Living Homegrown Podcast Episode #18 Making Wine Salt Show Notes: www.livinghomegrown.com/18 This is the Living Homegrown Podcast, episode #18 Announcer: Welcome to the Living Homegrown Podcast, where it s all about how to live farm fresh, without the farm. To help guide the way to a more flavorful and sustainable lifestyle is your host, national PBS TV producer and canning expert Theresa Loe. Theresa: Hey there everyone and welcome to the Living Homegrown Podcast. I m Theresa Loe and this podcast is where we talk about living farm fresh without a farm, and that s through artisan food crafts like canning and preserving, growing your own organic food, and just living a more sustainable lifestyle. If you want to learn more about these topics or my online canning courses just visit my website LivingHomegrown.com. And while I m on the subject of my canning courses I just want to tell you guys I have been working behind the scenes. I am totally revamping my Canning Academy and I know many of you have been asking you know when I m going to open the doors again. I m revamping it and trying to make it even better than it was before so it s going to be a few more weeks. We re actually in full production for our TV show Growing a Greener World on PBS and I m travelling a lot. So I have the course that I m working on on the side and I m also setting up some really cool interviews, I m setting up now but those particular podcasts won t be coming out for a few more 1
weeks. So bear with me as we're in production. You know since we re a gardening show we do a lot of the filming in summer. In fact a majority of the filming is done from late Spring to the end of Summer. So we re travelling a lot, we re seeing all the gardens and filming all these people we want the gardens to look the best. We want some of our stories to be told in the season of course that we re trying to exemplify. So I just wanted you guys to know I m working on all this stuff but I ve got some really cool stuff coming down the pipe. Not that this isn t going to be a great show, it is. I m actually going to be talking today about something that is kind of unexpected in the world of preserving. And that is wine salt. W-I-N-E. Not like I m whining about something [laughs]. So wine salt is probably something you have never heard of before. It s a seasoned salt and actually it s made with wine as you would expect. And most people haven t heard of it but I love this stuff. It is packed with flavour and it s so incredibly easy to make. It s basically a reduction of a really good wine and that can be a red wine or white wine that s mixed with kosher salt or sea salt. And it s used as a seasoning on beef and pork and chicken, vegetables, stew. Just about anything you know anything you can get your hands on. You get the idea. And it tastes like a seasoned reduction sauce. So it has that same depth of flavor that you get when you deglaze a pan. I like to take it a step further than just making the wine salt and I add herbs and sometimes citrus zest to it so it s even got a little bit of a bigger punch. And when the concentrated wine hits the juices of whatever meats or vegetables you re cooking or seasoning it turns into just liquid deliciousness. That s just the only way I can describe it. So trust me you will love it. I m going to tell you how to make it. Your friends will go, What? when you tell them you re using wine salt. It makes a great gift too. And I m going to give you the recipe, tell you how to make it and also if you go to the show notes for this episode, there is a video of me making it. It s kind of a fun video, just has some music and you get to see the steps that I m talking 2
about which might help you if you don t just want to auditor-ally hear it. You can watch how it s made, super easy stuff and you ll love using it. Now before I go into the directions of how you make this stuff let me first give you a few tips on how to get the best results. First, you want to be sure that you use a wine for making this, you want to use a wine that you also would enjoy drinking. The finished salt is only as good as the wine that you start with. If you don t care for the wine you know you have some bottle and you go Uhhh I don t really like drinking this but hey I ll make wine salt out of it. Well no, that s not such a good idea because you re reducing it and so you re only going to concentrate the flavors that you didn t like in the first place. But if you have a really nice bottle of wine or it doesn t have to be expensive but just have a nice flavor that you like well when you reduce that you re concentrating the flavors that you enjoy. So I always recommend that you use a wine that you would also enjoy drinking. In this process I also add herbs, but you don t have to. You can just make it with just wine and salt and that s great. So you can also change the herbs that I m going to be using in this recipe I use thyme and lemon zest. But you can really use whatever strikes your fancy. Rosemary with a cabernet is particularly nice and I also have combined sage with merlot. And any white wine goes great with thyme and sage. Those always work really well together. But experiment and have fun with it. And if you don t have any herbs then you can just do wine and salt it works great that way too. After you finish making the salt it lasts for six months in the jar. So it is preserved. After that the flavors start to dissipate a little bit and it s just best to make a new batch. It s not that it goes bad or rancid. It s just that it kind of loses its punch. And it is a salt so you can t add more to try and get more flavor or you over salt your food. you have to be careful with it. you just want to use this as you would a seasoned salt on any kind of dish. When I was thinking about doing this podcast I was thinking this is going to be kind of weird, I m going to be talking you through a recipe. But I just want you to understand the overall steps and process of it. And I really want to tell you guys about wine salt because whenever I mention it in a 3
