Stupid salt tricks

Did you know that salt has plenty of uses in the kitchen besides simply seasoning food? Here are two, courtesy of Alton Brown.

First, in addition to being tasty, salt can also be pretty abrasive – abrasive enough that you can use it as an easy way to clean cast-iron. While the pan is still hot, get a tiny bit of fat in it – just enough to provide a slight amount of lubrication – toss in a good-sized handful of salt, and scrub. Here’s Alton demonstrating:



Salt can also be used to clean off a lot of other things – including your teeth! (Grind the salt up as fine as possible. Mix it 1:2 with baking soda, add just enough water to give it a toothpaste-like consistency, and brush. Cleans and whitens. Definitely one of the odder toothbrushing experiences of my life. My teeth don’t look significantly whiter, but they’ve never felt more squeaky-clean. For all that, brushing with salty toothpaste is definitely something to give a miss.)


Second, remember how salt is the only rock that you eat? Well, it’s still a rock, and it shares some properties in common with other rocks. Specifically, it holds heat well, and does a good job of distributing it evenly. This is why you use a pizza stone to cook pizza – it ensures that your oven (which is prone to having hot and cold spots) doesn’t leave your relatively delicate pizza dough burnt in some places, and raw in others. The thing about using salt, as opposed to a flat rock like a pizza stone, is that salt is granular; it flows, to a certain extent, and you can surround things with it.

In this next clip, Alton cooks with salt. Not cooking using salt as an additive – cooking using salt as the medium to transfer the heat into the food. Like frying, which it in a lot of ways resembles.



The “why” here is pretty simple. Air, as a cooking medium, leaves a lot to be desired. (Never let it be said “Aaron is a dude who thinks air leaves a lot to be desired.” I’m strongly pro-air. It’s just not the best thing to cook in.)

Think about different ways to cook things. Here’s a quick list off the top of my head of methods, then what they’re actually doing.
1. Baking – Using the heated air within the oven.
2. Boiling or frying – Using heated water or oil.
3. Broiling or grilling – Using the radiated heat from a flame, with secondary cooking from the heated air.
4. Pan-frying or griddle cooking – Using a heated metal plate to conduct the heat.
(There are three basically ways to transfer heat – radiation, convection, and conduction. Radiation is the heat you feel off a fire, or from the sun. Conduction is you burning your hand on a hot pot. And convection is the hot water at the bottom of a kettle rising to the top.)

So what advantages does air have, over the others? Well, air can get hotter than any of the others, first of all. Water tops out at 212 degrees, even the best oils can only get to about 500, but air can go as hot as your oven will take it. (Technically, aluminum would melt at about 1100 degrees. Air would still just be air for another ten thousand degrees or so.) Air heats up quickly, too, compared to any of the other methods.

Unfortunately, the fact that air is a gas is a huge downer. Air’s specific heat is about 1/4 that of water – that means that a given mass of air will take a quarter as much energy to heat one degree as an equivalent amount of water – or give up that amount of energy to your food. The big problem there is the word “mass” – a kilogram of air versus a kilogram of water. The thing is, your oven doesn’t contain a kilogram of air. An average oven probably contains from about a half to a quarter kilogram of air. And that’s in your whole oven!

Let’s look at a real-world example. Let’s say your oven is fairly small – a 2 foot cube. (This makes my math easy.) That means it will have about .3 kg of air in it. Now, let’s say you really want to put the spurs to something – you’ve cranked your oven up to 500 degrees. Me, I’m taking it easy – I’ve got a liter of water, heated up to a nice and easy 200 degrees. My little electric teakettle has about six times as much energy stored in it as your whole oven!

So that’s the first problem. The second is that air has a much lower thermal conductivity than water. Not only does my water contain more energy, but it gives that energy up to food at a rate thirty times faster than air!

