Author: Mrs. Homegrown
Salted Spruce Tips and Pine Infused Garlic Salt
I’ve been really enjoying homemade seasoned salt lately, especially herb and conifer salts, but also just plain old garlic salt. For me, garlic salt sort of snuck under my DIY radar. If a recipe calls for garlic salt, you reach for the beige stuff in the jar, right? Well, no, actually, it turns out you can make it yourself in two minutes. I honestly don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out.
All you have to do is chop any aromatic, like garlic or herbs or citrus zest, into salt, mincing it with a big kitchen knife until it reaches a texture you like. That might be very fine, or a little rough. You could do this more quickly in a food processor. I use kosher salt for this, you could use a fancier salt if you like.
When you’re done, you spread the salt on a plate and leave it out to dry for a day or two. The salt really accelerates the dry time. Then transfer it to a jar. That’s all there is to it.
The only decisions to make are which aromatics you’re going to try–I’ll give some suggestions below–and what your salt to aromatic ratio is going to be. I can’t give you an exact recipe–it’s something you’ve got to feel out for yourself, knowing all the while that whatever you make will be okay.
Many herb salt recipes suggest equal parts herb and salt, but I often use much less salt than that. The question you must ask is whether you want your end product to be salt which is lightly flavored, or flavor chunks of some aromatic which are enhanced by salt–that is to say, herbed salt or salted herb?
The best approach is to simply start with less salt and see how it goes, because you can always add more.
Feline assistance in making the pine garlic salt.
A Tale of Two Salts
To give you some concrete examples, I made two small batches of salt today. I often make herbed salt in tiny batches that get used up quickly, because I like to experiment.
The first one I made was with spruce tips. These are the fresh spring growth of a fir tree, the tender chartreuse tips which stand out in such brilliant contrast to the tree’s older foliage. They have a subtle citrus-pine flavor. I only had a handful to work with–I’d like to get more if I can get up to the mountains again soon.
I felt like the spruce was the real star of this blend. I didn’t want its subtle flavor overwhelmed by salt, so I used very little salt.
I also had a bit of pine to work with. I’d been in the mountains for the day, and had been nibbling on every pine I saw, like a lunatic. [See the end for an obligatory safety warning.]
There is surprising flavor variation among conifers, even between trees of the same type growing right next to one another. Moreover, the flavor of a particular tree will fluctuate over the course of the year. If you’re looking for edible pine, you just have to taste test until you find something nice. Most of the pines I found on this outing were really dry despite the season–thank you, drought– and tasted bland or unpleasant. I found one tree which had a decent flavor, and brought home a single cluster of needles.
In this case, I decided the pine flavor was not interesting enough to be the star of the recipe, but I thought it would add a nice twist for garlic salt.
Most herbs, including the soft spruce tips, will sort of blend and mash into the salt, creating a uniform, sandy texture. Pine needles are too tough for that, so the best you can do with them is to chop them into very fine pieces then mix them into the salt. They will infuse the salt with flavor as they sit in it, but will always remain distinct, and if the pieces are too big, it can be unpleasant.
After I minced the needles, I minced some garlic into the salt as well. Chop the garlic about as fine as your patience lasts, keeping in mind that it shrinks when it dehydrates, so it doesn’t have to be super-fine to start.
You can see in these pictures that the garlic/pine salt is much whiter, i.e. much more salt heavy. The spruce tips, meanwhile, are all about the green.
Pine and garlic on the left, spruce tip on the right
Other Herbed Salt Ideas
Get creative. You can chop almost anything you like into salt:
• Herbs of all types–dill, sage, parsley, basil, etc. You can recreate classic herb combos, like Herbs de Provence.
• I haven’t made onion or shallot salt yet, but am wondering why I haven’t.
• Straight garlic salt is easy and useful
• Citrus zest is lovely with salt
• A nice fresh spicy red pepper would make an interesting salt
• Various combinations of the above seem suggestive: citrus and hot pepper, onion and parsley, etc.
• Lavender salt can be really nice if used sparingly on sweets, like caramel or shortbread or chocolate
• Stinging nettles don’t taste like much, but they have lots of nutritional value. Make a healthy green salt with fresh or dry nettles (For fresh, use a food processor, or wear gloves as you chop! The stingers will fade when the plant dries out.)
• Seaweed salt. Add some sesame seeds for furikake-like flavor
• My favorite salt so far has been piñon pine with garlic. I need me some more piñon!
What do you do with it?
Herbed salts are nice on vegetables and popcorn. They can add that extra oomph to soups and stews. They can be used as meat rubs. They can be kept at table and sprinkled on everything.
Regarding pine toxicity
There was a single study that showed that eating Ponderosa pine tips caused miscarriages in cattle, and if the cattle ate huge amounts of Ponderosa pine, they suffered other illnesses. This gets waved around and scares people from eating pine. In contrast to this is a long tradition of humans brewing and drinking pine needle tea in perfect safety. It is my understanding that all true pines (Pinus) are considered edible.
As usual, the answer is all things in moderation. Don’t eat tons of pine. Easily done! It’s not that tasty. And to be absolutely safe, skip pine entirely while you’re pregnant.
