Our Recipes

The vegetables of summer are steadily dropping off their vines and sliding back into the sun-soaked recesses of memory. Much as I look forward to fall–rain, endive, leaves, rain, a hiatus from mowing the lawn, endive, rain–I still crave the crisp, succulent, almost arrogant freshness of a veggie sandwich: all that is vegetal between the savory bookends of bread and cheese. And nothing loves a great salt like a veggie sandwich. My favorite: Amabito no Moshio(藻塩) is an ancient type of Japanese salt, called shio. Shios are identifiable by their fine, snow-like texture. Their firm, intensely mineral backbone lends a delicacy and brightness to food, much as acidity supports definition and complexity in wine. Amabito no Moshio is the granddaddy of shios, created some 2,500 years ago in what was then more or less a neolithic Japan. Seaweed was hauled out of the water by fishermen and dried on the rocks, then sprayed with water, then dried some more, then sprayed some more, etc. etc. until a now salt-encrusted seaweed could be rinsed to make a saturated brine. The brine, along with bits of the kelp, would then be boiled off over a wood fire, resulting in a delicately seaweed-infused salt. Today, The Meadow’s Amabito no Moshio, made with the hondawara variety of seaweed (Sargassum fulvellum) is inspired by that tradition. If today is your day to celebrate the veggie sandwich–perhaps your last true fresh veggie sandwich of the year–do it with the proper reverence, and with a last backwards glimpse of summer’s sunny sanctity. Serves 5 Ingredients: 8 slices black bread or pumpernickel 1 teaspoon horseradish (optional) 4 ounces (8 tablespoons) cream cheese ½ bunch watercress, large stems trimmed 8 thin slices ripe tomato 2 thin slices red onion, halved 1 cup mung bean sprouts 24 thin slices cucumber ½ avocado, cut in 8 thin wedges 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar Small grind of black peppercorns 4 three-finger pinches Amabito No Moshio sea salt Spread the (optional) horseradish very sparingly over each slice of bread. Spread the cream cheese on one side of each slice of bread. Top four of the slices with a small fistful of watercress, two slices tomato, a half-slice red onion, ¼ cup sprouts, six cucumber slices, and two slices avocado. Mix the olive oil and vinegar and spoon a small amount over the vegetables. Season each sandwich with a grinding of pepper and a three-finger pinch of Amabito no Moshio sea salt. Top with remaining cream cheese and bread and serve immediately.

Usually the thing to ask when using salt is: how can I make the most of the interplay between salt and food? There’s texture to consider, the mineral flavors of the salt itself, and the visual cues that sensuously salted food can provide to get the engines of your appetite revving.   A spinach gratin is a slightly difficult character in this regard. Gratin is incredibly delicious, easy to eat, and naturally accommodates a variety of dishes, but its nature is to avoid acting like the life of the party. Also, much of the salt comes from the cheese, and the general texture of the dish is so full and rich that it leaves little room for any but the most aggressive salt crystals to have an impact on the mouthfeel of the dish. It takes an aggressive salt to shine against the backdrop of such a dish with sufficient luminosity to actually illuminate it without overwhelming it with saltiness. One salt jump to mind: Maine Coast Sea Salt. The salt has a hard, bright, faintly hot but minerally flavors and a somewhat hard crunch, so you don’t need a lot for the salt to contribute a note of rowdiness to the spinach gratin. A few pinches on the top of a gratin will greet your lips with something unexpected, an in-your-face attitude that awakens you to the full pleasure of the gratin’s comforting flavors. Serves 4 Ingredients: 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil 4 ounces shiitake mushrooms, stems trimmed, caps sliced about 1/4 inch thick 1 pound cleaned baby spinach leaves 3 two-finger pinches Maine Coast Sea Salt  3 grindings black peppercorns 2 tablespoons dry sherry 1 cup heavy cream 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard Grating of nutmeg 2 ounces shredded Gruyere cheese Preheat a broiler. Heat the olive oil in a very large skillet (raw spinach occupies 50 times the space of the same spinach cooked, which means you will need a pan many times larger than you think you will need) over medium high heat. Add the mushrooms and sauté just until tender, about 4 minutes. Add the spinach leaves and stir until completely wilted, about 3 minutes. While the spinach is cooking season it with one pinch of Maine Coast sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Transfer to a shallow gratin dish or casserole. Return the pan to the heat and add the sherry. Bring to a boil. Add the cream and boil until the volume is reduced by half. Remove from heat and stir in the mustard and nutmeg. Pour over the spinach and spread evenly. Scatter the gruyere on top of the spinach mixture and run under the broiler until the cheese is fully melted and preferably a little brown. If it begins to get oily before it browns remove it right away. Scatter the remaining Maine coast sea salt over top and serve immediately.

