Salted Cashews

I'm still thinking about salt. I probably will for quite some time. It's hard to get to simple things like recipes, when this minor ingredient - this nothing, this white powder that goes EVERYWHERE - is still such a mystery. Still, I feel bad - this is supposed to be a cooking blog, and I haven't done any actual cooking yet.

So let's front-load this one, before I can distract myself.

About two months ago, I brought home a small green cannister that purported to contain "sea salt and cracked pepper cashews." It sounded like an interesting snack, and it languished, unopened, in our pantry for about a week. Then, one evening, Victoria and I opened it while watching a movie... it didn't last out the film.

Now, my initial feelings towards these seeds were as follows:

1. Five dollars is a lot to pay for a small can of nuts.
2. "Sea salt" is salt. And "cracked pepper" is pepper. Yes, I understand that there are salts, in the chemical sense, of all sorts of things, and that such a thing as UNcracked pepper exists. But honest, you'd have to be a damn fool to think that someone was topping their snack with whole peppercorns. It's all marketing mumbo-jumbo - it just sounds better than "salt & pepper cashews."
3. Man, those were some good nuts!

And, as these things go, I found myself buying them again next time I was at the supermarket.

But, it occurred to me, if these WERE something as simple as salt & pepper nuts, then I should easily be able to make them at home. Not only that, but I am a BIG believer that the fewer ingredients that go into something, the better - and salt & pepper nuts shouldn't have eleven things listed under ingredients. What do you need? Salt, pepper, nuts. Simple. Upon reflection, it occurred to me that some sort of binding agent was also required - neither salt, pepper, or nuts being known for their stickiness. (this of course accounts for many of the non-salt, nut, or pepper ingredients.)

I bought a pound of raw cashews (raw, not pre-roasted) from the supermarket, for about the same price as that six-ounce jar. I looked up roasting times on the Internet, and found that it takes about 10 minutes at 350 degrees to properly roast cashews - but to be very careful, because they go from underdone to burned fairly quickly. (I already knew this to be true. I had, once before, tried roasting my own cashew, and got a pound of burned and junky nuts fairly quickly.

FIRST TRY

I decided to try olive oil as my binding agent. Victoria and I have a device called a Misto, which is basically an air-propelled mister (one who mists, not of-age male) for heavier substances, like oils. It works great - you give it a few pumps and it aerosolizes whatever you've put in it.

My plan was fairly simple - bake the nuts for seven minutes, (at 350, on an aluminum half-sheet baking tray) whip 'em out, mist 'em with olive oil, salt 'em, pepper 'em, then bake them the rest of the way.

Result: Good. Not as good as store-bought, but good - the problem being quality control. The taste on the ones that came out right was better than the store-bought, but the mist of olive oil just wasn't enough to get the salt and pepper to stick - what you really wanted to do was rub the nuts around in the grease at the bottom of the tray before eating them, just like you do with popcorn. If you're that sort of person.

SECOND TRY

Well, if you know anything about me - and if you're reading this, chances are that you do - you know that if there's one thing I get, it's emboldened. So, flush with a half-success, I made me some big plans.

AARON'S BIG PLAN: Let's do some science. There were tons of different ways that one could go about this, and no shortage of cashews in the world. I went out and bought another pound of cashews, with the intent of breaking them up into six different batches, and trying out six different things on them. (Why six? Well, at the time the idea came into my head, I had three ideas, and I always like to leave room for some science to happen. By the time it actually came to roasting, I only had four ideas total, so I had to get creative. This time, rather than spritzing the cashews with olive oil, then sprinkling them, I would pre-make mixtures in small prep bowls, pull the cashews out, toss them in the bowls, then put them back on the tray to finish baking. So, for example, I put a tablespoon of oil in a bowl, spread it around, followed it up with a teaspoon of salt and a few grinds of pepper. Which leads me to:

PROBLEM 1: When I get excited, for some inexplicable reason, I think that measurements are something that can be done away with. Which is STUPID. I'm terrible at eyeballing volumes. How bad? Well, we've got two one-cup measures in our house that, every few months, I will line up side by side and pour water back and forth between, because I cannot believe that they are both the same size. How much oil at the bottom of a bowl is a tablespoon? Who the hell knows? I certainly don't.

As a result, my use of the words "tablespoon" and "teaspoon" above are more or less a dramatic convenience. They probably don't make any sense at all. How about, "less oil than you'd think", "as much salt as you'd think", and "slightly more pepper than you'd think." And I'll try to get back to you with exact measurements in a few days.

As I said, I made six batches. I will be posting fairly soon about the different salts I've acquired... until then, just work with me.

