Sea Salt

[RPCookin]

My wife just got home from 8 days visiting Long Island, Bahamas, the island we used to live on. She brought back 5 pounds of sea salt - the real deal. She raked and bagged it herself on the shore of one of the evaporation ponds in the settlement of Salt Pond. These are natural saline ponds that used to be regularly harvested for export many years ago, but now are mostly just raked by locals for sale in the island stores, for personal use, or to sell to tourists at the museum.

I have enough now to last for a good long time.

 

[Dawgluver]

Whoa! 5 lbs! Have fun with it, good catch!

 

[Aunt Bea]

Euell Gibbons would have been proud!

That salt will add flavor to the food and the dinner conversations for a long, long time!

 

[Chief Longwind Of The North]

Nice. Sea Salt harvested from evaporation ponds has a distinctive, ocean flavor.

Just because I can, I'll add a bit to this story. Did you know that a great deal of sea salt sold commercially comes from deep, underground tunnels that run under the city of Detroit Michigan. It seems we were at one time under the ocean in these parts. Then, the Earth moved, and we became dry land. The water evaporated and left huge salt deposits under Detroit, and I would guess, under other midwestern areas as well. Those salt tunnels have been mined for a long time, and are still producing vast quantities of sea salt. How's that for a salt twist?

Seeeeeeya; Chief Longwind of the North

 

[GotGarlic]

Nice. Sea Salt harvested from evaporation ponds has a distinctive, ocean flavor.

Just because I can, I'll add a bit to this story. Did you know that a great deal of sea salt sold commercially comes from deep, underground tunnels that run under the city of Detroit Michigan. It seems we were at one time under the ocean in these parts. Then, the Earth moved, and we became dry land. The water evaporated and left huge salt deposits under Detroit, and I would guess, under other midwestern areas as well. Those salt tunnels have been mined for a long time, and are still producing vast quantities of sea salt. How's that for a salt twist?

Seeeeeeya; Chief Longwind of the North

I knew that, Chief. I grew up in Michigan and DH is a geologist by training I think, years ago, there was talk about using those caverns for nuclear waste. Thankfully, that never happened.

 

[taxlady]

Five lbs, cool.

I figure just about all salt is sea salt, if you check the history.

 

[Cooking Goddess]

I knew that, Chief...

Me, too! Not just Detroit, but Cleveland too. Since it's known as the Great Eastern Salt Basin I figure it's located under all of the Great Lakes. Cargill has been mining under Cleveland for over half a century. They estimate the Salt Basin contains enough salt to mine for another century.

Still "lake salt" just doesn't have the same allure as Bahamian sea salt. And Huntington Beach isn't anywhere near as romantic as a Bahama beach.

 

[RPCookin]

Five lbs, cool.

I figure just about all salt is sea salt, if you check the history.

Yep. All salt is really sea salt, just that some of it was precipitated out of supersaturated salt water a very long time ago. That process is still ongoing, and most true sea salt is of a somewhat more recent origin. commercially, they create large shallow ponds, flood them with salt water, let it evaporate, flood again, and eventually the salt becomes so concentrated that it precipitates out of the water and is collected from the bottoms of the ponds.

I talked to a Bahamian woman whose mother worked gathering salt for an exporter. She even did it a little bit herself when she was old enough - although still a young girl - before the government taxed the profitability out of the industry. It was apparently a hazardous job, as the saturated salt water that they waded in burned the skin on their legs. It limited the amount of time they could spend harvesting.

 

[Aunt Bea]

They used a similar solar method in my area to turn salt into gold. The salt water was flooded into wooden trays and the water was evaporated by the sun. A large bell on a local building would be rung when rain threatened and all of the salt workers would run to put large wooden covers over the trays. They also used to boil the salt water to extract it and we have a small museum that documents the process. At one time we had two salt pools that were used for public swimming. The salt industry was a huge part of our local economy and the taxes on our annual production of 8 million bushels of salt was used to help retire the debt incurred by the state to build the Erie canal. I wish someone would begin harvesting it again, it would make a great novelty gift.

 

[Chief Longwind Of The North]

If California would create very, very large salt pools to collect salt, they could capture the evaporating water and use it to help with the extreme water shortage there. But it would be a gargantuan task. I would expect that desalinization plants would produce salt as a by-product as well.

Seeeeeeya; Chief Longwind of the North

 

[Andy M.]

Desalination plants produce very salty sea water that is returned to the sea. The salt and water that make sea water are not 100% separated. Some fresh water is extracted from the sea water and the rest is pumped back into the ocean.

 

[puffin3]

I go out to the West Coast of Van. Is. There I collect 30 gals of pristine ocean water in sealable 5 gal pails.
Bring it home and using a wood fire pit and a SS 45 gal vat I scored somewhere fifty years ago I evaporate the water. I end up with a surprising amount of beautiful bone white sea salt. I jar it and give it to friends and family as gifts.
I like that it has a subtle ocean taste and smell.