Avert your eyes. Blush. Go ahead. The steak salad is always a little embarrassing to look at. Nobody is to blame for this. Like the pitterpat of a Geisha’s geta sandal across the parquet, the modesty of the salad is betrayed by its inescapable voluptuousness. But this needs to be greeted in the spirit in which it is offered, which is to say, with deference and respect. So often the architect of the steak salad indulges in the natural inclination to use the steak itself as the seasoning for the entire dish, salting the heck out of the steak–and in effect utilizing the steak in much the way we use bacon bits and gorgonzola on a cobb salad, or anchovies and parmesan on a Caesar salad—taking advantage of an ingredient’s natural saltiness to season for the dish. This is a perfectly normal impulse. After all, for millions of years we got most of the salt we ate from red meat, so if some part of our reptile mind still thinks of meat as salt, the modern steak salad maker can surely be excused for thinking of salt as meat. But the missed opportunity to enlist a good salt with steak makes this confusion tragic nonetheless. Shinkai Deep Sea Salt: taught, brilliant, bitter-sweet, immaculate. Sprinkled over the steak on this Japanese steak salad, Shinkai Deep Sea Salt brings grace and definition to the meat, deliciously integrating its carnal succulence into the civilized bed of gleaming garden greens. Serves 8 Ingredients: For the dressing/marinade: 1/4 cup soy sauce Grated zest and juice of 1 lemon 2 tablespoons canola oil 1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil 1 tablespoon honey 1 garlic clove, minced 1 tablespoon minced gingerroot 1 small fresh red chile, stemmed, seeded, and minced For the salad: 1 pound flank steak 3 tablespoons canola oil 1/4 lb oyster or shiitake mushrooms 2 baby bok choy, halved lengthwise 1 quart mixed baby greens, cleaned 3 stalks Chinese celery, or 1 stalk Pascal celery, thinly sliced 2 scallions, root end trimmed, thinly sliced 6 grape tomatoes, sliced 1/2 cucumber, thinly sliced 8 sugar snap or snow pea pods, sliced crosswise Julienned zest of 1 lemon 4 three-finger pinches Shinkai Deep Sea Salt Mix the ingredients for the dressing/marinade in a small bowl.Put the steak in a zip-lock bag. Add ¼ cup of the dressing/marinade to the bag. Seal the bag and massage the dressing into the meat. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours and as long as 12 hours. Cover the remaining dressing/marinade and refrigerate. Heat a charcoal or gas grill for high direct grilling. Remove the steak from the bag and wipe off any excess marinade. Coat the steak with 1 tablespoon oil, the mushrooms with 1 ½ tablespoons oil, and the bok choy with the remaining ½ tablespoon oil. Grill the mushrooms until well marked and almost tender, 1 to 2 minutes per side. Set aside and toss with 2 tablespoons reserved dressing. Grill the bok choy halves until grill marked on both sides, about 1 minute per side. Set aside and toss with 1 tablespoon reserved dressing. Grill the flank steak to desired degree of doneness, about 4 minutes per side for very rare, 5 minutes per side for rare, 6 minutes per side for medium rare, 7 minutes per side for medium, turning 90 degrees halfway through the grilling of each side to create cross-hatched grill marks. Set aside to rest for at least 10 minutes before slicing. While the steak is resting, gently toss the baby greens, celery, scallions, tomatoes, cucumber, and sliced pea pods with 1/3 cup of the remaining dressing. Mound on 4 plates. Slice the steak against its grain into thin slices. Arrange several slices steak, some grilled mushrooms, and grilled bok choy on the salad. Scatter the lemon zest over all. Drizzle with the remaining dressing. Sprinkle a pinch of Shinkai deep sea salt over each portion, rubbing fingers together gently as it falls to scatter as evenly as possible. Serve.  

