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!

Week 1: Salt, or, the week of living saltily

We're gonna need a bigger blog.

Salt made sense to me. It seemed natural; salt is simple and everyone uses it, so it should probably be first, right? Right. Bloody well right.

Except, here's the problem. I could easily spend the entire year just talking about salt. Salt is NUTS. (It's delicious on nuts, too!) It's important enough that for most of human history, procuring salt was a primary concern of day-to-day living. But today, we don't really think about salt. We don't have to look for salt licks. We don't need to live by a salt works, and don't need bamboo piping to ship it all over China any more. The idea that there are "salt mines" is more or less a joke, and none of us have ever boiled briny water in pots to extract the salt from it.

That wasn't always the case, though. Three thousand years ago, the Chinese government kept a monopoly on the two most critical substances for day-to-day life - salt and iron. The Romans paid their soldiers in salt.[1] The name the Romans gave to the people we know as the Celts - or Gauls in Latin - means "salt", or "salt people", and rather than the blue-painted, shaggy-haired barbarians that Roman history has handed down to us, they were master salt miners, and had a trade empire that stretched all the way from England to western China, at the time of the birth of Christ. As recently as eighty years ago, a civil rights lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi led a hundred thousand people on a two hundred fifty mile march to commit a heinous act of civil disobedience - to make salt themselves rather than paying the British government's tax on the substance. That simple act eventually lead to Indian independence from England.

As a chemical substance, salt just seems weird. It's the combination of two deadly elements, yet we need it to live. We need salt every day, in fact, in fairly large quantities - but drinking sea water will kill you.[2] It raises the boiling point of water, lowers its freezing point, carries heat so well that it can be used as a cooking medium, and is crucial for making ice cream.

And it's delicious! Not amazing on its own, maybe, but put in on pretty much anything, and woo hoo! When life hands you lemons, break out the tequila and salt!


Let's talk about taste for a minute. Your tongue can pick up five basic tastes - sweet, sour, bitter, savory, and salty. (I know, I know, we were taught four in elementary school. Savory was only added to the list about a hundred years ago, so it's no surprise public schools haven't caught up.) In addition, your tongue can pick up the sensation of spiciness... but then again, so can pretty much every bit of skin on your body, if the spice is potent enough. I mean, your tongue can also sense "getting stabbed" but "stabbed in the tongue" isn't really a taste.

Okay, after doing some science, I've retracted that statement. Stabbed in the tongue is definitely a taste. Kinda coppery.

Now, I want you to make a list in your head of things that taste sweet. Think about chocolate, fruit, splenda, milk, chloroform, lead acetate - all of them taste sweet because they've all got different sugars. Do the same thing for sourness (things with acids in them), bitterness (a huge amount of stuff, much of which needs to be processed to remove toxicity), and savoriness (I have no freaking idea. Savoriness? I was never taught that in grade school.) (Wikipedia says savory taste buds look for foods with high amino acid content... IE, things taste "rich" to us because they're nutrient-dense. Makes sense.)

Now let's look at the list of things that taste salty:

1. Salt

That couldn't possibly be right. To the internet!

Okay. Great Internet has shown me the truth. Here's list 2.0:

1. Salt
2. Potassium Chloride
3. Other cholrides of the alkali metals

So, take a look down the left hand side of the periodic table. First, let's visit #17, chlorine. Got it? Don't hold it too close, though, because it'll turn into hydrochloric acid in your lungs, which is why they used it to clear out trenches in WWI. Now, head all the way to the left, to Sodium, #11. Don't pick it up - you might sweat a bit, and sodium reacts exothermically to water. For those of you without a greek background - gunpowder reacts exothermically to fire. Now, to these two fascinating ways to die, add a little bit of fire, which as I recall is also fairly good at killing folk. Logically, the result should be something that burns you to death, blows you up, then dissolves whatever is left. And yet... (Safety tip - DO NOT try to salt your popcorn by directly mixing sodium and chlorine.)

Now, one of the reasons that the periodic table is so awesome is that it organizes the elements in a fashion that makes them look like they're giving you the fist of metal! Also, they're grouped according to properties - so that potassium, right below sodium, is likely to behave similarly. And, it bonds to chlorine like sodium does, and even has a vaguely salty taste. The problem is that while too much salt will give you high blood pressure, too much potassium chloride will skip the middleman and just kill you. (In far, far higher doses than even the biggest salt fiend would ever use, of course.) As you go father down the periodic table, the stuff that you get becomes less and less like salt, and more and more likely to kill you. So, yes, there's salty tasting stuff out there... but mostly, what we're looking at is salt.