class everyone is always intrigued and is very curious as is how is this made? And how do you use it? A lot of people have not heard about it so I wanted to turn you guys onto this whole idea of using wine salt. And it looks really pretty when you make it with a red wine. It turns kind of a it s kind of a purple salt is what it is. So it s kind of cool. All you need for ingredients is one bottle of wine or about two cups if you end up pouring yourself a glass first which is what I usually do as I m making this. It takes a long time to cook down the wine so I ll pour myself off a little glass and I ll be sipping that while I m cooking down the wine into a syrup. You re also going to need one cup of kosher salt or you could use a sea salt if you wanted to. And I add one teaspoon of lemon zest and one teaspoon of freshly chopped thyme leaves for this particular recipe. And in the video that you ll see I m using this recipe and I used a red wine. So it s pretty simple. Your pour the wine into a heavy bottomed pan over medium heat. And it has be a heavy bottomed pan or your wine will burn. And I ve burned wine before. It s not pretty [laughs]. So don t do that. Make sure it s a really heavy bottomed pan so you re not going to get any scorching or burning. And you just start simmering the entire contents until they are reduced down to only about three tablespoons. It takes about 20 minutes. And you can be doing other things like making dinner and you can go by and just give it a little stir every once in a while. You don t have to stand there for twenty minutes and stir this thing. But you want to keep your eye on it because as soon as you get down to the last few tablespoons or quarter cup of wine, it goes very quickly. And it will suddenly just turn into a syrup. And at that moment is when you turn off the heat. If you re not sure if it s the syrup consistency yet, all you have to do is take a metal spoon and dip it into the mixture and if it coats the back of the spoon, like you could take your finger and run through it and it leaves a line where your finger went through, like if it s coating the back of a metal spoon, then it s syrup. And you can turn off the flame. You ll have about 4
three tablespoons in the bottom of this pan. And you don t want to go past that stage or it burns very quickly. So once you have this pan with the few tablespoons of syrupy concentrated wine, your next step is just to pour in the salt and whatever spices you want to use. It s that simple. You just pour them in, take a spoon and stir it all up. Once it s well mixed and if you re using a red wine it s going to turn a bright beautiful purple color, then you take that mixture and you spread it onto a cookie sheet. And the next thing we re going to do is try to dry it out a little bit more. You only have a few tablespoons of moisture in there, but you have to get it completely dry before you can seal it in a jar on your pantry shelf. So you re going to place it onto the cookie sheet and then you have to dry it out. The way I usually do it is to place it into a really low oven for 1-2 hours. Like on the lowest setting that your oven will go. And you keep your door open on the oven a little bit if you need to and check it every twenty minutes or so. The wine salt can still burn if your oven gets too hot. Another way to dry it out which is even better and easier is if you have a dehydrator. I ve used my excalibur for this. You can place it on one of the shelves of your dehydrator and just keep it on a medium setting and it can take anywhere form several hours to overnight and then it s completely dry. Now if you don t want to have to put it in the oven and you don t have a dehydrator you can just take this pan and set it on the counter and stir it every few hours. This is the slowest method and it will take a day or two to dry completely. The salt will draw the moisture out and it will eventually be dry enough to put into a jar. Once the salt feels very dry to the touch and you re pretty sure that you ve got it dry then you can pour it into a jar like a canning jar with a lid or any kind of tightly sealed container and just keep it on your shelf and use it in six months for the best flavor. 5
And like I said, all you do is use it as a seasoning salt. You sprinkle it over the foods just before or just after cooking. I ve used this seasoned salt on steaks and roasts, on roasted vegetables, on stew, root vegetables, grilled meat. Any savoury dish that just needs a little splash of wine for flavour you can sprinkle this on and you get the wine and the salt and the herbs it s just, it s amazing stuff. I love it! But the one thing to remember is that this is a salt so a little bit goes a long way. I made a mistake the first couple times I made it by over salting my food because it just looked so amazing and I was excited so try to use a light hand and it will just add the reduction flavor without too much salt. So this may not have been a normal style of podcast for me, but when I was looking through the different topics I had in my agenda of different things I could cover, this was definitely one that I wanted to get out there for you guys. I think you guys will have a lot of fun with it. It s so easy to use, it s so easy to make. And it really adds a lot of punch. If you would like to see the video of how to make this you can watch all the steps it s a two minute video. It has music it just goes really fast but you can see what the stuff looks like and you can see how easy it is to make. Go to my website and look at the show notes for this episode. It s at LivingHomegrown.com/18. That s slash 1-8. I will have the video and I will have the recipe so that you can just print it out and save it for whenever you want to make it. So thanks for listening today. I m still lining up some really cool interviews in upcoming podcasts but I just have to get through a few more weeks of our full production of our TV show. They will be coming down the pipe though so stay tuned for that. And keep working on your food choices, that are local, seasonal and homegrown. I hope you all have a fantastic week, take care! 6
Announcer: That s all for this episode of the Living Homegrown podcast. Visit LivingHomegrown.com to download Theresa s free canning resource guide and find more tips on how to live farm fresh, without the farm. Be sure to join Theresa Loe next time on the Living Homegrown podcast. [bloopers] 7