Worth My Salt, Part II

Sorry for the week of silence. We were out of town visiting family and friends. I'll write more about that experience later in the week. Today I need to fill you in on our salt-making endeavor.

You may remember from many weeks ago that we thought we had a lead on some local-ish salt. Salt brought back from Hawaii (fancy Hawaiian salt) in the vacation luggage of some friends. Well that fell through. Salt was lost in transit somewhere. Easy come, easy go I guess. So we've been rationing the 1/4 cup of Kosher salt with which we started. It was going fast. Really fast with all of the baking and cooking. Prepared foods have plenty of salt to make them tasty, even the "healthy" all-organic foods (think soups, bread, crackers, tortillas, condiments). But since we've been eating almost exclusively from our own kitchen even when we were trying to conserve it has gone incredibly fast. The dwindling reserve has been the topic of some tense moments between Charlie and me, at least one tense moment that I might even call an argument. The weekend before last we decided that the time was ripe for some out-of-the-box thinking.

We decided to make salt. We planned a trip to Newport, about 45 minutes away. We timed it to coincide with the Newport Seafood and Wine Festival, hoping to score some good local eats and drinks on the way. Sounds great right? Well we were turned away at the door because Charlie had a very conspicuous 20 lb minor on his back. Luke wasn't welcome so we had to look elsewhere for our local lunch. We found it at a great spot called Local Ocean which serves fish from the docks across the street from it's front door. Fabulous food, local wine and beer and we purchases some line caught tuna brought in from those same docks.

Then we got down to business. Time for the salt harvest. We went to a nearby beach and Charlie waded out into the surf to retrieve 5 gallons of sea water. We had no idea how much salt that would produce so it was just a guess. He took one for the team by getting incredibly wet in the Pacific Ocean in mid-February. Cold, cold, cold...Here's a little video clip of our Newport experience: http://www.vimeo.com/732803

We boiled the heck out of one gallon that night, just as an experiment. I should mention that I first poured the water through some cheese cloth to filter out the sand and any bits of ocean-faring matter that may have been captured. It made an impressive amount of salt. About 3/4 cup. It took about 3 hours, boiling at a low simmer. And it tastes great. A surprisingly easy solution to our salt problem.