So this is the point that I'm trying to make. Evolution has spent a large amount of real estate in order to detect a single substance - enough that we can readily say that one of the tongue's primary functions is as a salt detector. (You've got to look at what stuff actually does, not just what it claims to do. A book that claims to be an adventure novel exploring the depths that a man will sink to for revenge, but spends half of its pages talking about the minutae of the whale trade, is a book about the minutae of the whale trade.) So I apparently decided that in the first week of my year-long project, I'd explore 1/5th of the tastes that humans can experience. (More than that, if you include "stabbed".) Next week is "all sour things", followed by "bitter delights", after which I will spend forty-nine weeks trying to figure out what the hell savory is.

If there's one thing I'm known for, it's my ability to plan things out. This kind of thing is why.

Still, I've learned a ton of amazing things about salt. Tomorrow: More salt facts, and we make pickles!


[1] Well, probably not. But they did SOMETHING that linked soldiers and salt, though historians are a little bit back-and-forth as to what that actually was. In any case, both the words "salary" and "soldier" have their root in the roman word for salt. Ever thought about what it meant to say someone was worth his salt? (Salad also has the same root.)

[2] Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink: I never understood why this was the case until I started learning about salt; you always read about drinking salt water making you thirstier and thirstier, then killing you. I never believed it. But it's a total head-slapper; obvious once you hear it. Salt is good, yes, but excess salt still needs to be flushed out of your body. The body needs water to do this. The problem is, sea water contains more salt than that volume of water will allow you to clear out of your system. So, you drink your first cup. Your kidneys start doing their job, flushing the excess salt, and you pee, losing water. The problem is, you've used that whole cup of water, but haven't cleared all the salt out yet. Your body wants to pee again, requiring more water. It tells you "Drink more water!" and you do... adding even MORE salt to your over-salinated system. Meanwhile, the extra salt is wreaking havoc on the rest of your system, which uses osmosis to accomplish a lot of basic tasks - dehydrating you. (Didn't you ever wonder why bars are nice enough to server salty snacks, like peanuts and pretzels, for free?) Within hours you start hallucinating, and die really quickly afterwards.

According to Alton Brown, you CAN survive drinking about a .8% salt solution - so if you're stranded on an average-salinity ocean (3.2%) you can stretch your drinking water by adding one part seawater to three parts fresh water.

A quick note on cooking, dieting, and me.

So. Four years ago, I lived in Israel. I went to the gym every day, bought fresh fruits and vegetables to eat almost every day from a stand across the street, and was generally as fit as I've been.

Today, I have a law degree, a nine-month old child, and fifty extra pounds. It's a big change. A big, fat change. (Most amazing of all was how much weight I put on when my wife, Victoria, was pregnant.)

Thus, my wife and I are in the process of dieting. We're doing a low carb, low fat thing - nothing radical, just trying to adjust our diets to something that the human body likes a bit more than pizza and pasta six times a week. There isn't likely to be that much bread, potatoes, corn, etc, in my cooking, at least until I'm back at a reasonable weight. More's the shame, because I loves me some taters.

Also, Victoria is a vegetarian, for a certain definition of vegetable*. So, while I cook meat occasionally, mostly I do it at lunchtime, when she's not around. In the evenings, we have vegetarian* meals.

Finally, Benjamin, our son, is a baby. He eats baby food. Victoria makes a lot of the baby food herself, which is friggin' awesome. Where appropriate, she'll post baby food recipes that involve whatever spice we're working with.


* Fish, Peking duck, and my cheeseburgers are all vegetables.

So what am I doing, exactly?

I like rules. You wouldn't think it, but I do. Rules turn "let's pretend" into a game, and they turn "I'm gonna cook some stuff with tarragon" into a capital-P Project. (Rules turn "I'm being an asshole to you" into "I'm a lawyer", so I've got THAT going for me.)

My Project is this - to learn how to cook with spices*, one spice a week, over the course of a year. During each week, I'm going to attempt to cook as many things as possible that put that spice to the forefront, including some which use that spice exclusively. I'm going to learn as much as I can, in a limited amount of time, about that spice's origins, history, and general usage. If possible, I'm going to procure and use different versions of the spice in question. I'll try to do five to six dishes a week - hopefully mixing breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, as appropriate, as well as whatever other stuff sounds good. (Guess what I can't wait to put that tarragon into? Here's a hint - it's vodka.)

