Try it -- just don't be surprised if everyone else at the diner thinks you're nuts.
I think the salted candy or dessert will be a rage that everyone will talk about years from now as a joke on the public. I like the chocolate cake from BAKED but salted caramel doesn't make sense to my taste buds or me. I just don't get it.
I've always liked chocolate covered pretzels (as long as it's good quality chocolate). My 3 o'clock workday snack consists of 10 mini pretzels and 10 peanut m&ms. Makes 10 mouthfuls of a pretzel - chocolate -peanut combination.
I don't know why people are so put off by the thought of salt and sugar together, when in fact the two complement each other so perfectly. Remember those chili covered fruit lollipops from Mexico? Everyone loved those in elementary school, but my friends act all grossed out when I put some salt on a piece of chocolate or a pinch of cayenne in my hot chocolate.
Things are going the other way too. I just saw Giada sprinkle a bit of super dark chocolate on a plage of beef rib ragu pasta, and my thought was "wow! That would be great with 99% bitter chocolate," kind of like putting cocoa powder in a chili recipe.
It's true that all cultures have been pairing the very salty with the very sweet for years. Mostly because both are traditional curing agents.
This is a great piece, thanks for writing it. America likes to know what the "trends" are, but really what happens is that diners learn something new and so they think it's new. No matter, I like playing with sweet & savoury compnents in my desserts, so this 'trend" or whatever merely means diners are more likely to enjoy something off the cliche-d track now!
i dream of komi's (dupont circle area, washington, dc) mascarpone stuffed dates sprinkled with fleur de sel...heaven in my mouth
My favorite from Norway and/or Sweden is the salted licorice. Nothing beats it. it is truly delicious. The ones we get here are not as salty, but you can get them in stores that sell Scandinavian foods in this country.
have fun with this -- start a caramel ... add halves of pears... watch color and go long .... remove pears, add a little heavy cream and cracked black pepper ... back in with the pears, turning a few times .... serve pears, caramel sauce and sprinkle with fleur de sel or mediterranean black volcanic salt flakes
I grew up in Virginia and it was not at all uncommon to put salt on watermelon, cantaloupe or honeydew. I didn't know that was common in other parts of the world as well. A little salt in caramel makes it taste more buttery mmmmmmmmm
the salted caramel ice cream from bi-rite creamery in san francisco is AMAZING! i also like sprinkling salt on grapefruits and oranges (weird i know)...
flipz pretzels have been around for years, and major popcorn manufacturers have introduced microwave versions of kettle corn, so its definitely becoming more mainstream.
I've been sprinkling salt on cantaloupe ever since I started eating it (I learned it from my father) -- it brings out the flavor of the melon very well.
The most popular salty sweet treats in LA is the butterscotch budino at Mozza sprinkled with Fleur de sel.
I love salt with watermelon.
Salting watermelon is an Iranian tradition? Who knew? We did it all the time in the rural PA town in which I was raised and none of us had ever heard of Iran until allowing their deposed shah into our country for medical treatment precipitated the hostage crisis.
This is an interesting article. I love salty-sweets! The manchego cheesecake with green apple sorbet and rosemary sounds out of this world. I am traveling to San Francisco this month and next for a work related training. I don't know where we're staying, or, for that matter, where Coi is located, but I intended to find out!
Man, that cheesecake with Epoisses cheese sounds like.. Well.. A dish for one braver than I!
To me it sounds like making a tart with Limburger.