Fiore di Sale di Cervia Finishing Salt

The Champagne of salt (or rather, the fine Prosecco), Fiore di Cervia is much like a great Brittany fleur de sel, but warmer, less metallic, less briny. In other words, this solar evaporated sea salt from Italy lacks the fresh briny edge of French fleur de sel--which can be either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your elevation, perspective, prejudices, tastes, cooking style, political beliefs, whether or not you think Pluto should be defined as a planet, etc.

With all of my personal baggage (with a strange and, to me, baffling history of once having absolutely hated Italy in an an insect way), I find this salt to provide a luscious and tingling pleasure not unlike diving into the scary blue anchovy infested waters off Cinque Terre. However, this salt is in fact harvested from the much more docile saltpans of the happy blue Adriatic Sea by chatty Italian blokes wielding wooden rakes in precisely the fashion as their ancestor have, way back since the wily and lethal Etruscans roamed the earth. Now, defenseless against the unflinching amazingness of Italy, and I have no defenses, and eat this salt often and with gusto. You can even try it in an extraordinary dark Italian chocolate bar! (Check out the BruCo Cervia and Trapani Sea Salt Chocolate Bar.)