RecipeMuncher

I’m never too excited about baking fish–fish in the oven usually means a smelly kitchen in my mind. Then there’s this concept of salt crusting fish. Maybe you’ve heard of it before–you start with a whole fish, cover it all over with a thick layer of salt (yes, its a lot of salt), and bake it. The way it works is the salt forms a hard crust while the fish cooks inside (stuffed with various aromatics), retaining a tremendous deal of moisture and yielding incredibly tender, delicious fish that quite simply highlights the inherent flavors of great fresh fish. I thought I’d give this a shot and made Salt Encrusted Yellowtail Snapper.

<img src=”http://www.recipemuncher.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/9bae0_salt_encrusted_yellowtail_snapper-7.jpg” alt=”" width=”500″ height=”332″ class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-1576″ …

Recently I went to a Japanese restaurant whose specialty is soba noodles and soup. I asked if they had anything vegetarian and they looked at me almost kindly, as if to say, how sad that you can’t eat our food. She said she’d check with the chef - I really really wanted to try the soba. But the chef said that all the broths were fish based, so that was out. And then he said he could make me some vegetarian tempura.

The fabulous plate of tempura arrived, but no fabulous dipping sauce. I asked for it, only to be told that all tempura dipping sauce is made with fish sauce in restaurants! I looked down to see that she had provided a dipping “salt”. There were two kinds - green tea salt and sea salt. The green tea salt was superb!! I asked the chef and he said he just whizzes green tea leaves and salt together! Now, why didn’t I think of making flavored salt?!

A week later, I had a craving for…