1. Sea salt and pepper.
2. Pink salt
3. Garlic salt
4. Table salt and pepper

And that was where my ideas ran out. So here were my game-time plays:

5. Tabasco
6. Wasabi

The tabasco, of course, was easy - it didn't need anything to get it to stick to the cashews. To bind the wasabi, I didn't feel that olive oil was the way to go. I checked out recipes for wasabi peas, and found that people use rice vinegar, which seemed reasonable.

The wasabi was really interesting... in both the good and bad meaning of that word. The wasabi powder we've got in the house has zero in the way of kick. I don't know if it's gone off, was weak to begin with, or if it just doesn't really get firey until you have a lot of it all in one place.


But, wait - I'm getting ahead of myself. Before I can tell you that the wasabi ones were kinda boring, I have to talk about

PROBLEM 2: Here's a suggestion, if you ever decide to do something like this - mix up a bunch of different batches of flavored roasted nuts. (I'm sure that you can generalize more than I have.) Take the time - do them one at a time, maybe spaced five minutes apart so that batch 2 is going in when batch 1 is halfway done. As it was, the whole thing turned into an utter mess. We got two batches of nuts into their coating bowls - then all of a sudden I realized that I needed to make a map of which area of the tray had which flavor on it, or I would forget.

Also, it took TIME to do all this work - and what we really needed to do was give the nuts a nice, quick toss or two in the bowl, then get them back in the oven. As it was, when I poured the wasabi ones back on the tray, they had soaked so long that they were soft and soggy... not encouraging at all.

See how the ones in the bowl are kind of a goopy mess? That is to be avoided.

And then, of course, I had to deal with PROBLEM 3: since some of the nuts (tabasco and wasabi) had been soaking in a watery liquid, they were... watery. And watery things in general take longer to cook than non-watery things. So after a few minutes, we had to remove the tray, carefully scoop batches 1-4 into their final resting places, then put the tray back in the oven. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine how annoying it is, on a scale of 1-10, to scoop 1/6 of the cashews off of a hot metal plate, without intermingling any of the other ones.

I took this picture before I realized that tabasco and wasabi ones needed to go back in. Aren't the colors nice?

Unfortunately, the wasabi cashews didn't ever cook enough to get crunchy - they got to the point of burning, but were still mushy. (About two days later, we opened them back up and found that they had, mysteriously, finally gotten to be cripsy. Still didn't taste spicy, though.)

Result: As I said, the wasabi ones eventually worked out, but were never particularly exciting. The tabasco ones showed a lot of promise - and I imagine with a better tabasco sauce, the right amount of time soaking, and the right cooking time, they would be really zingy. The sea salt & pepper was Victoria's favorite; as for me, I liked the pink salt best. How were the garlic salt and kosher salt batches? Well, I'LL JUST HAVE TO LET MY WIFE TELL YOU HOW THOSE TURNED OUT.

BECAUSE I HAVE NO IDEA.


(Because, you see, she ate them all before I got a chance to try them. I don't know if that was clear from my previous statements.)

(I'm a bitter, bitter man.)

Four little cashews, all in a row...

THIRD TRY

A few days ago, Victoria decided that she wanted some more of these. So, as the long-suffering husband, it was my duty to trudge out into the snow, walk the two miles to the store, get some cashews, then come back and cook them.

This time, things were a bit easier - I knew I wouldn't run into the same problems I ran into last time. Into the bowl, toss a few times, out onto the tray. However, problem one reared its ugly head again. I guesstimated on the amount of oil and salt I'd need, and would up with too much of both of them. Another problem reared its head, as well - one that I HAD during the second try, but didn't realize.

Problem 4: cooling. By the time you've taken a pound of nuts off a baking tray and tossed them in oil enough time to coat, they've cooled enough that they've become fairly UN-baked. Now, this isn't an enormous problem - they warmed up enough eventually - but as I said, the line between uncooked and toast is fairly thin, so I wound up having to watch them like a hawk. The total oven time increased from ten to almost fifteen minutes.

This is right after I salted them.

Result: These were both too oily and too salty. (Although the pepper was just right.) Have you ever had popcorn that was a bit too greasy and a bit too salty? You know how it tastes insanely delicious, even though you know you're going to regret it? Yeah. That was pretty much what we had here. At this point, three days later, enough of the salt has shaken off of them that they're absolutely amazing, though.

Seriously, though - doesn't this picture look incredible? I'ma go eat some RIGHT NOW.

The next time I do this, it'll be pretty much like the third try - although I will use less oil and salt - I really feel like all I need to do is coat the bowl, and let that touch the cashews, not necessarily have enough to pool up - and I'll be more confident about the amount of time I'm cooking them for. I also want to try the pink salt out again, and I really want to work on this wasabi idea.


Well, I was going to talk about different types of salt... but this post is long enough already. I'll get to that tomorrow. And pickles!