The Way We Eat: Salt With a Deadly Weapon

Salted caramel. Sounds like one of those molecular gastronomy goofs, like bacon-and-egg ice cream. When I first encountered macarons au caramel et fleur de sel at Pierre Hermé, the famous Paris bakery, I mentally placed them in the clever category, along with Hermé’s hazelnut-and-white-truffle and olive-oil-and-vanilla versions. But there was nothing cheeky about the flavor: rich and round, with a toasty depth and lingering taste that bypassed mere sweetness. And there was nothing salty about it, either.

Thanks to these last few years of exaggerated salt connoisseurship (the biggest jaw-dropper is the chunky Jurassic salt from Montana offered at Per Se), the American palate is now primed for salted caramel. Del Posto serves a fig pudding with pomegranate sorbet, zabaglione and salted caramel sauce. Café Boulud pairs its caramel-chocolate trifle with salted caramel ice cream. At Eleven Madison Park, the warm chocolate pudding cake has been sidelined in favor of a liquid-caramel version, served alongside salted caramel ice cream. And Dante in Boston makes a float from ginger soda and salted caramel mousse.

In France, of course, this is old news. A result of neither foam chic nor salt snobbery, salted caramels are what children have long snacked on in Brittany. This was confirmed by Olivier Roellinger, the chef at O. Roellinger, a three-star restaurant located in the house where he grew up near Mont St.-Michel. “We never had cheese in Brittany,” he explained recently. “All of the milk is made into butter.” The reason goes back to the Celts and their superstition that cheese could cause tuberculosis. “The only way to conserve the milk, ” he said, “was to salt it a lot” with the Guérande salt — sel gris — that is harvested in the region. (Fleur de sel is the fine surface layer that is scraped off by hand just two months a year.) At his restaurant, Roellinger uses salted caramel as a base for desserts with cocoa, orange zest and hazelnuts; at home, he puts it on crepes or bakes it with apples or pears. “It’s a flavor that is very long,” he said. “You start to taste it, and you can’t stop. It’s very destructive for the calories!”

Leave it to the Americans to take such destruction one step further, by pairing it with chocolate. In 2001, Fran Bigelow, a chocolate maker in Seattle, was looking for a new garnish for her chocolate-covered caramels when she tried some of the gray salt she had been seeing in restaurants. She had to give out lots of free samples to get people to try it. But now, she said, her salted chocolate caramels make up 75 percent of the Fran’s Chocolates caramel franchise. “The salt pushes the flavors forward, giving it more depth,” she told me. Once people experience it, they rarely go back: “When you try plain — I mean chocolate-covered — it just doesn’t awaken your palate.” Other palate-awakening chocolates include the salted caramel-filled thimbles from Sahagun in Portland, Ore., and the salted caramel balls from L’Artisan du Chocolat in London — also their top seller and worth their weight in shipping costs.

“Think how good a Milky Way would be if they put fleur de sel on top,” said Nicole Kaplan, the pastry chef at Eleven Madison Park, who discovered salted caramel via ice cream at Berthillon in Paris eight years ago. (She later spent a month assembling the fabled salted caramel macaroons at Pierre Hermé.) “Finally, the taste buds for so sweet are getting tempered,” she said, referring to her countrymen. “We can appreciate what things taste like as themselves, not just that plus sugar.”

When I went to watch Kaplan make her salted caramel dessert at the restaurant, she was strictly sweet as she rubbed together sugar and water in a saucepan, the elements of caramel. After five or so minutes, she gave it a gentle swirl to combine the burbling golden goo, which quickly turned amber. This is usually where home cooks chicken out and take it off the heat. But, said Kaplan, “it’s important to go to black death. If it doesn’t smell, it’s not ready.”

Speaking of death, boiling caramel must be handled with care. When adding liquids to it, roll down your sleeves and stand back. As she made the ice-cream base, Kaplan poured in the cream before the milk, explaining that the fat in the cream prevents it from curdling while cooling the way for the milk. A dollop of (unsalted!) butter was simply for indulgence. After it had cooled, a half-teaspoon of fleur de sel was stirred into the mixture. Later, as she composed the final dish, she added another pinch for a flavor-rousing finish. “Salt,” she said, “just makes it more. . .caramelly.”

Caramel Coulant

For the caramel sauce:

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
1/3 cup cream
1 ½ tablespoons butter
¼ cup milk
For the coulant:
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
Pinch of fleur de sel
¼ cup plus 1 ½ teaspoons sugar
2/3 cup cake flour.
2 eggs.

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Combine the sugar and ¼ cup water in a pot. Do not stir. Cook over medium-high heat to a dark caramel, swirling as it begins to brown to distribute the sugar. Reduce the heat to low and deglaze with the cream, standing back to avoid bubbling caramel. Add the butter and milk. (It will bubble again.) Stir until well incorporated. Let cool. (The sauce can be made ahead and refrigerated.)

2. Spray 5, 4-ounce ramekins with cooking spray; cover the inside of the ramekin with sugar and remove excess. Place on a sheet pan.

3. Make the coulant by warming 1/3 cup caramel sauce in a medium saucepan; then stir in the butter and fleur de sel. Off the heat, stir in the sugar, then flour, then eggs, adding the next just after the prior has been combined. Pour the mixture two-thirds of the way into each ramekin. Bake 8 to 10 minutes, turning the sheet pan halfway through, until the shell is cakelike but the center is flowing. Let cool. When ready to serve, rewarm the cakes in the ramekins for a few minutes. Place a serving plate over the ramekin and flip it to release the coulant. Serve with salted caramel ice cream. Serves 5. Adapted from Nicole Kaplan at Eleven Madison Park, New York.

Salted Caramel Ice Cream

3/4 cup plus ½ cup sugar
2 teaspoons light corn syrup
2 cups cream, preferably organic
2 cups whole milk
10 egg yolks
½ teaspoon fleur de sel, plus more for serving.

1. Place 3/4 cup sugar and the corn syrup in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Do not stir. Cook over medium-high heat to a dark caramel, swirling as it begins to brown to distribute the sugar. Deglaze with the cream; then slowly add the milk. The caramel will harden. Bring to a boil, then simmer, stirring, just until the caramel has dissolved.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together the remaining sugar, yolks and fleur de sel. Whisk a little caramel cream into the egg mixture to temper, pour the egg mixture into the remaining caramel cream and mix. Strain the mixture through a fine-meshed sieve. Cool completely, preferably overnight, then freeze in an ice-cream maker.

3. Serve with the warm cakes and sprinkle both with fleur de sel. Makes about 1 quart. Adapted from Nicole Kaplan at Eleven Madison Park, New York.

Salted Caramel and Milk Chocolate Mousse

½ cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup plus 1 ½ tablespoons heavy whipping cream
2 ½ tablespoons good-quality salted butter
7 ounces milk chocolate, roughly chopped
3 eggs, separated.

1. Combine the sugar and 2 tablespoons water in a medium saucepan. Do not stir. Cook over medium-high heat to a dark caramel, swirling as it begins to brown to distribute the sugar. Take off the heat and deglaze with the cream and butter. Add the chocolate, wait for a minute or two for it to melt and mix until smooth. Mix in the egg yolks.

2. Whisk the egg whites until they form firm peaks and then fold into the chocolate mixture. Divide between 6 4-ounce ramekins and chill for at least 6 hours. Serves 6. Adapted from “Du Caramel Plein la Bouche,” by Trish Deseine, featured on foodbeam.blogspot.com.