Saturday, May 1, 2010

Off to a rocky start

When you're on a short vacation, you're most likely in a hotel, or staying with friends, and the one chore you don't have to do is cook for yourself. We're staying overseas for about five months, starting in Sweden, living in our own quarters, and eating every meal out isn't an option. Even I could get sick of travel food if I had to eat every meal out for that long a time.

Cooking in my own kitchen while I'm away from home isn't a challenge, but sometimes grocery shopping can be. All of the slight or sharp differences in cuisines are reflected clearly in the supermarket. Meat is cut differently, so your cooking instincts might not work. Some foods are emphasized; others are hard to find. I spent weeks looking for mustard in Italy once. Maybe Italians just don't use it. For this reason, it's often fun to wander through a foreign supermarket, just to see what's important to people in the kitchen, even if I have no intention of cooking anything.

I'm in Sweden, a place that's very familiar to me, a place with large supermarkets, a place with people who speak perfect English even if all the signage is understandable only to the chef on Sesame Street. Normally this isn't a problem for me. Today it was.

We had our first big trip to fill the refrigerator and to set me up to make some recipes in advance of needing to eat them. My first official act when I arrive in a kitchen is to make scones. Today I decided to make four batches, 32 of them. We'll have lots of visitors this season and scones are what my guests wake up to.

I was out of salt. Table salt was out of the question; I use kosher salt exclusively for cooking. I have no idea what Swedes would call kosher salt, though I'm sure I've bought it in the past. The market had two sorts of salt, as far as I could tell, fine table salt and salt with grains larger than kosher salt but well smaller than the salt you'd grind in a grinder. Normally, I'd stop someone in the aisle and ask about it. In Sweden, if they can't answer my question, it's because they don't cook. It's never because they don't speak English. But I didn't bother doing the research. I bought the larger-grained salt.

Scones are baked goods, and they need a little salt to work. I was sure that either the food processor would break up the salt, or the 400-degree oven would melt the grains, just as it would with kosher salt. I was wrong. My husband tasted a scone (his official role in sconemaking) and said, unaware of my ingredient swap, "Gee, there's a large piece of salt in this one." Indeed, he later told me that the whole scone had a sort of salty bite to it. Thirty-two scones, none of which passes the quality control test. My husband promised to eat one every day until they are gone (the way you might eat a Hershey's kiss even if it included a little taste of salt.) I'll hold off on cooking anything else until I fix the salt situation.

Taking travel with a grain of salt isn't as fun as it sounds.

2 comments:

  1. Dear Foodie 2,
    While it may be premature have you ever tried to get salt from La Mer? I think that'd be a neat exercise. I'd also think that sea salt would be available in Sweden.
    Bon Voyage,
    Lou

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  2. Sea salt is indeed for sale in Sweden, and that's undoubtedly what I've used in the past. At a very large supermarket today, I found finely ground sea salt (generally sea salt here is in flakes and still isn't scone-worthy). The texture of the fine sea salt is something more than table salt and something less than salt flakes. This salt has about the same finger feel as kosher salt, and I feel as though I'm back in business.

    As far as La Mer goes, no, I haven't panned for salt enroute. But we do take the salt out of seawater with the watermaker, and if only I could save what I pull out, I'd be ever so self-sufficient.

    Foodie 2

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