04 June 2009

Natural Sea Salt

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Salt is important – for health and our culture.  Loyalty, friendship and bargains are sealed with salt in the Middle East.  Ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans included salt in sacrifices and offerings.

Carrying salt to a new home is a British tradition – in 1789, when Robert Burns moved to a new house in Ellisland, he was escorted there by his relatives carrying a bowl of salt.

Salt in history

The Chinese started making salt in Sichuan from 3000BC; Li Bing ordered the drilling of the first brine wells in 252BC.  The Ancient Egyptians made salt by evapourating seawater from the Nile Delta, using it for preserving fish and birds and in mummification.

The word “salary” comes from the Roman word for salt, “salarium”.  However, while no-one quite knows the origin of this, Pliny The Elder wrote in Naturalis Historia that "[i]n Rome. . .the soldier's pay was originally salt and the word salary derives from it. . ." (finished in AD 77).

But it is the Celts or Gauls who were the first “salt people”.  They founded the first salt towns – Halle sits on an East German salt bed, while Hallein and Swäbish Hall and Hallstatt in Austria have the same linguistic root as Galicia in Spain and Portugal.  The Celtic society was founded on salt mining, trading it to the far ends of Europe at the same time as spreading Celtic culture.

Nowadays, most salt is made industrially by injecting water into rock salt deposits, which dissolves the salt, or by taking sea-water.  These brines are then filtered and evapourated by boiling.  The resultant salt may then be bleached to remove any yellow/grey colour in the salt crystals.  Anti-caking chemicals are then added to the salt to make it free-flowing.  These industrial salts have an uncomplicated salt (or pure sodium chloride) taste.

Salt & Health

Salt is responsible for maintaining water balance, blood pressure and is essential for muscle and nerve activity – sodium is needed to transport nutrients and oxygen, transmit nerve impulses and move muscles.  An adult human contains around 250g of salt, but is constantly losing it through natural bodily functions.  In fact, it’s as if we (together with all animals) have brought the sea with us to enable us all to survive on land.

But too much may increase the chances of high blood pressure, heart disorders and kidney disease – the average UK adult eats 8 – 15kg of salt per day.

Nowadays, salt (even sea salt) is refined – bleached to change its colour from yellow to white and made free-running through anti-caking agents (such as magnesium carbonate, calcium silicate or sodium hexacyanoferrate II).  Anti-caking agents cloud brines and distort flavours – we notice this especially in bread and pastry.

So if like us, you feel that our daily food is already pretty unnatural and overprocessed without your salt also being tampered with, you should go for old-fashioned, slow-harvested sea salt.

Portuguese sea salts

In the Algarve in the middle of the Nature Reserve Ria Formosa, there is still a tradition of salt harvesting.  While not as well known as that from Britanny, perhaps, we feel that it produces whiter crystals and a mellower flavour, with a wonderful bouquet of trace elements lacking in other sea salts.  Ria Formosa is home to flamingos, storks and other salt birds as well as brine shrimp and microalgae.

Traditional salt is produced in salinas (salt marshes and salt-pans).  After being submerged all winter, the salina is reborn in April when it is filled with concentrated sea water (at 150g of salts per litre), which still contains all trace minerals.

In mid-May, as the sun heats up the salina, the seawater concentration rises to 250g of salts per litre and our sea salt starts to crystallise.  As soon as this starts, the salt pan is topped up with more seawater to keep the process going.

By June, the salt-pans are ready for harvesting.  This is done with real care to avoid mixing the bottom clay with the salt and so keeping the sea salts naturally white.  After being hand-harvested, this traditional sea salt is sun-dried for 5 days maximising its magnesium and iodine content.

The Fleur de Sel – the gourmet product favoured in France – is collected from the surface of the pan like cream from milk.  The salt-workers gently harvest this thin layer of salt as it crystallizes on the surface of the water before sun-drying.  Fleur de sel has a trace element bouquet that highlights food flavours and crumbles easily between the fingers.

We have done chemical analysis of our salts (see below for details) to show the levels of minerals retained through sun drying.

Other great salts

In Britain, there is a choice of wonderful sea salts that have been produced through small-scale industrial evapouration.  Maldon Sea Salt is without a doubt one of the culinary icons in the world, and is still being produced by a family run business in Essex and they are lovely people.  Newer contenders include Anglesey Sea Salt and Cornish Sea Salt. 

I know I am a Luddite but there is something much more beautiful about sun-dried salt that has been slowly cared for and dried, rather than industrially evapourated sea salts made in stainless steel vats.

Chemical analysis of Steenbergs natural sea salt