Spruce Salt

This weekend, I'm attempting some spruce salt. After a little neighborhood exploration, I found three large, happy blue spruce on Tufts campus and carefully snipped a few of the tender new tips from their branches. Where these trees live it's clear they get pruned back on a regular basis, so I didn't feel bad about stunting their growth ever so slightly for my own experimentation. One must always be careful about foraging these days, especially in highly populated areas, as once-overlooked wild edibles (ramps and fiddleheads are especially hip) are now being harvested to the brink of extinction in some areas. Leave it too the bloggers to ruin a good thing for the wise few by raving about it to the masses.

Anyway, off the pedestal and back to the spruce salt. I only harvested what you see here, and that turned out to be plenty to flavour a small jar of salt, which I'm sure will last me forever and a half.

  I chopped up some of the needles but left most whole, with the thought that I'd pull them out of the salt after they'd worked their magic. Then I mixed the lot of them in with some coarse sea salt and put the lid on to let them mingle for a day or so. It may have been a mistake to use an air-tight lid, because when I came back to them the salt was very moist- I replaced the lid with a coffee filter to allow for some air exchange, and it seems to be drying out nicely now. The aroma is intensely spruce, sharp and clean and unexpectedly not Christmassy. Much more of a green, young, spring sort of spruce. As the salt dried, it mellowed into a grassier, herbal flavor, but held on to a bit of that piney punch. I'm going to grind some up to put on grilled steaks tonight, but I could also imagine it on molasses cookies, or popcorn, or smoked fish, or creamy roasted eggplant...