The Ballad of Salty and Sweet - Recap
In a supermarket, Alton appears rolling a cloth-covered cart down an aisle. He's here to discuss a particular kitchen love story: salty and sweet. Recipes books are filled with examples, from the peanut butter and jelly sandwich to prosciutto wrapped melon; from chocolate covered pretzels to feta cheese served with fruit or honey roasted peanuts. His quest is to reveal why these flavors pair so well and so often.
There's a complex gustatory gestalt at work here. To demonstrate it Alton offers some chocolate covered cookies to an indifferent pair of shoppers, who proclaims them, “Okay”. Alton then leads viewers to cart's lower shelf, under the cloth covering, where he has another plate of cookies and... his salt cellar. He explains that a little salt can enhance the flavor of nearly anything, including flavors that aren't salty. Using a torch, Alton applies just enough heat to soften the tops of his new plate of cookies and then dusts them with the kosher salt. This time, his audience is very enthusiastic, even offering money for the treats! But today, awesome is free. It is also Good Eats!
Salt and sugar complete each other, but the distribution isn't equal. Alton considers an interloping flavor – bitter. Most alkaloids have a bitter flavor. Some of these are poisons, and others are medicines, and all of them taste bad. At this point, a flying woman garbed in archaic English nanny attire descends. She is Mary Puffin, and she understands that Alton has some “nasty medicine” to take. She asserts that a spoonful of sugar will help the medicine go down, but Alton disagrees. He feels salt is better suited to this job.
Nearby rests a half grapefruit. But is grapefruit really a fruit? It has fruity flavors, but they are buried beneath the intense bitterness of naringin, a powerful flavanone with certain medicinal properties. Alton slides the grapefruit over to Mary Puffin, who spoons on plenty of sugar to disguise the taste. Then he slides it to an off-screen diner. Alas, the sugar did not help; the grapefruit now tastes like sugar over bitter.
It turns out that the tongue detects sugar and bitter flavors the same way: with a protein coupled molecule embedded in the membrane of taste sensitive cells. A tastant binds to this receptor which causes a chemical change inside the cell. That signal ultimately reaches the brain, which records it. Some receptors react to bitter flavors, others to sweet flavors; both work the same way, so if something is sweet and bitter at the same time the brain detects both flavors.
Alton proposes a different approach to masking bitter flavor. He prepares two grapefruits by halving them, and then sprinkling on some coarse sugar (available at a baking supply house or from an Internet vendor). With his torch, he melts that to create a brûlée effect. To create the proper effect without burning the sugar, Alton keeps his torch moving constantly. He finishes the treat by sprinkling a bit of sea salt on each grapefruit half.
Mary Puffin tries a bite, and proclaims it sweet and sour and not at all bitter! Asked how she explains that, she replies that she never explains anything. If Alton took that approach he wouldn't have his own show. He explains that when salt dissolves on the tongue, it forms sodium and chloride ions. The sodium ions enter cells through ion channels, regardless of what flavors the cells normally detect. For reasons scientists still do not understand, when sodium passes into cells that detect bitter flavors it somehow blocks detection of these flavors. It can even enhance other flavors – perhaps electrically increasing the ability of cells to detect these flavors, or perhaps altering the brain's perception of them. Chefs understand that salt does not make things taste salty, it makes them taste good. Even sweet treats! Confronted with this, Mary Puffin undergoes a startling transformation into a character who promises to “get Alton” and “his little dog, too” as she flies away, laughing maniacally.
Sometime after the discovery of fire but before the invention of the airplane, the French invented caramel. Alton slides a copy of “Good Eats: The Early Years” from his shelf, opening it to reveal it has been converted to store chocolates. Selecting one, he explains that the word caramel derives from an ancient Greek word for straw or hay, because of the color similarity. Further, it has been married to salt for centuries, despite the fact that this has garnered attention lately as if it were a new concept. Often these confections command premium prices, leading Alton to suggest making them at home.
As with the brûlée, Alton will cook the sugar to a bitter state. The addition of salt at key points will help other flavors balance the bitterness. Alton begins by folding a piece of parchment paper so that it will fit nicely inside an 8” x 8” baking pan, lining it. He uses a rule and measures the paper carefully so that it is the correct size and covers the entire baking pan.
