We like salt in this house. A lot.
And we like experimenting with random food things that probably have no good purpose taking up shelf space in our small NYC apartment.
But hell… why not?
So when my awesome sister got Mike and me a Himalayan Salt Block, we were excited.
What is a Himalayan Pink Salt Block? It’s a big block of pink salt. OOOOOOOO!
It also allows you to serve thinly sliced fruits, cheeses, etc on a pretty salt platter that adds a hint of saltiness, and, MUCH COOLER, the ability to heat it up and then cook food directly on it.
The rules… heat it slowly so it doesn’t crack, and get it to a high enough temperature that you can cook on. You are supposed to put your hand over it and when you can’t keep it there for more than a few seconds, it’s hot enough. We heated it for the requested period of time but the hand test proved that it wasn’t hot enough. So we heated for another… hour… and it still really wasn’t hot enough according to our hands. But… away we went.
We decided to go with breakfast, and we had some pancetta just sitting around, so we tried it. After a good amount of time, we realized it wasn’t going to heat it enough to make me feel confident about not eating raw pork, so we finished it in the pan.
Next try? Eggs! We left the pancetta grease on there to add some flavor, cracked an egg into a small bowl, and got ready to fry an egg on a salt block.
I would have a picture of what happened next… but when an egg flows off the block, off the catch pan below, and onto the stove and into a flame… the camera gets thrown to the side.
20 minutes of scrambling to clean up later, we decided we needed a way to contain the egg… so I went through the cabinet and decided the outside rim of a tart pan would be the right size of containment without foregoing too much surface area.
Once the whites were sufficiently cooked, we removed the ring to allow it to cook up the yolk a little more. It took… a very long time.
And still could have probably been a bit more “done,” but I do love my runny yolk!
When we tried to do more than 1 at a time, it got a little messy, but the ring worked at least!
Conclusion? Fun to play with, but probably not very useful. It didn’t really add the saltiness we were hoping for to the egg and it was a bitch and a half to contain and to clean.
I think very thinly sliced pieces of fish or meat will work much better, and no more playing with things that run all over the place.
I am happy to have a much cooler version of a cheese plate though! (And a huge paperweight)
