33 mock recipes

Homemade salted eggs brined in rock salt water for three weeks until the yolks turn firm, golden-orange, and richly savory. Just three ingredients and patience. Serve quartered with rice or congee.

Preserved grape vine leaves for making dolmades all year. Fresh-picked early-summer leaves get bundled, blanched in salted water, then packed into jars with rock salt brine for long-term pantry storage.

White Michigan bean soup is a three-ingredient classic: white navy-style beans simmered slowly with a smoked ham hock, then partly mashed to thicken. Old-school, no-fuss comfort.

Split pea soup simmers dried split peas with a smoky ham hock, onion, salt, and pepper for 90 minutes until the peas collapse into a thick green broth and the meat falls off the bone.

French market soup simmers a medley of dried beans with a smoky ham hock until tender, then brightens the pot with tomatoes and a finishing splash of lemon. A hearty, economical bean soup made from a colorful bean mix.

Hearty smoked pork and bean soup built from ham hocks, dried pink beans, and beef stock with paprika and sauteed garlic. Partially pureed for a thick, velvety body. Serves 6.

Prime rib roasted in a rock salt crust that seals in every drop of juice, producing fork-tender, deeply seasoned meat. A showstopping Old English technique you crack open with a hammer.

Salt-roasted shrimp with a scampi beurre blanc dipping sauce. A showstopper appetizer where shrimp cook shell-on over a bed of rock salt and get served with a buttery white wine dip.

Southern-style dried lima beans slow-simmered with smoked ham hock skin, bacon drippings, and a pinch of sugar until creamy and tender. Simple, smoky, old-fashioned comfort food.

Baked oysters with garlic pine nut butter: fresh oysters baked in their shells under a compound butter of toasted pine nuts, garlic, shallots, fresh herbs, brandy, and lemon. A restaurant-grade appetizer.

Braised Pork, served with bunya nut, Australian rice grass and dusted with Lemon Myrtle.

Oysters Thomas bakes fresh oysters on the half shell topped with lump crab meat, bearnaise sauce, and cream sauce under golden bread crumbs. An elegant appetizer.

A delicious cabbage soup made with chicken broth, ham hock and wine vinegar.

Pan-broiled steak with whiskey sauce sears peppercorn-crusted steak on rock salt in a hot cast-iron pan, then spoons over a whiskey-butter sauce. Steakhouse dinner made at home.

Cantonese salt-baked chicken buried in six pounds of blazing rock salt with ginger, garlic, and scallion stuffing. Hakka-style whole chicken technique that gives you impossibly juicy meat and silky skin.

Salt-smothered chicken buried in a bed of red-hot rock salt with ginger, tangerine peel, and Szechuan peppercorn marinade sealed in the cavity. An ancient Cantonese technique that steams the bird to silken tenderness.