Start-Up Chronicle
Getting a restaurant off the ground.
One of the magical aspects of running a business is how it eventually taps into everything you know, or thought you knew. Maybe that’s why you got into that particular business in the first place, without ever knowing about this secret synergy. Southfork Kitchen has drawn upon just about every experience or interest I have ever had, both obvious and all but forgotten, from music to design, food to entertainment, media to human interaction (oy, those human interactions!). More than a string of nouns, it is nearly a summation of a life.
This dawned on me as I found myself wading into the Atlantic Ocean last spring.
Back in the day, when I lived for a spell on Formentera, a Spanish island just south of Ibezia, I was fascinated by the grizzled men who made a living producing sea salt in what I considered a most quaint and natural fashion. They built a three-sided wooden stall in the ocean that jutted out from a low rock formation along the coast line. They opened a door to allow the ocean to rush in, closed it, and left the pool of sea water to bake in the Spanish sun. When they returned, salt awaited them. This was 1970 and I thought it was a charming, if primitive, method of salt production.
So primitive, in fact, that although I live a mile from the Atlantic Ocean and have walked its beaches for 30-some years, I had never thought about extracting the salt from the sea where I taught my kids to swim, threw balls for my dogs, swam with my wife and watched many a lovely lass fight the waves.
Last spring, on a whim, I started wading into the ocean that inspired the seafood restaurant, and started filling containers with water and taking them home to make salt. Making salt is a weird, inaccurate conceit — I steal the salt from the Atlantic Ocean. Or, on a kinder note, I find the salt in the sea, just rolling back and forth, waiting to be captured and transported to my backyard where I can recapture my nomadic acid days in Spain.
I let the contraband sit overnight until the sand falls to the bottom of the container, as in an hour glass, allowing me to pour the water through a chinoise and into shallow, round baking pans. They sit in the sun two days or four. The length of time for evaporation depends on the season, the sun, the humidity, the morning dew, the evening breeze, the volume of water and perhaps several other factors I have yet to grasp.
Sometimes, I have to finish the salt in the oven. Around 100 degrees for an hour or so, until it thoroughly dries. With a fine spatula, I lift the salt from the pans. Having put a number of batches through high- and low-speed blenders, having crushed it with mortars and pestles, having tried a variety of methods in search of the best texture, I now stir the salt briskly with an old wooden spoon and leave it alone. It needs little help from me.
The amount one can harvest is surprisingly generous. Of all the oceans, the North Atlantic is the saltiest. One cubic foot of sea water, I have read, can yield more than two pounds of salt. For me, on my modest scale, a gallon and half fills an eight-ounce container with pure grey salt. (Closer to off-white than grey, akin to fresh snow on shadowy city streets.) While I do not vitiate the salt with any other flavors, no citrus or truffle, we have smoked the salt at the restaurant and are impressed. Experiments continue.
When I started this process, I was concerned with safety. After all, I had heard of salt from the farthest reaches of the globe, and selmeliers in fancy restaurants matching the appropriate salt to each course, but none of it came from the North Atlantic. That most salts sounded like potent, artisanal marijuana only heightened my intrigue: Utah Red, Himalayan Pink, Andes Rock, Balinese Deep, Silver Welsh, Hawaiian Lava, Pakistani Rock, Korean Bamboo, Jurassic Grey, Turkish Pyramid, Vietnamese Pearl, Volcanic Black, Cypriot Flake. You had to wonder why New York had never produced sea salt. Where was Atlantic City Salt Water Salt? Outer Banks Sea Salt? Key West Sea Salt?
I called the Food and Drug Administration. I told the representative I was using the salt at the restaurant. I asked if she wanted to test the salt.
“Why should we?” asked the rep.
“I don’t know what’s in it,” I said.
“I do,” she said. “Salt.”
“But there may be impurities,” I said.
“Maybe a little clay, but it’s a minuscule amount.”
“Could you test the salt, just to be sure?” I begged.
“We do not pretest products. We do not do your research and development work for you. After you have a product ready to sell, then we get involved.”
“I am not going into the salt business.”
“Then don’t worry about it.”
“I just don’t want to hurt anyone,” I said.
“Kids swallow a gallon of that stuff every day. Relax.”
“Thank you. I will try.”
She had a point. The taste of the salt was very similar to a mouthful of ocean water, the same that fish were drinking in every day. It was very salty salt, recognizable to anyone who swam or fished or breathed on the East End of Long Island. More than a few grains, when not melting into or enhancing food, were almost astringent. The crystals were large and unrefined. Common table salt is generally sodium chloride that has been kiln-dried — scorched to remove moisture — and then bolstered with iodine and anticaking agents, such as sodium aluminum silicate, or additive E-554. The trace minerals, up to 84 in some sea salt, as well as calcium, magnesium and potassium, are obliterated in the processing. Even some “sea salts” are stripped of minerals and trace elements as they are washed or boiled.
I called a lab that had tested water for me in the past. I repeated the story.
“We don’t have to test it,” I heard.
“Why not?”
“We can already tell you what’s in it.”
“What?”
“Salt!”
I was convinced. I crushed it into a finer crystal and called it Ocean Road Sea Salt because the beach where I collect, forage, pilfer, capture, contain the salt water it is at the end of Ocean Road. I put the salt into a thick glass jar that once held saffron. I brought it the restaurant so everyone could taste it and offer an opinion. We decided to use it on our home-churned butter with honey and espelette.
The very next day, a couple came to the restaurant to show me their newest product: sea salt. From a few miles down the beach in Amagansett. Steven and Natalie Judelson had been struck by a similar lightning bolt a year before and were in full commercial sea salt mode. They were selling it — $9 an ounce for plain, $11 an ounce for flavored — in the same kind of glass jar I was using. They had four varieties — salt, salt with citrus, salt with pepper, salt with herbs de provence. I marveled at the synchronicity but decided I enjoyed the harvesting (and the savings) too much to purchase their salt; none of our chefs wanted to use someone else’s proportions of lemon to salt, or salt to pepper.
Since then, I have seen Amagansett Sea Salt sold at farmers’ markets and specialty stores and winning the favor of Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park, one of the most successful and innovative restaurants in America. Cynical friends say I was a day late and a dollar short, that I missed a golden opportunity. I take that cum grano salis. I say mazel tov, Judelsons. I could never get my head around selling something where the contents are free, floating around in the ocean, and the only cost is harvesting and packaging and delivering.
Wait. Doesn’t that describe what we do with fish? Never mind.
Bruce Buschel owns Southfork Kitchen, a restaurant in Bridgehampton, N.Y.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=083e59d4f5681cbe018919b0f18e03f7