Season of the sea

Where does salt come from?

By Joan Lang

CASCO BAY: filtered and evaporated on your table.

Let’s see a show of hands: how many of you know where salt comes from? Just as I suspected. Well, I’d never really thought about it, either. Until the ingredient-mad millennium, that is, when everybody started talking about where their salad greens come from and how long their cheese is aged and just how virginal the olive oil is. I recently talked to a chef who uses not one but four different kinds of salt — plain table salt, kosher salt, and sea salts from both France and Italy — and that got me thinking.

Nowadays, the salt most people are familiar with — in the little round cardboard boxes in the supermarket — has been mined from large deposits left when the great salt lakes dried up, and is highly refined, full of drying agents and added iodine. But chefs and ambitious home cooks are being re-introduced to the more natural, flavorful sea salt.

I’ve been using kosher salt in cooking for years, believing it has a cleaner, more elemental “salt” flavor, but I recently started experimenting with fancy mail order sea salts: coarse gray salt from Brittany; top-of-the-line French Fleur de Sel (“flower of the sea”), $11 for a 200-gram container, ouch! But you could really taste the difference. Organic Welsh sea salt is almost sweet in flavor. Salt from the island of Normoutier in the north of France is briny and savory; from Re, another island, it’s more bright-tasting. Plain old roast chicken or even a salted raw radish will never taste the same for me again.

Steve Cook’s been thinking about salt, too. The proprietor of Maine Sea Salt on Bailey Island is the only producer of natural sea salt in the state — one of only a handful in the entire country, in fact. It goes to figure there’d be someone making artisanal sea salt in a state with literally thousands of miles of coastline. And so on one of those last perfect Indian Summer days of late October, I set off on another thrilling Phoenix assignment: go watch Casco Bay evaporate.

Actually, it’s a little more involved that that, despite the fact that the technology used for making sea salt hasn’t changed much in more than 1000 years. In fact, salt has a long and illustrious history. Revered since the time of the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, it was once so valuable that Roman soldiers received a salt allowance as part of their pay (and thus the expression, “worth his salt”). Here in Maine, in the years between the American Revolution and the War of 1812, there were salt works all up and down the coast, to make up for Portuguese and Spanish imports unavailable during the blockades. When the ports reopened, the industry died away.

Cook aims to bring it back. Like many in the burgeoning cottage food industry, he was drawn to a new career where he could be creative and do something a little different — and since his family owns Cook’s Lobster House on the northern reaches of Casco Bay, he knew the value of seawater.

Maine Sea Salt was born in 1998, in Steve Cook’s kitchen, where he started evaporating big stainless steel pans of seawater to form salt crystals. But the relatively high heat of boiling also drives off many of the nutritive and flavorful minerals in the evaporation process.

“Basically, you want to get rid of the water and leave everything else,” says Cook, who has figured out the entire process by trial-and-error — there certainly aren’t any manuals or recipes around. This spring, he converted the operation to solar evaporation. The low, slow heat of the sun takes longer and is more labor-intensive, but Cook believes it yields a better-tasting, more mineral-enriched product.

His 40 solar “huts” sit on a back lot in interior Richmond, Maine, and consist of three rows of four-foot by 16-foot A-frames (basically, the size of two sheets of plywood), covered with plastic sheeting. Seawater from the bay is pumped into large drums, then trucked to Richmond, where it’s filtered and piped onto the floor of the huts with the help of plain old gravity. The plastic raises the heat inside the huts and speeds evaporation, while it also keeps out debris. It’s all very low-tech, but effective.

Over the course of a few weeks to a month, depending on the weather and the amount of sun, the water evaporates, leaving behind pure-white, crystalline salt. Cook rakes it up with a brush that looks suspiciously like something you’d clean snow off the windshield with, then takes it back home and grinds it — mostly coarse, but sometimes fine — and packages it. All told, production averages 2500 to 3000 pounds a year, although you can’t really make salt during a snowy winter.

And that, dear readers, is where salt comes from. Maine Sea Salt is worth seeking out, with a mellow, fresh-tasting salinity and a distinctive, mineral flavor. Lots of folks who care about where their ingredients come from are using it: Fore Street puts it out in little pottery salt dishes on every table, and Appleton Creamery uses the stuff for its goat cheeses, for instance.

It’s also sold in 8-oz. packages for $4.50 to $5 in a lot of places around town, including the Portland Public Market and Portland Greengrocer. And Cook’s got lots more plans. He’s experimenting with a seasoned steak salt that’s now available at Wolfe’s Neck Farm in the market, and he’s talking to the King Arthur Flour catalog people and even to a woman who makes bath salts. It can also be mail-ordered direct from Maine Sea Salt at 207/725-5415.

Cook has a vision of an operation that will one day support 100,000 to 200,000 pounds of production a year, somewhere on the coast where the seawater can be pumped directly into the evaporating facilities. Hey, stranger things have happened, and everyone uses salt.

Joan Lang can be reached at joanmlang@aol.com.