Our friend at the flower market who grows the calla lilies for our shop in Portland also has 40 chickens. Every year over the winter, as the pluvial Pacific Northwest endures its onslaught of alternating grey darkness and dark greyness, the birds more or less give up egg laying altogether. Stubborn about our eggs, we more or less give them up too, and the resulting drought of omelets, frittatas, aiolis, caesar salads, mayonnaises, pound cakes, and pisco sours is one of the greatest hardships of winter. Come spring, however, the chickens kick into gear and produce cartons upon cartons of bug-fed eggs with lovely brown-speckled shells and yolks the color of radioactive apricots. If you have good eggs, consider the following deviled eggs recipe. The chile in this recipe will give them a little kick, while the Black Diamond sea salt (a Cypriot flake salt infused with activated charcoal) provides jaunty contrast with the yolks as well as an incredibly satisfying, potato chip-like crunch of pungent salt. Serves 4 people Ingredients: 4 eggs Sel gris to taste 3 tablespoons mayonnaise (see recipe) 1/2 teaspoon Dijon-style mustard 1 small chile, pequin or piri piri, seeds removed, finely chopped 2 pinches Black Diamond flake salt Put eggs in small pot. Cover with cold water. Add a handful of sel gris, cover and bring to a boil. Turn down to a simmer and cook the eggs for 2 minutes. Remove from heat and rest for 12 minutes. By "cooking" the eggs off the heat you insure that the protein in the yolk and white will set up gradually. The results will be creamy and pristine, without a trace of sulfur-green surrounding the yolks, a common problem when hard-cooked eggs are overcooked. Drain and cool the eggs under cold running water, and refrigerate. Cut the eggs in half lengthwise, dipping the knife into a bowl of water before every cut. Remove the yolks to a small mixing bowl. Add the mayonnaise, mustard, and chile and mix until fluffy. Fill the hollow of each egg half with the yolk mixture and sprinkle with Black Diamond flake salt. Serve within 30 minutes.

A salmon caught high in the freshwater streams of the mountains bears within its pink flesh the flavors of faraway places in the Pacific Ocean, a rosy imprint of the long voyage back to its birthplace. These fish see a lot of things below the ocean depths. And then they eat them. Salmon deserve a suitably thoughtful and voracious treatment in the kitchen. Iburi-Jio Cherry, a smoked sea salt from Japan, has endured a journey comparable to that of the salmon. Artisan salt makers plumb seawater off the coast of the Oga Peninsula, drawing a pristine brine up from the pure, deepwater currents. After concentrating the brine, they heat it over a wood fire over three days, stirring constantly to produce asalt that is the texture of powder snow. This salt is then gently cold smoked over cherry wood for a sweet, smoky, bacony aroma that is unrivaled in the culinary world. The combination of deep sea minerals, cherry wood smoke, and buttery salmon takes your taste buds on peregrinations through flavor’s most unfathomed depths. Serves 6 Ingredients: 1 side of salmon, preferably wild, about 2 pounds, bones removed ¼ cup black sesame seeds ¼ cup white sesame seeds 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil Finely grated zest and juice of a lime 1 teaspoon dark toasted sesame oil ½ teaspoon Aleppo pepper, or ¼ teaspoon crushed chilies 3 big pinches Iburi-Jio Cherry smoked salt Coat the flesh-side of the salmon with the sesame seeds and pat gently into the surface. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat until smoking. Carefully put the salmon in the pan flesh-side down and cook until browned, about 5 minutes. Turn carefully and cook until the fish is firm but still translucent in the center, 4 to 5 minutes more. While the salmon is cooking, combine the lime zest, lime juice, sesame oil and Aleppo pepper in a small bowl. Using a wide spatula or two spatulas, transfer the fish to a serving platter. Drizzle with the lime mixture and scatter the salt over all. Serve immediately. If you need to delay serving, wait until the last second to salt. You want the delicate crystals of the Iburi-Jio to barely dissolve at first bite.