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Savory perfection of sea salts worth the labor
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TIMOTHY Charles, at the exquisite Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland, showed me the precious harvest in his palm.
I had been impressed with the flavor of a tiny sprinkle of sparkling sea salt over hotel-churned butter that was served in a small cup with bread during my stay. It reminded me of Suzushio sea salt from Japan, which I have been using for the past 14 years in my kitchen. Displaying the salt in his hand, Charles told me that they do small-scale sea salt production in their own hotel kitchen.
Proper intake of salt and the choice of quality salt are vital to healthy living. Salt — in my case, sea salt — is the most important and frequently used ingredient in my kitchen. Without proper salt, no food presents its best taste.
A tiny sprinkle of good salt over a slice of sun-ripened heirloom tomato opens up its deep, heavenly flavor. Very basic dressing made of excellent cold-pressed olive oil and freshly squeezed lemon juice desperately needs excellent salt; it is as crucial as the other ingredients. A lightly salted fillet of uncooked fish exudes all its off-flavor elements from its surface, and the salt firms up the muscle meat — both key to producing a delicious simply grilled fish.
When I prepare stir-fried vegetables, I add a pinch of salt along with aromatics and the vegetables to the wok in order to highlight the best flavor of each individual ingredient. No further flavoring is needed. Salt makes the dish complete.
My Suzushio sea salt comes from the Noto Peninsula on the Japan Sea in Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture. It is a basic, daily-use, high-quality, artisanal salt. It has higher mineral content than most other salts, resulting in a salt that is balanced in acidity, sweetness, saltiness and astringency. Magnesium chloride, potassium chloride, sodium chloride, calcium chloride and trace minerals are responsible for these flavors.
Suzushio sea salt is made at the Nihon Shinkaien Sangyo Co, founded in 2002 by Shoji Koyachi. Koyachi devised the best and most efficient way to concentrate the salt in sea water under the challenge of Japan’s humid climate. He built a factory room with what look like Venetian blinds made of reeds to do the evaporation and concentration process.
Forty thousand liters of sea water, collected from deep waters offshore, are sprayed over these “blinds.” The water drips down the reeds, allowing for evaporation and concentration; it is then collected at the floor and sprayed over and over again on the reeds for nine days. By the end of the process, the concentration of salt in the water has increased more than threefold to 10 percent. In an adjoining room, there are huge seven-foot-diameter iron pots with stainless steel liners.
Each pot is filled with the concentrated sea water, which is cooked down to perfect salt crystals over a wood fire.
Junko Tsunetoshi has been the salt maker since the beginning of the operation. She stirs the steaming cooking pot with a long wooden spatula for eight hours every day.
The production of sea salt at the Fogo Island Inn in Newfoundland has a different story. Charles and his crew put buckets out into shallow water at the shore, close to the Fogo Island Inn, during the winter. The water is so clean they do not need to venture out offshore to collect it.
The 60 liters of sea water in the buckets freezes in the cold climate. As less salty ice forms at the top, very salty water is concentrated in the bottom of the bucket. They retrieve the partially frozen bucket from the shore and bring it to the kitchen.
After removing concentrated salt water from the bucket, they cook it down in a pot to 5 to 6 liters.
Then they spread it on a nonreactive plastic container and dry it to crystals using a gentle breeze from an electric fan. It takes 24 hours to produce the fine granules.
Since the process requires extensive energy consumption, the wintertime production remains small. But according to Charles, summer can bring an entirely different method of salt production — foraging a sheet of sparkling naturally crystalized sea salt that has formed directly on the dark-colored rock lining the shore near the inn.
Sea salt connects people and nature, and I have seen this connection in two places very distant and very different from each other.
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