In pursuit of scientific rigor - for where are we without it? - I will, additionally, be making one particular dish every week. It's a simple stuffed mushroom recipe - mushrooms, spinach, a little butter, a little cheese. That's it. Every week, I'll add one, and only one, addition to that - the spice of the week. Yes, I'm aware that Cinnamon stuffed mushrooms are going to taste odd. To which I say to you - SCIENCE!

I don't have any particular order laid out for what I'm going to do and when. Week one is Salt, and therefore week fifty-two will probably be Pepper. (My wife asked me why it doesn't make more sense that week two would be pepper. To which I said to her - SCIENCE!) If you've got any requests or suggestions, please feel free to get in touch with me!


*Just because the blog is called "The Year of Living Spicily" doesn't mean that I'm restricting myself to spices. It's just that "The Year of Living Seasoningsly" sounds stupid and "The Year of Living Herbally" sounds either like I'm a hippie or a pothead. Basically, I'll spend a week on any flavorant - for example, my first week is salt, which is a seasoning, not a spice.

However, for the purpose of me not going nuts on terminology, I'm going to generically refer to any food-flavoring device as a spice. It's wrong. I know that, you know that, but it makes my life easier. Everyone is happy.

Definitions

This is a place where I can store definitions for all the terms that I will use frequently.

Herb: A plant which contains volatile, essential, flavorful oils, expressed in its leaves. [1]

Spice: A plant which contains volatile, essential, flavorful oils, expressed in other botanical parts, such as seeds, bark, or berries. [2]

Seasoning: Not a well-defined term. Most broadly, the act of adding flavor to food, be it from salt, herbs, spices, or anything else. Most narrowly, the act of salting food. I found a good middle ground in the French cooking guide "Le Guide Culinaire". (lit. "Cooking for Frenchies") It divides seasonings into four categories:
1. Saline seasonings—Salt, spiced salt, saltpeter.
2. Acid seasonings—Plain vinegar, or same aromatized with tarragon; verjuice, lemon and orange juices.
3. Hot seasonings—Peppercorns, ground or coarsely chopped pepper, or mignonette pepper; paprika, curry, cayenne, and mixed pepper spices.
4. Saccharine seasonings—Sugar and honey.

Essential Oil: Essential meaning "containing the essence of", not "very important to". An oil which carries the aromatic compounds from the plant. Essential oils are generally hydrophobic and lipophilic - they dissolve in fats, not in water.

Batman: Batman is not an element of cooking. He is the world's greatest detective. He is the alter-ego of billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, and is universally accepted as the most awesome superhero ever.

T-Rex: T-Rex loves stomping on houses and small ladies. He is philosophical and goofy guy. In short, he is an everyman, like me. He loves Batman as well. My son Benjamin has a t-shirt with him on it, as well as a giant morbidly obese stuffed version of him.

What? I said terms I will use frequently. Haven't you ever read anything I've written?


1: Good Eats: Spice Capades (Food Network television broadcast, 14 January 2004) at 3:15.
2: Id.

Purpose

Over the last few years, I've found myself becoming a half-decent cook. Not a great cook, but a good one. I can look at a recipe and use it as a base for my own ideas; I can even freestyle with generally good results. I'm not super-creative, but I'm a decent kitchen craftsman.

I have a few blind spots, though. I can't bake for crap. I'm really bad at timing a meal. And I know absolutely nothing about spices. Not that I can't use them; I have a decently-stocked spice cabinet, and can follow a recipe. I can even infer, based on similar dishes, what spices I should use. But I don't have a feel for them, the same way that, let's say, I can tell when a dish might want Cheddar versus Parmesan cheese.

This is fixable. And, since I work better with structure, I'm giving myself one. Fifty-two weeks in a year; one spice a week. My Year of Living Spicily. (And I'm not going to nitpick the definition of spice, either. Herbs and other flavorants count.) And since I'm starved for things to write about, I thought it might be fun to blog about it - to not only share results and recipes, but to see what other people might have to offer.

The Year of Living Spicily

All right! The Year of Living Spicily has begun, and, as I planned, on January 11! (We have always been at war with Eurasia.)