Next, he places a large pot on the stove and combines water, light corn syrup, sugar and cream of tartar. He applies medium heat and brings this brew to a simmer, then covers it for five minutes. Cream of tartar (a potassium salt of tartaric acid) breaks the bonds between the monosaccharides glucose and fructose. Corn syrup brings other sugars to the mix. Together, these ingredients prevent the sugar from crystallizing as it cooks, which would create a crunchy candy. Correctly prepared caramel is a smooth, amorphous candy with no inherent crunch. After five minutes Alton removes the lid and adds a candy thermometer, then continues to cook the syrup at a lower temperature (without touching or stirring it) until it is golden in color and reaches a temperature of 300° F. He swirls it a bit to ensure even distribution of heat (avoiding hot pockets). The temperature should be past 350° F. At this temperature the heat breaks down the glucose and fructose, creating new flavor compounds.
By the time the temperature reaches 360° F, the syrup is dark brown and nearly smoking. It's time to put out the fire, metaphorically. To do that, Alton adds a cup of heavy cream. Cream contains fats which make the caramel soft and chewy. He has laced the cream with a little soy sauce, which contains a great deal of salt. That will mitigate some of the bitter flavors produced by cooking the sugar, and bring meaty undertones to make the candy's flavor more complex and interesting. Once the thermal display calms and the steam dissipates, he adds unsalted butter and cooks this until the butter melts and the temperature returns to 255° F, stirring with a wooden spoon. Why use a wooden spoon? At one time confectioners thought wood prevented crystallization because it did not pull heat out of the syrup. The truth is that wood simply protects hands from the candy's high heat. When the syrup has regained the correct temperature, Alton decants it into the baking pan (taking due caution to avoid burning himself). A few taps on the side of the pan encourage air bubbles to migrate to the top, where they will pop. Alton lets that cool for thirty minutes or so, after which he'll apply a finishing salt.
Unlike salts dissolved in foods, finishing salts are intended to be experienced in their crystal form. They can add crunch, contribute to appearance, and certain add interesting flavors to a dish. There are many varieties, and the right choice depends on the chef's preference and the nature of the dish. Some popular finishing salts include kosher salt, coarse sea salt (which can bring additional subtle flavors), and India's kala namak (a black salt containing sulfur that tastes somewhat like eggs). There's also Cypress flake salt (looks interesting but has a relatively mild flavor) and Sel de Gris (gray salt), an unrefined salt from France. Hawaiian red salt contains clay that adds a a mineral bite. Smoked sea salt is made from salt water boiled over wood fires; the crystals absorb smoky flavors as they form. Pink salt isn't a sea salt at all; it is mined in the Himalaya mountains. There are literally dozens of choices, and the selection varies with the cook's tastes. For his caramel Alton chooses a San Francisco coarse sea salt.
Alton sprinkles just a little sea salt onto caramel that has cooled for a half hour. The salt bounces around a bit, but given time it will adhere nicely. Another three and a half hours of cooling will see the caramel ready for cutting. To cut it, Alton rolls a steel ruler across the top of the cooled caramel in each direction to make evenly spaced lines that form a grid of one inch squares. His goal is pieces of caramel about one inch square. Once he has laid out a grid, he uses a pizza cutter and long, quick strokes to cut the candy apart (long, quick strokes help prevent the cutter from binding). When his fingers get sticky, he dips them in a bowl of ice water to chill them down. He separates each piece manually, wrapping it in a twist of parchment. Alton pops one caramel in his mouth. It's delicious, but it also impairs his ability to speak for a time – so with the help of subtitles he describes the salty sweetness, crunch, and complex flavors that would be masked entirely by the bitterness of burned sugar were it not for salt. And if salt can be added to sweet treats, can sugar be added to salty foods? Absolutely, and Alton can prove it.
To prove it, Alton sets his oven to 400° F and puts a shelf in the middle of it. Then he lines a sheet pan with foil and sets a cooling rack inside it. From his refrigerator he grabs a pound of thick-cut bacon, and lays this across the cooling rack so the strips do not overlap. He slides that into the oven where it will bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until it is almost done. While it cooks, he pulls out his food processor.
Into the bowl go pecans and light brown sugar. He pulses that until it looks like crumbs. When the bacon is ready, he slides it out of the oven and sprinkles the crumb mixture onto each piece, patting it down very lightly. He returns the dusted bacon to the oven for ten more minutes to finish cooking, then and allows it to cool on the rack for a few minutes. This “praline bacon” goes well with anything from the morning eggs to an evening ice cream dessert.
