Ingredients

1.4kg free range pork with thick covering of skin & fat
6 decent sized cooking apples
1tbsp orange juice
2 Fairtrade cinnamon sticks
1tsp Fairtrade ground nutmeg
3 – 5tbsp Fairtrade caster sugar, to taste

To prepare the pork joint, score through the skin but not all the way through the fat, say about 0.5cm.  Then repeat this every 0.5cm across the skin.  Next rub 2 teaspoons of sunflower oil over the surface and liberally sprinkling it with sea salt; massage the sea salt into the skin and set aside.

I follow the method that Sophie Grigson used in her fabulous book “Meat” which says that you cook at 180^oC for 30 minutes per 500g plus an extra 20-30 minutes at the end for safety.  This should cook the joint perfectly and give you a good crunchy crackling; it certainly works for us, but the key is the skin & fat on the outside and how you prepare it.

As for the apple sauce, I peeled, sliced & diced these and bunged all of the ingredients into a heavy pan with a lid on.  I cooked this at a low-medium heat for 20 minutes.  I took out the cinnamon quills, then pulsed the apples to a fine sauce and served this cold.

I served all of this with roast potatoes and the vegetables.

You should buy the best quality pork you can find, as the classic supermarket meat is tastless and full of water.  Free range or rare breed adds a lot of flavour that seems to be missing from the bland kit that the big shops sell.  Try your local farm shop or a mini-multiple like Booths.

Here is another salty recipe.  It’s a traditional way of cooking in China and strangely is really delicious, even though it sounds far to salty.  While it seems a waste of salt, you can re-use the salt for similar meals – perhaps cook this first then the salt buried red snapper later.  

1.5kg                Whole chicken

1½tbsp             Fruit-flavoured brandy

1½tbsp             Soy sauce

4 slices             Fresh ginger

1                      Large onion, finely sliced

1tbsp                Steenbergs China 5 spice powder

2.75kg              Coarse sea salt

Preheat the oven to 180^oC.

Mix together the brandy and soy sauce and use this to rub the chicken inside and outside.  Mix together the ginger, onion and China 5 spice and place this inside the chicken.  Leave to stand in a cool, well ventilated place for 2 hours to dry out.

Place the salt in a deep casserole dish and warm it through in the oven, stirring it once or twice to ensure that it is evenly heated through.  Make a well in the salt and bury the chicken, covering it completely.  Cover the casserole and warm it over a low heat for 10 minutes to warm through.  Transfer it into the preheated oven and cook for 1½ hours.

To serve, lift the chicken out of the casserole and brush it free of salt.  Chop it through the bone into 20 pieces and arrange on a double platter.  Serve hot, with rice or noodles, together with stir-fried vegetables.

Carrying salt to a new home is a British tradition – in 1789, when Robert Burns moved to a new house in Ellisland, he was escorted there by his relatives carrying a bowl of salt.

Salt in history

The Chinese started making salt in Sichuan from 3000BC; Li Bing ordered the drilling of the first brine wells in 252BC.  The Ancient Egyptians made salt by evapourating seawater from the Nile Delta, using it for preserving fish and birds and in mummification.

The word “salary” comes from the Roman word for salt, “salarium”.  However, while no-one quite knows the origin of this, Pliny The Elder wrote in Naturalis Historia that “[i]n Rome. . .the soldier’s pay was originally salt and the word salary derives from it. . .” (finished in AD 77).

But it is the Celts or Gauls who were the first “salt people”.  They founded the first salt towns – Halle sits on an East German salt bed, while Hallein and Swäbish Hall and Hallstatt in Austria have the same linguistic root as Galicia in Spain and Portugal.  The Celtic society was founded on salt mining, trading it to the far ends of Europe at the same time as spreading Celtic culture.

Nowadays, most salt is made industrially by injecting water into rock salt deposits, which dissolves the salt, or by taking sea-water.  These brines are then filtered and evapourated by boiling.  The resultant salt may then be bleached to remove any yellow/grey colour in the salt crystals.  Anti-caking chemicals are then added to the salt to make it free-flowing.  These industrial salts have an uncomplicated salt (or pure sodium chloride) taste.

Salt & Health

Salt is responsible for maintaining water balance, blood pressure and is essential for muscle and nerve activity – sodium is needed to transport nutrients and oxygen, transmit nerve impulses and move muscles.  An adult human contains around 250g of salt, but is constantly losing it through natural bodily functions.  In fact, it’s as if we (together with all animals) have brought the sea with us to enable us all to survive on land.

But too much may increase the chances of high blood pressure, heart disorders and kidney disease – the average UK adult eats 8 – 15kg of salt per day.

Nowadays, salt (even sea salt) is refined – bleached to change its colour from yellow to white and made free-running through anti-caking agents (such as magnesium carbonate, calcium silicate or sodium hexacyanoferrate II).  Anti-caking agents cloud brines and distort flavours – we notice this especially in bread and pastry.

So if like us, you feel that our daily food is already pretty unnatural and overprocessed without your salt also being tampered with, you should go for old-fashioned, slow-harvested sea salt.

Portuguese sea salts

In the Algarve in the middle of the Nature Reserve Ria Formosa, there is still a tradition of salt harvesting.  While not as well known as that from Britanny, perhaps, we feel that it produces whiter crystals and a mellower flavour, with a wonderful bouquet of trace elements lacking in other sea salts.  Ria Formosa is home to flamingos, storks and other salt birds as well as brine shrimp and microalgae.

Traditional salt is produced in salinas (salt marshes and salt-pans).  After being submerged all winter, the salina is reborn in April when it is filled with concentrated sea water (at 150g of salts per litre), which still contains all trace minerals.

In mid-May, as the sun heats up the salina, the seawater concentration rises to 250g of salts per litre and our sea salt starts to crystallise.  As soon as this starts, the salt pan is topped up with more seawater to keep the process going.

By June, the salt-pans are ready for harvesting.  This is done with real care to avoid mixing the bottom clay with the salt and so keeping the sea salts naturally white.  After being hand-harvested, this traditional sea salt is sun-dried for 5 days maximising its magnesium and iodine content.

The Fleur de Sel – the gourmet product favoured in France – is collected from the surface of the pan like cream from milk.  The salt-workers gently harvest this thin layer of salt as it crystallizes on the surface of the water before sun-drying.  Fleur de sel has a trace element bouquet that highlights food flavours and crumbles easily between the fingers.

We have done chemical analysis of our salts (see below for details) to show the levels of minerals retained through sun drying.

Other great salts

In Britain, there is a choice of wonderful sea salts that have been produced through small-scale industrial evapouration.  Maldon Sea Salt is without a doubt one of the culinary icons in the world, and is still being produced by a family run business in Essex and they are lovely people.  Newer contenders include Anglesey Sea Salt and Cornish Sea Salt. 

I know I am a Luddite but there is something much more beautiful about sun-dried salt that has been slowly cared for and dried, rather than industrially evapourated sea salts made in stainless steel vats.

Chemical analysis of Steenbergs natural sea salt