The Brewers Art in Baltimore has some great beer. They also have some moderately priced french fries that are covered in garlic salt. It’s really hard to beat garlic salt covered fries and great beer. I wanted to cook up some sweet potato fries for a party and I remembered how great the brewers fries were. So one thing led to another and I created this salt.

This is another salt experiment. Still a work in progress. The New Mexican chilies that I used lent an almost fruity flavor to this and the spice wasn’t really over powering so this could easily be dusted over corn and it wouldn’t over power it with heat.

Like I said, this is an experiment. I’m gonna keep playing with ratios / spices until I come up with a final mix.

I ran across smoked salt the other day and I thought, “Eight dollars for salt?”. Ok, it’s special sea salt from Maine. It’s slowly smoked so the flavors infuse etc etc. Still just sounds like salt that’s been put in a smoker to me. Unfortunately I don’t have a setup to do cold smoking, and my hot smoking setup is just a grill and a smoke box. So I improvised a little mini smoker from an old tea tin, some aluminum foil, and my camping stove.

The brown bits are the smokey

So the results are just so so. You can see in the above picture that some of the salt is still white. That stuff barely has any smokey to it. The dark bits on the other hand are pretty smokey. I have a few other ideas that I’d like to try out before I settle on the best method. I can’t imagine that anyone else will try to make this contraption so I’ll just quickly review what I did.

Drill holes in the top of a tea tin. Heat it up really hot to burn of any paint / chemicals that might be on it. Wrap 1/2 cup of salt in cheese cloth. Place wood chips (soaked) into the tin and put the lid on. Add Make a little volcano of tin foil around the top of the tin and put the cheese cloth wrapped salt into the volcano. Fire up the stove and let it smoke for a while. I think I smoked mine for 20 minutes.