Alton hopes he has inspired cooks to explore the alchemy of salty and sweet on their own. Perhaps a salted birthday cake? Or even salt on those little marshmallow chicks that show up at Easter. One thing is certain: salty and sweet can work together nicely to produce Good Eats!
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There's a complex gustatory gestalt at work here. To demonstrate it Alton offers some chocolate covered cookies to an indifferent pair of shoppers, who proclaims them, “Okay”. Alton then leads viewers to cart's lower shelf, under the cloth covering, where he has another plate of cookies and... his salt cellar. He explains that a little salt can enhance the flavor of nearly anything, including flavors that aren't salty. Using a torch, Alton applies just enough heat to soften the tops of his new plate of cookies and then dusts them with the kosher salt. This time, his audience is very enthusiastic, even offering money for the treats! But today, awesome is free. It is also Good Eats!
Salt and sugar complete each other, but the distribution isn't equal. Alton considers an interloping flavor – bitter. Most alkaloids have a bitter flavor. Some of these are poisons, and others are medicines, and all of them taste bad. At this point, a flying woman garbed in archaic English nanny attire descends. She is Mary Puffin, and she understands that Alton has some “nasty medicine” to take. She asserts that a spoonful of sugar will help the medicine go down, but Alton disagrees. He feels salt is better suited to this job.
Nearby rests a half grapefruit. But is grapefruit really a fruit? It has fruity flavors, but they are buried beneath the intense bitterness of naringin, a powerful flavanone with certain medicinal properties. Alton slides the grapefruit over to Mary Puffin, who spoons on plenty of sugar to disguise the taste. Then he slides it to an off-screen diner. Alas, the sugar did not help; the grapefruit now tastes like sugar over bitter.
It turns out that the tongue detects sugar and bitter flavors the same way: with a protein coupled molecule embedded in the membrane of taste sensitive cells. A tastant binds to this receptor which causes a chemical change inside the cell. That signal ultimately reaches the brain, which records it. Some receptors react to bitter flavors, others to sweet flavors; both work the same way, so if something is sweet and bitter at the same time the brain detects both flavors.
Alton proposes a different approach to masking bitter flavor. He prepares two grapefruits by halving them, and then sprinkling on some coarse sugar (available at a baking supply house or from an Internet vendor). With his torch, he melts that to create a brûlée effect. To create the proper effect without burning the sugar, Alton keeps his torch moving constantly. He finishes the treat by sprinkling a bit of sea salt on each grapefruit half.
Mary Puffin tries a bite, and proclaims it sweet and sour and not at all bitter! Asked how she explains that, she replies that she never explains anything. If Alton took that approach he wouldn't have his own show. He explains that when salt dissolves on the tongue, it forms sodium and chloride ions. The sodium ions enter cells through ion channels, regardless of what flavors the cells normally detect. For reasons scientists still do not understand, when sodium passes into cells that detect bitter flavors it somehow blocks detection of these flavors. It can even enhance other flavors – perhaps electrically increasing the ability of cells to detect these flavors, or perhaps altering the brain's perception of them. Chefs understand that salt does not make things taste salty, it makes them taste good. Even sweet treats! Confronted with this, Mary Puffin undergoes a startling transformation into a character who promises to “get Alton” and “his little dog, too” as she flies away, laughing maniacally.
Sometime after the discovery of fire but before the invention of the airplane, the French invented caramel. Alton slides a copy of “Good Eats: The Early Years” from his shelf, opening it to reveal it has been converted to store chocolates. Selecting one, he explains that the word caramel derives from an ancient Greek word for straw or hay, because of the color similarity. Further, it has been married to salt for centuries, despite the fact that this has garnered attention lately as if it were a new concept. Often these confections command premium prices, leading Alton to suggest making them at home.
As with the brûlée, Alton will cook the sugar to a bitter state. The addition of salt at key points will help other flavors balance the bitterness. Alton begins by folding a piece of parchment paper so that it will fit nicely inside an 8” x 8” baking pan, lining it. He uses a rule and measures the paper carefully so that it is the correct size and covers the entire baking pan.
