If you have been following my blog for
long, you probably have gathered that my sweetie is actually a bit of a salty…
in the kindest of ways of course. She
has been obsessed with eating salt for years and over the last several months,
has been cultivating a dream of producing her very own sea salt. This dream carried us to some of the salted
lakes in the Desert SW (see posts Death Valley and Joshua Tree ) over the holidays, through some interesting
books about the history and diversity of salt production, and finally, last
weekend, to the nearby shores of the Salish Sea to “forage” for our very own.
Our closest access to the sea is in
Bellingham Bay, but the industrial history of the bay and large amount of
freshwater brought in from the Nooksack River caused us to broaden our
scope. We decided on the Northwest side
of Lummi Island because of its deep clear waters and exposure to the Strait of
Georgia. The “Whatcom Chief,” a small ferry,
carried us safely from Gooseberry Point to Lummi Island and we found a pleasant
landowner that allowed us to cross her property to get to the beach.
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| The saltworks |
Filling buckets with seawater is
certainly the easiest part of the process. It must then be boiled to evaporate the water away from the
salt. The seawater from Lummi Island is
about 27-31 parts per thousand salt. At
this concentration, every gallon of our seawater should contain about ¼ pound
(1/2 cup) of salt.
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| The improved saltworks |
We needed a saltworks, so we stopped by
Dad’s house and picked up a small rusty wood stove that Christian and Ric salvaged
from a shipwrecked boat a few years ago.
We used a 4 gallon enameled steel pot to boil our sea water in. The stove is a little underpowered for
heating up more than a gallon at a time, but thin layers of water evaporate
more efficiently (due to the high surface area to volume ratio) so that wasn’t
too big an issue. The alder smoke
from the fire infused the saltwater and gave the brine a nice smoky
flavor. The little wood stove wasn’t
burning very efficiently without a stovepipe, so I put a couple lengths of pipe
on it for our second batch.
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| Salt crystals precipitating |
As soon as salt crystals began to precipitate,
we moved the kettle to our kitchen stove top where we could more precisely
control the temperature. Salt crystals
began forming more rapidly and coated the bottom in a thick layer that required
occasional stirring to keep from being scorched. Eventually almost all the water was gone. We scooped out the salt slurry and spread it
onto glass panes that we put in a food dehydrator to drive off the last bit of
moisture.
We have a number of ideas for improving
the efficiency of our saltworks, but all things considered, it wasn’t too
laborious a project. The fire did
most of the work and all we had to do was stoke it up every couple hours. I think we only burned about 3 armloads of
wood to boil about 5 gallons of water, and now we have a year’s worth of salt
to show for it. During a cold snap half
way through the project, I noticed that ice formed on the top of the salt water
and I wonder how effectively we could take advantage of this phenomenon to
increase the salinity of our seawater.
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| Finished Salt |
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