In addition, know how to identify two truly toxic trees you might run into, and definitely don’t want to eat: The Australian Pine, also known as Norfolk Pine and the Yew. Neither are actually pines–they’re not members of the Pinus family–but they are sometimes thought of as pines.
Spam Poetry Sunday
In lieu of our usual picture Sunday, we offer instead a beautiful word picture from our friends the spammers. Our software blocks thousands of these every day, but some get through and we have to hand prune our comment sections:
We wish to thannk you yett agai ffor the gorgeous ideas you offered Janet
when preparing her own post-graduate research and, most importantly, pertaining to providing masny of the ideas in a blog post.
If we had been aware off your web site a year ago, we would
have been kept from the nonessential measures we wer selecting.
Thank you very much.
What mystifies us is the ultimate purpose of these spam comments. This one was placed on our announcement for our upcoming coffee roasting class (not a popular or highly linked post), and linked to a page for a restaurant which is obviously just a place holder, in that it has no content or history or graphic design. And who the heck is Janet?
Going to Seed
Tidiness is a very pleasant thing inside a house. Outside, in a yard or garden, it’s not at all a good thing. I’m really tired of the cult of tidy.
We seem to be confused. We conflate our yards with our living rooms, the space beneath our shrubs for kitchen floors. Popular opinion seems to believe our flower and vegetable gardens should be maintained like trophy rooms, like curio cases.
Our mistake, of course, is thinking that everything is about us. That our yard, our garden, our little patch of land actually belongs to us and we have the right to maintain it exactly as we like. We might own it on paper, but we share it with hundreds, thousands, millions (if you want to get into soil biology) of other lives.
Of course, if we maintain our yards to exact standards of tidiness–say our yard consists of a lawn and some shrubs along the drive with the dirt beneath them blown clean, we probably are not supporting much life at all. We’ve put up the No Trespassing sign, and creatures listen.
It gets even more sparse if we spray herbicides and pesticides all over the place. All of the invisible life vanishes. Any creatures which visit are just passing through.
The land is eerily silent.
But life is waiting to come back. That is what is so amazing. It jumps back if given even half a chance. If you open the door just a crack.
All we have to do is sit back and relax.
Stop with the obsessive yard work.
Stop paying the yard crew.
Stop spraying chemicals around.
Just stop.
Leave the leaves. Let fallen leaves and pulled weeds stay on the land to protect and nourish the soil.
Let volunteers bloom.
Let your garden go to seed.
If we live with fussy neighbors, or under the impression that our gardens should look like the ones in the magazines, we might work hard to keep our vegetable and flower gardens impeccable, starting seedlings in advance to replace aging plants so there’s never any sense of “decline” in the garden.
I’ve always let parts of our garden go to seed, but this year, more than ever, I’m attuned to it. I’m reveling in the beauty in it, and I’m understand the generosity of it down deep, on the soul level.
In the past I struggled to leave the plants as long as I could stand it, knowing they were doing good in their later life cycle, but also feeling like my yellow, straggly garden made me look lazy or incompetent.
I was also acutely aware of the long gaps between harvests that would occur if I waited for plants to go to seed before replacing them. Now, I’ve given up all that anxiety, and I revel in this time.
The insects feast on the flowers which bloom on our lettuce, our arugula, our radishes, our mustard, our fennel. Predatory wasps hunt alongside lady bugs and diligent bees of all types.
We have more birds than ever in our yard, and they love our overgrown, browning beds, because of course they’re eating the seeds or the bugs on the ripening plants. They would not, however, allow me to take any pictures of them doing these things.
They love all the weedy places, the vacant lots and over grown side yards. Those places are full of flashing wings and trilling songs. It’s already a seed time of year here in LA on our fast moving calendar, and I’m watching the birds feast. I love watching the little finches balancing on thin, swaying plant stalks in the golden light of the afternoon. The world is full of moments of perfect, unconscious beauty like that.
Once the seeds are eaten, and the plants are brown and empty, I cut the stalks down at their base, but I don’t throw anything away. Everything stays in the yard, on or in the ground. The plant which fed us and the bee and the finch will now finish its work feeding the soil. Feeding the soil is its deepest work.
And–never worry!– some seed always manages to hit the ground despite all the competition, ensuring volunteers will come up next year, and feed us all again.
An aside:
One area where I have to admit that I am less than generous is in the matter of radish seed pods. These I don’t leave for the birds, because I like them so much.
Most of you gardeners are probably very familiar with radish seed pods. If you aren’t, they are the fat little pods that show up after a radish plant of any type goes to seed.
They taste like radishes, pretty much, sometimes they’re sweeter, sometimes they’re spicier. Radish pods are both a bonus crop and a fine consolation prize, because even if your radish roots end up puny or woody or otherwise disappointing, you can always eat the pods. They’re best fresh, picked a handful at a time as a snack or to put in a salad, but you can lactoferment or pickle them, too, using pretty much any pickle recipe you prefer.
Picture Sundays: Signs
While I appreciate the sentiment, I thought I’d take this moment to share one of a few truths I’m 100% certain of in this life: The people for whom signs are written never read signs.