Next, he places a large pot on the stove and combines water, light corn syrup, sugar and cream of tartar. He applies medium heat and brings this brew to a simmer, then covers it for five minutes. Cream of tartar (a potassium salt of tartaric acid) breaks the bonds between the monosaccharides glucose and fructose. Corn syrup brings other sugars to the mix. Together, these ingredients prevent the sugar from crystallizing as it cooks, which would create a crunchy candy. Correctly prepared caramel is a smooth, amorphous candy with no inherent crunch. After five minutes Alton removes the lid and adds a candy thermometer, then continues to cook the syrup at a lower temperature (without touching or stirring it) until it is golden in color and reaches a temperature of 300° F. He swirls it a bit to ensure even distribution of heat (avoiding hot pockets). The temperature should be past 350° F. At this temperature the heat breaks down the glucose and fructose, creating new flavor compounds.
By the time the temperature reaches 360° F, the syrup is dark brown and nearly smoking. It's time to put out the fire, metaphorically. To do that, Alton adds a cup of heavy cream. Cream contains fats which make the caramel soft and chewy. He has laced the cream with a little soy sauce, which contains a great deal of salt. That will mitigate some of the bitter flavors produced by cooking the sugar, and bring meaty undertones to make the candy's flavor more complex and interesting. Once the thermal display calms and the steam dissipates, he adds unsalted butter and cooks this until the butter melts and the temperature returns to 255° F, stirring with a wooden spoon. Why use a wooden spoon? At one time confectioners thought wood prevented crystallization because it did not pull heat out of the syrup. The truth is that wood simply protects hands from the candy's high heat. When the syrup has regained the correct temperature, Alton decants it into the baking pan (taking due caution to avoid burning himself). A few taps on the side of the pan encourage air bubbles to migrate to the top, where they will pop. Alton lets that cool for thirty minutes or so, after which he'll apply a finishing salt.
Unlike salts dissolved in foods, finishing salts are intended to be experienced in their crystal form. They can add crunch, contribute to appearance, and certain add interesting flavors to a dish. There are many varieties, and the right choice depends on the chef's preference and the nature of the dish. Some popular finishing salts include kosher salt, coarse sea salt (which can bring additional subtle flavors), and India's kala namak (a black salt containing sulfur that tastes somewhat like eggs). There's also Cypress flake salt (looks interesting but has a relatively mild flavor) and Sel de Gris (gray salt), an unrefined salt from France. Hawaiian red salt contains clay that adds a a mineral bite. Smoked sea salt is made from salt water boiled over wood fires; the crystals absorb smoky flavors as they form. Pink salt isn't a sea salt at all; it is mined in the Himalaya mountains. There are literally dozens of choices, and the selection varies with the cook's tastes. For his caramel Alton chooses a San Francisco coarse sea salt.
Alton sprinkles just a little sea salt onto caramel that has cooled for a half hour. The salt bounces around a bit, but given time it will adhere nicely. Another three and a half hours of cooling will see the caramel ready for cutting. To cut it, Alton rolls a steel ruler across the top of the cooled caramel in each direction to make evenly spaced lines that form a grid of one inch squares. His goal is pieces of caramel about one inch square. Once he has laid out a grid, he uses a pizza cutter and long, quick strokes to cut the candy apart (long, quick strokes help prevent the cutter from binding). When his fingers get sticky, he dips them in a bowl of ice water to chill them down. He separates each piece manually, wrapping it in a twist of parchment. Alton pops one caramel in his mouth. It's delicious, but it also impairs his ability to speak for a time – so with the help of subtitles he describes the salty sweetness, crunch, and complex flavors that would be masked entirely by the bitterness of burned sugar were it not for salt. And if salt can be added to sweet treats, can sugar be added to salty foods? Absolutely, and Alton can prove it.
To prove it, Alton sets his oven to 400° F and puts a shelf in the middle of it. Then he lines a sheet pan with foil and sets a cooling rack inside it. From his refrigerator he grabs a pound of thick-cut bacon, and lays this across the cooling rack so the strips do not overlap. He slides that into the oven where it will bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until it is almost done. While it cooks, he pulls out his food processor.
Into the bowl go pecans and light brown sugar. He pulses that until it looks like crumbs. When the bacon is ready, he slides it out of the oven and sprinkles the crumb mixture onto each piece, patting it down very lightly. He returns the dusted bacon to the oven for ten more minutes to finish cooking, then and allows it to cool on the rack for a few minutes. This “praline bacon” goes well with anything from the morning eggs to an evening ice cream dessert.
Alton hopes he has inspired cooks to explore the alchemy of salty and sweet on their own. Perhaps a salted birthday cake? Or even salt on those little marshmallow chicks that show up at Easter. One thing is certain: salty and sweet can work together nicely to produce Good Eats!
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