Everything you need to make this recipe. Seriously. Including the oven.

I love flavoured salts. Smoked salts, herbed salts, lemon, garlic, chili pepper, whatever. And I’ve happily been paying sums for them that my late pal John Wayne would call [and I should alert you to salty language here] “rigoddamndiculous.” Particularly in this case, when making it yourself is ridiculously simple.

It’s been my experience that no recipe is foolproof, because just as I find one that might fill the bill, along lumbers a bigger fool. But if you are incapable of getting this one for Sriracha salt right, you may as well convert your kitchen into a darkroom or a tool shed or a walk-in closet, because you have no business cooking in it.

Before I get into the particulars, I owe a shout-out to Let’s Give Peas a Chance, from whom I got the recipe, and Radical Possibility, from whom they got the recipe.

Salz, sel, salt, sal, tuz, gatza… whichever you prefer.

INGREDIENTS:
1 cup sea salt (or kosher salt, or fleur de sel)
4 tbsp./60 ml Sriracha sauce (or, as my Canadian homies call it, “Cock sauce” — because of the rooster on the label)

Add the sauce to the salt.

Coated.

DIRECTIONS:
Preheat oven to 350ºF / 175 (actually 176.67)ºC. Mix salt and sriracha in bowl. Transfer from bowl to aluminum foil-lined cookie sheet. Spread out with spoon or spatula to thin layer. Turn off heat in oven. Place tray in oven and allow to dry, about 2 hours, but it’s fine to leave it in overnight. You’ll want to give it a stir and a scrape every 20 minutes or so for the first hour, just to help prevent excess clumping and promote drying. Any crystals that remain clumpy can be broken up by shaking vigorously in a covered container, or separated mechanically, either with a fork in a bowl or in a small spice grinder/food processor (just a few quick pulses will do the trick — you don’t want to pulverize the salt!). [Of course, you could also spread your salt mix on the fine-mesh screen of your dehydrator as well, but I’m guessing that for every kitchen equipped with a dehydrator, there are about half a million that are not.]

Spread the salt on the cookie sheet.

Put it in the oven.

After a couple of hours, it will look like this.

Works great for dry rubs, or as a finishing salt for salad, or probably a hundred billion other things I haven’t thought of. But it’s simple, and inexpensive, and it makes a great gift. Heck, everybody uses salt. And any friend who receives a little container of this as a present will think you’re some sort of kitchen wizard, possessed of superhuman culinary powers. Don’t ruin it for them. Let’s just keep this our secret, okay?

Ready to rock.