Salt Block Cooking : 70 Recipes for Grilling, Chilling, Searing, and Serving on Himalayan Salt Blocks

The original, bestselling book that focuses on salt block cooking, with seventy recipes designed for using this unique cooking tool.​

A precious mineral mined from ancient hills deep in Asia has stormed the American cooking scene. With hues ranging from rose to garnet to ice, Himalayan salt blocks offer a vessel for preparing food as stunningly visual as it is staggeringly delicious. Guided only by a hunger for flavor and an obsession with the awesome power of salt, award-winning author Mark Bitterman pioneers uncharted culinary terrain with Salt Block Cooking, which provides simple, modern recipes that illustrate salt block grilling, baking, serving, and more.

Everyone who loves the excitement and pleasure of discovering new cooking techniques will enjoy this guide to cooking and entertaining with salt blocks. The introduction is your salt block owner’s manual, with everything you need to know to purchase, use, and maintain salt blocks with confidence. The chapters that follow divide seventy recipes into six techniques: serving, warming, curing, cooking, chilling, and of course, drinking. You’ll find recipes ranging from a minty watermelon and feta salad to salt-tinged walnut scones, beef fajitas served tableside, salt-cured candied strawberries, and salt-frozen Parmesan ice cream!

This book is the definitive text on Himalayan salt blocks, written by the man wrote the definitive text on salt. Enough with salting your food—now it’s time to food your salt!

Mark Bitterman is the author of the James Beard Award-winning book, Salted. He is the leading expert in culinary salt, and has led the charge into the culinary adventure of cooking on salt blocks. As owner of the speciality store, The Meadow, with locations in Portland, OR and New York City, he is one of the largest importers, retailers, and wholesale distributors of salt blocks. He lectures at culinary schools such as the French Culinary Institute, the Institute of Culinary Education, and Le Cordon Bleu and has been recognized as a Local Food Hero by Cooking Light, and a Tastemaker by Food & Wine. He has been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, O magazine, GC, Rachael Ray, Wine Spectator, and on The Splendid Table, All Things Considered, CBS News, ABC News, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and more.


Andrew Schloss, who frequently develops recipes for The Meadow’s various communications and activities, contributes his expertise to the development of the recipes for the book. Schloss is the author of sixteen cookbooks including: Mastering the Grill (a New York Times best-seller) and The Science of Good Food (winner of an IACP Cookbook Award, a James Beard finalist, nominated by Le Cordon Bleu Food Media Awards as Best Food Book in the World), both co-authored with David Joachim. His latest books are Fire it Up (also with Joachim) and Homemade Sodas. He is the culinary force behind Cookulus, the first interactive cookbook app.