Finally – and I wish I had a better engineering background, so that I could express this better – air just isn’t very pushy. And for even cooking, we want pushy. Think about the difference between broiling a turkey and frying it. Why is frying so much better? Well, first, you’re actually cooking the bird at a LOWER heat. You wouldn’t think it, but you are – your oven is going to be at 325 or so, but the fry oil is only at about 175-180. It’s just that you’re getting that heat into the bird much more effectively. Second, though, is that the hot oil is going to flow over, around, into, and through every nook and cranny of that bird, and stay hot – meaning that the inside is going to get cooked at the same time as the outside. Those same nooks would certainly get air as well – but without the density and pressure of the oil, it will just find a happy nook, cool down, and not do much of anything.

So finally, we’ve got this rock salt cooking method. Alton takes care to tell you to pack the salt down tight – the goal here is for the heat to be transferred into the salt, then distributed quickly and evenly across the food. I would imagine that a salt-crusted roast is basically doing a similar thing – using that salt crust to absorb the heat then transfer it quickly and evenly into the roast.


On a related heat-transfer note… ever wonder why you put a pinch of salt in the water when you’re cooking pasta? It’s not for flavor – it’s to speed up the process. Again, salting the water raises its boiling point, so rather than boiling your pasta at 212 degrees, you’re boiling it at 220, or 225, or whatever. More hotter cooking = more faster cooking.



Bonus salt trick - Create a city which is such a blight in God's eyes that he determines He will annihilate it utterly. Make sure it's so bad that even if your uncle tries to talk God down, he will fail. Escape from the city, but make sure your wife is the curious type... presto! A salt pillar in the shape of your lady!


You know, I never got this part. I mean, Orpheus, sure - I can kinda get Orpheus. Neil Gaiman does a really good take on the Orpheus myth... in it, Eurydice was a shade - she wouldn't take mortal form unti they hit daylight - and after hours and hours of walking, hearing NOTHING behind him, Orpheus managed to convince himself that Hades had tricked him, and looks back. But Lot's wife? No. God himself tells you "I'm going to be smashing the living shit out of your town. I can't really enjoy getting a mad-on when people are watching, so just head to Zoar and don't look back.” Is this a parable about how weak women are? How disobedient? Because, honestly, while random sexism isn’t exactly out of place in the Bible, I just don’t understand the point that’s trying to be made here. Why did she look back?

It's not like Sodom and Gomorrah were nice places. Lot had some angels over to his place the night before, and all of his neighbors stopped by to rape them. That's what the town was like. Your neighbors might want a cup of sugar; Lot's neighbors wanted a cup of man-rape. (And check out Genesis 19:8, for possibly the most messed-up part of the whole story. And remember Lot is the GOOD guy.) And I can't imagine that Lot's wife's aunt or something was stuck back in the city; God was generally good about families. The angels gave them time to grab their stuff, so it’s not like she felt bad about what she was leaving behind. I can’t imagine she had a whole lot of great memories of the place. Maybe they had a really nice house? And she felt bad about losing the real estate?

Why the heck did they stay in Sodom anyway? It’s not like they lived in Queens, and housing prices were ridiculous everywhere around them… this is biblical Israel. Not exactly heavily populated. If they wanted out, they could just pack up, go five miles west, and start a new city – bang, done. Their neighbors weren’t just bad people – they were literally a mob of rapists. I guess they only raped strangers? But they were really nice people once you actually were a local landowner?

Maybe God was quiet, like in the Orpheus story? And Lot's wife wasn't really sure anything was actually happening? I don’t really imagine “rain of brimstone” as being a stealth attack move, though. Still, if it was quiet… and she was probably pissed off at her husband, what with the Genesis 19:8 thing and everything… maybe she thought he was just being a douchebag, and made up the whole “angels told me to flee the town.”

Maybe she was suicidal. I had a discussion today about the perverse urges people sometimes have – that moment when you’re looking over a railing when you can just feel your body shouting “Jump!” Maybe she gave in to that. Maybe she just couldn’t get over what her husband had done (19:8 again. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go take a look.) and decided to end it rather than go on living with him.

Man, that there Bible has got some weird stuff.