5 Ingredients or Fewer

There are two kinds of people: those who love potato chips and those who don’t exist. Making your own chips means a fresh potato, freshly fried in the freshest oil. It also means you can choose your own salt. The freshly fried potato chip is an object worthy of serious contemplation, a thing of wonder, a crispy symphony of fat and starch and salt. When the diamondlike glitter of fleur de sel throws its multifaceted might behind it, hold on to the roof.

For hundreds of thousands of years, we burned bones in the fire and then broke them open to slather our food (and faces and bodies) in the butter-fine marrow. Scooped from roasted veal bones and spread on a wedge of crusty bread, marrow is so rich and flavorful that it threatens to overwhelm. And that’s where the salt comes in. The strident mineral tones of a coarse sel gris penetrate through the fatty richness, letting fly its myriad dimensions—like cutting a ruby from a hunk of Burmese rock. If marrow hadn’t been created by nature, it would have been necessary to invent it just to have a food that strikes so squarely at the core of the eating experience. If it weren’t for sel gris, nature’s felicity would all be for naught.

If the restaurants that produce them are any indication, the superlative steaks of the world cannot be reduced to a simple formula. Consider Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecôte in Paris, where the brisk waiter actually serves you half a steak, then gives the other half to another person, and then, just as you are finishing the last bite of your first half, he brings you another half-steak right off the grill—a miraculous second coming. Consider Raoul’s in New York, where the experience of eating is suffused by an equally savory experience of sitting, drinking, observing, and conversing. The only way to rival these folks is to take matters into your own hands: an excellent steak, the best pepper, the perfect salt, and thou. Tomes have been written on how to cook a steak. Precious little has been said on how to salt one. To cook: start with a lot of heat, finish with a little. Do the opposite with the salt: cook with no salt at all, or very little, if you really must have some. When the steak is served, choose the most beautiful sel gris you can find and let fly.

We embrace the urge to grill as a rogue moment of atavism in modern life. Our primitive faculties at play, we become dissatisfied with our indoor culinary selves. Flattening a split chicken under a brick of 500-million-year-old salt and cooking it quickly over an open fire makes good on all that grilling has to offer: simplicity and dramatic impact. The salt block compresses the poultry, making it cook more quickly and seasoning it at the same time. The result is a novel flash-fired flavor, crackling crisp skin, and firmer textured meat that reinvigorates the experience of eating chicken as an authentic form of self-expression. See page 267 for more on using salt blocks.

The acid from the grapefruit juice and citric acid will naturally thicken the sweetened condensed milk, which is one of the coolest things to watch happen right before your very eyes.

This dressing is especially good on tossed greens with tomatoes, red onion, and crumbled blue cheese.

This is great over salad greens and excellent with fish; you can also use it as a light veggie dip. I recommend roasting fresh red bell peppers, but if time doesn’t allow, substitute a 14-ounce jar of roasted red peppers, drained, adding 1 teaspoon of sugar to ensure sweetness.

This sauce is wonderful on pound cake, ice cream, and many other desserts.

This sauce makes something special out of plain cake or vanilla ice cream.

To make a tasty cheese sauce for vegetables, add 1/2 cup shredded cheese.