Singing The Praises of Sea Salt
Salt. The one ingredient that crosses cultures, borders and cooking styles to enhance flavour in both savoury and sweet dishes.
Salt. The one ingredient that crosses cultures, borders and cooking styles to enhance flavour in both savoury and sweet dishes.
Salt. The one ingredient that crosses cultures, borders and cooking styles to enhance flavour in both savoury and sweet dishes. It’s quite simply in everything.
Over the years we’ve come to realise that too much of this popular seasoning may lead to health issues and with the typical Scot sprinkling a liberal dash of common white table salt onto everything before tasting, it’s probably good advice!
However, not all salts are made equal. Because whilst its true that all salt is sodium chloride, and all salt comes from the sea, table salt has been processed and stripped of its beneficial minerals leaving ONLY sodium and chloride, and perhaps an anti-caking substance such as silicon dioxide or magnesium carbonate.
Check out our full range of sea salts to buy online and in the deli now >
Sea salt is made through the evaporation of seawater, undergoing minimal processing (if any), which ensures it retains its trace levels of minerals such as magnesium, potassium, calcium and other nutrients.
In addition, sea salts tend to have larger crystal sizes which means they have less sodium by volume. In fact, our friends at Dorset Sea Salt recommend using 30% less of their flakes than you normal would with table salt.
“Due to the world famous and unique geology of the Jurassic coast, our sea salt possesses a distinct mineral profile. Rich with vital minerals, our sea salt is a healthy alternative to table salt which is laden with additives and anti-caking agents.“
Some suggested health benefits of sea salt include:
Founded in 2017, the Dorset Sea Salt Company is helmed by Jethro, an obsessed sea salt fanatic. After reading about the historic and cultural relevance of salt production in Dorset, and visiting the natural salt pans on the east weares of Portland, Jethro pondered how and why this local industry had vanished. This idea affected him so immensely that he began to conceptualize, and envisage the revival of Dorset’s local Sea Salt scene.
His aim is to preserve the traditional methods of the industry, but at the same time shroud it in an ethical, and ecological ethos. The result of this concoction is exceptional sea salt. Every small batch harvested is part of the wider mission grounded in craftsmanship, locality, and quality.
They hand-harvest their sea salt from Britain’s purest waters along the Jurassic coastline.
“We collect our mineral rich, and super clean sea water from the Atlantic. This is so we can be sure that our raw material has the correct amount of salinity. After we collect the sea from our favourite spot, we then pass it through a triple filtering system, developed and designed to preserve all the goodness from the Jurassic Coast.”
ENSC was founded in St Monans, a coastal village in the East Neuk, by Darren Peattie in 2019, producing its first salt harvest in 2021 after a long project build.
After 18 years, Darren returned, with his wife Mhairi and two daughters, to the village of St Monans, where he had grown up and generations of his family had lived for 400 years. The idea of a contemporary salt works came to Darren and Mhairi, a head chef, on their walks by the ruins of salt pans in St Monans. Together with a still standing windmill, nine salt pans dating from the 17th century were used to heat seawater for the extraction of salt in an industry which thrived for centuries until its decline in the 19th century.
Inspired by St.Monans’ rich heritage of salt production, the East Neuk Salt Co harnesses the power of nature and hand to craft some of the finest sea salt produced in the UK.
Using a combination of traditional and modern methods, ENSC creates 100% organically hand-harvested Scottish sea salt flakes using the finest Grade A waters sourced from the coast of the East Neuk in Fife.
This produces stunning crystal formations with a rich but subtle flavour which has received outstanding reviews from professional chefs, home cooks and foodies across the UK and globally. It truly is the “white gold” of the East Neuk.
A multi award-winning, natural sea salt made entirely from the mineral-rich sea waters of Loch Snizort on the Isle of Skye. We use just the sun and wind to transform it into pure sea salt crystals that have a distinct texture and flavour.
It is a completely natural, unrefined sea salt made using a single stage evaporation process that ensures that all the minerals and elements found in the sea are retained in the salt. This gives our salt a distinct, robust flavour and a 'sweet finish'.
The Isle of Skye Sea Salt Company was set up with the aim of producing a top quality, gourmet sea salt, with minimum impact on the beautiful environment of the Isle of Skye.
We have developed a unique solar evaporation process that harnesses the sun and the wind to evaporate the water that sits in ponds within polytunnels beside Loch Snizort.
This very natural process and the provenance of our location on Skye has allowed us to produce a premium quality sea salt with a distinct taste and texture.
When we started the business, we were the only sea salt producers in the UK to make the salt using this process and within two years of production, we began winning awards with the most recent being in 2021. These awards are an endorsement of the years of research and hard work undertaken to achieve our ambition.
Harnessing the power of the sun and wind to make sea salt is a slow natural process, but one that has earned international recognition. We were very pleased to be one of the few Scottish food producers to be nominated to receive the accolade of being entered into the International Slow Food Movement 'Ark of Taste', which recognises producers who seek to resurrect and reimagine traditional local foods.
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