Re: Dinner Tonight, 1/31/2025

On Thu, 6 Feb 2025 12:10:52 +0000, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

dsi100@yahoo.com (dsi1) writes:
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On Wed, 5 Feb 2025 13:02:56 +0000, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

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I'd be concerned with the refined salt.  Whatever quantities you eat,
I'd use coarse salt.  You can grain it before having it, of course.
Coarse salt retains important minerals such as magnesium.  In fact, if
you don't go to the beach every day, I think I would take a magnesium
supplement.  An awesome website on Mg is mgwater.com.

>
When I was a boy, my dad would smoke meat using Hawaiian red clay salt.
That's a coarse salt with red clay mixed in. The Hawaiians call it
"alaea" salt.

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Interesting.  I had never heard of that.  For how long would they smoke
it---do you know?
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The package of salt would read "not intended for human consumption." I
would wonder about that.

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That's also interesting.  I suppose they knew out of practice that it
wasn't really impure in the sense that it didn't do anything bad.
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The Hawaiians use it as a ceremonial salt. They'll throw the salt around
the ground to cleanse the area of bad spirits and bless an area.

>
That's also very interesting.  I've heard that salt has even been used
as money.  (Is that true?  Is it true that the word salary comes from
``salt''?)
>

These days, I don't use alaea salt in cooking, not because it's salt
with dirt mixed it but because it seems disrespectful to Hawaiian
tradition. The next time I see a Hawaiian Kapuna/Kahuna, I'll ask him
his opinion on this.

>
Please do and share with us.

My dad would smoke meats for our Christmas party. I never paid much
attention to how he did it. I wish I did now. I have grilled my dad
about it when he was in his nineties - he said it was just something he
picked up somewhere. He smoked chicken and chuck roasts in an old 55 gal
oil drum. That's a Chinese technique. The meat was seasoned in the old
Hawaiian style - just salt. The chicken and meat came out looking normal
but when you cut it up, they'd be a bright red under the surface. I had
never seen such a thing before.
The old Hawaiians were into salt. They produced it by drying sea water
on their salt farms. They pretty much had to back in the old days. I
don't know where the bags of commercial Hawaiian salt come from. They're
not from salt farms. The real stuff is flakes, not crystals. I'll
occasionally get a small bag of salt from a guy in Molokai.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gawS3sBHMQw