Where does sea salt come from?

Well...the sea obviously, but we were curious just how much salt was in the sea.

To try and get an understanding of how long it takes for salt works to allow the water to evaporate under the sun, we chose to use a heat lamp to "reduce" the ocean water.

The water sat under the heat lamp about six hours a day for three weeks for our result. We began with about nine gallons, or about 72 pounds of sea water taken from a beach on Cape Cod in Dennis Mass. We ended up with just about 40 ounces, or a bit under 2 1/2 pounds of sea salt. It was actually more that I anticipated.

As you can see in the photos, the crystals were quite big and would have been bigger if I could have resisted playing with the salt during its final stages of evaporation. I broke up the crystals and sent them through a pasta strainer with big holes to get a nice coarse salt.

The salt tastes like salt...which is a good thing, but it had kind of a metalic taste to it. I dont know if the off flavors were from stuff that was in the water. There was some seaweed and sand in the water. (The water was cold, so I just waded up to my knees to fill up my jug). It was filtered through cheesecloth, but something may have gotten through.

I still plan to use the salt although Im not sure what for quite yet. It was a very interesting experiment...more to come.