Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [27]
When salt water is evaporated in a boiling vat or under the protection of a greenhouse, crystals may form into tall, hollow pyramids, pointy as arrowheads; or into squat pyramids, flat as Chinese throwing stars. Some crystals are shaped by the wind blowing them snowball style into little ball bearings. Some crystals are feathered, fine as owl down, so dainty around the edges they flicker in and out of visibility.
Crystallographic variation contributes much of an individual salt’s character, but the mineral makeup and moisture content engendered by different salt-making practices are also important. Source water for evaporative salts might be collected effortlessly from the shores of a salt marsh or it could be laboriously pumped from 3,000 feet beneath the surface of the sea. It could come from a salt lake at the edge of a desert or from a salt spring high in the mountains. The weather could be hot and arid or cool and humid. Each environment, each geography, informs the mineral makeup, crystallization, flavor, and color of its salt.
Salts can be mined in deep, 600-million-year-old veins clear as Waterford crystal or cut from surface deposits in fuzzy white blocks brittle as sandstone, or it may appear as a marbled mixture of both. The salt could be pink from a little iron or blood red from lots of iron. On the other hand, salts with an abundance of trace minerals can be perfectly transparent, as can salt with virtually no trace minerals at all. Salt is also naturally found in whites, grays, yellows and oranges. Once in a blue moon, a blue salt appears, or a green one, or a violet one.
SOLAR SALT
Salt is born of the purest of parents: the sun and the sea —Pythagoras
There are two ways to make evaporative salt. Brine can be circulated through ponds and solar-evaporated by the sun and wind until crystals form, or it can be heated in a vessel over fire to achieve the same thing. Both methods are ancient. Solar evaporation is the most widely practiced artisanal method.
Four types of salt are produced by solar methods. Fleur de sel, the finest and most delicate crystals, are skimmed or netted from the top of a pond shortly after forming. Sel gris (also called bay salt), comprising coarser and usually moister crystals, may form first on the top of the salt pan and drop to the bottom, or it may simply grow on the bottom. Sel gris is raked off daily or every few days. Salt makers can let the salt accumulate for anywhere from several days to several months into a thick cake lying on the bottom of the pan. This very coarse salt is called traditional salt, and it often needs to be ground up. In regions lucky enough to be graced by just the right hot, dry, windless climate (or a greenhouse), pyramid-shaped salt crystals may form on the surface of the evaporating pan in the place of more granular fleur de sel. These delicate crystals often break into flakes when raked off, and are consequently called flake salts.
Most solar salts are evaporated, crystallized, and harvested outdoors in a process called winning. In some cases, greenhouses are used. The precise techniques used in each stage of the process differ enormously based on a variety of factors, such as the salinity of the source water (generally, the ocean, a salt lake, or salt spring), geology, tradition, economics, and the salt maker’s preference. The most