Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaledition.com/i/1516167
50 culturecheesemag.com BEGINNINGS 2024 ough delicious, the crackly white Pop Rock moments in your aged gouda, cheddar, or grana are decidedly not salt. ey're crystals of tyrosine, an amino acid created by the breakdown of proteins. Over many generations, indigenous salt gatherers, known as "saleros," have harvested salt from the expansive Bolivian salt flats of Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni. They gather the raw mineral and shape it into mounds, allowing it to dry naturally before it undergoes transportation to processing facilities, where it is refined into table salt. L ast fall, I found myself touring some of the most prestigious cheesemaking facilities in Europe (and, arguably, the world). In a jaunt I dubbed my "Fritzaly" trip, I zipped in a tiny Fiat from France to Switzerland to Italy, stopping to visit makers along the way, and at each of these facilities I encountered some version of the same thing: giant plastic sacks of industrial salt. I pressed my tour guides about these bags—their provenance, their grain, the process behind their selection—but was met with blank stares every time. These were not mass producers, mind you, but the cream of the artisan crop. World famous, award- winning makers for whom milk is of salient importance, to the point that they have actual laws governing what their cows eat. And yet this humble white grain, poured into vats in enormous quantities, was largely an afterthought. "I can honestly say that salt is about the least interesting aspect of our work," says Zoe Brickley of Jasper Hill Farm. Though she did mention a few experiments—one involving an iron- rich red salt to encourage flora growth; another an accident that occurred when a supplier changed their grain size, resulting in faster uptake and massively oversalted batches—she had little to say on the subject. For an industry obsessed with traceability, we spend woefully little time on one of cheese's primary ingredients. "Salt isn't something that folks talk that much about," says Rachel Fritz Schaal, who, with husband Peter Dixon, runs Parish Hill Creamery and gives joint talks about salt for the American Cheese Society. While most makers use refined salts, Parish Hill employs unrefined solar evaporated sea salt from Maine Sea Salt Company in their makes—a salt that's eight to 12 times more expensive than industrial offerings. "We decided it was worth it," Fritz Schaal says, "[because] we wanted to use salt that would be akin to what would have been used before." This if-it-ain't-broke ancestral trust pervades our industry, but sticking with the old doesn't always mean using fancy salt. A recent study comparing Camembert PDOs made with refined, baked, sun-dried, and Himalayan rock salts found that the standard refined variety resulted in the best-tasting wheels. And experimenters must be careful—Rispens Gouda ran into trouble using mountain rock salt that turned out to contain radioactive materials as a result of pollution and leaching. Despite proximity to the Great Salt Lake, Britton Welsh of Beehive Cheese uses a mix of industrial and local salts in her makes. "At the end of the day," she says, "our decisions are made based on quality." To learn more about how cheesemakers choose (and use) salt across the globe, read on. Worth Your Salt PHOTO: (Opposite page) Salar de Uyeni: