(energetic music)
- We make salt from seawater,
one of the few companies that do in the United States,
right here on the Oregon coast.
Anybody can make salt, it's of course very easy,
but it's very difficult to make great salt consistently,
especially from a natural resource such as seawater.
We make pure flake salt, pure kosher sea salt.
It takes about two weeks from seawater to dry flake of salt.
We are literally on the bay right here.
The seawater is 10 yards away from us here,
and our salt making facility is right there.
It's about a seven mile long bay called Netarts Bay.
It's very high in salinity,
which is of course very unusual on the Oregon coast.
We want to get as high as salinity
or as high a salt count as possible
when we're trying to make salt.
I think I ended up getting like two or three gallons
from 27 different spots from all the way
in Neah Bay in Washington State to Gold Beach in Oregon,
and made salt from all of those
and literally just tried them side by side.
Netarts Bay was far and away the best.
The reason Netarts Bay is so special
is because you have higher than normal salinity,
but then you also have tens of millions of oysters
that are farmed here.
Individual oysters can filter
about 20 gallons of seawater a day.
It's been clean for an immense amount of time,
and we hope to keep it that way forever.
This is our intake pipe.
We pump seawater in
through this pretty underwhelming three-inch PVC line.
We'll walk up very shortly up the hill
to our filtration and reverse osmosis.
So this is a reverse osmosis unit.
Typically reverse osmosis is used
to either clean or purify water or to desalinate seawater.
We, of course, are desalinating seawater,
but we want the salty part of the seawater
and not the fresh water.
It'll pass through the reverse osmosis
and then to these storage tanks.
Seawater is, you know, about 3 1/2, 4% salt
in the ocean as it is.
Through this process, we're dramatically increasing
that concentration of salt in the seawater.
(light upbeat music)
This is where a lot of the magic starts to happen.
Jason handles all operations here at the coast for us.
- So what's happening here is we have created pre-brine
through the reverse osmosis unit
and it is now coming through gravity
and fed into these boils.
What's very important about the stages
is we are raising the salinity.
We're also cleaning it through heat.
One of the main reasons why we do it this way,
we don't just cook it down to what's left,
it's a big misconception when people make salt,
'cause through this process calcium will settle out.
Some of the calcium and magnesium will either cook out
or bond to the bottom of the pot.
In fact, it can create things like this.
And so this is over time,
this will be built up on the bottom of a pot.
You never really get rid of the calcium.
It'll always be there,
but we can get as much as possible out.
And if we do it this way,
when the salt forms, it's just forming salt.
- We're removing a lot of the bitterness
associated with those minerals.
So you're left with a very clean,
straightforward sodium chloride crystal.
The flavor of our salt is clean, briny.
Some people often describe it as sweet,
which is obviously a weird way to describe salt.
What they're kind of going after there is how clean
and pure it taste with no impurities
and then just dissipates.
- It all has to line up right.
If it's not, then the quality can change,
and all it is, is what's going on around.
Can we make the perfect batch?
This is the point where we actually end up
filtering that last time.
So it goes from our boil shed
through the side of this building
through a filtration system,
which is three 30 inch .5 micron filters,
and that will get everything out of it.
Remember, clean, clean, clean, clean, clean.
Come on in, I'm gonna show you
where all the fancy stuff happens.
(light electronic music)
So now we are in the evaporator room,
and this is where we actually make the salt.
In this room we have 10 pans.
Each pan's 150 something gallons.
We have two pans per pot.
We average between 400 and 500 pounds per batch.
These evap pans right here have just been filled and lit.
We fill these up to surface tension right at the very top
and then we turn the heat on.
There's still a little bit of a salinity gain
that we need to have happen here.
And so we do one more thing to clean it,
and we will go through and take a strainer,
and we will clean the top of this off.
And once we see the first grain of salt
being formed here, stop.
You don't clean nothing no more.
Now you let it do its thing.
The crystals will start forming at the very top
and you'll start moving around and bonding to each other
to where it forms a large pyramidical structure,
just large enough to where a surface tension
can't hold it anymore,
and then it starts snowing into the pans.
- The salt crystals form on the surface of the brine
through a very precise combination of time, temperature,
and mineral composition of the brine.
Then they gently fall to the bottom of the pan
like a leaf falling from a tree.
That process is really beautiful.
(upbeat music)
- So what you're seeing right here
is not just any type of shovel.
And the reason why there's holes in this
is because we want it to drain.
That brine is still making salt.
So we can let it go back in there and make some more salt.
And then when it's time to harvest, you harvest.
(gentle upbeat music)
So the way we harvest, as you can see,
I'm using practically no strength or force behind it.
You're letting the fluid act
almost as a lubricant underneath the salt.
And you gently take a scoop
and then place it on this rack to drain.
You cannot be impatient and be a saltmaker.
- Finishing salts is still something
that mystifies a lot of America.
I found out about it when I was living in Denmark
and was blown away by how much better it made
really simple food.
And so then I moved back here to Oregon
and realized nobody in America was making
great flake finishing salt.
- A lot of it does have to do with the environment,
how hot it is outside, how dry or wet it is outside.
That can slow or speed up our boil process
just based off of evaporation.
If you harvest too soon, you agitate the liquid,
and it can increase the evaporation rate,
so therefore maybe lose more liquid.
If you wait too long in a pan
and there's too much salt in it,
those flakes can bond together
and become much more difficult to break apart.
You have to find the right time, and that just takes time.
And what you're seeing right now
is you were letting it drain and getting any of the liquid
that might still be sitting in the salt back into the pan.
So at this point, we come over here
and we gently, don't toss it in.
This isn't dirt, this is beautiful flakes of salt.
These little pans down here,
what they do is they catch any of the access
that has traveled through the bottom of this barrel.
We try very, very hard to recycle as much as we can.
- So I'd been making salt
for about two and a half years for fun,
and I would just get a couple of gallons of seawater,
bring it back in a milk jug.
Hauled seawater over the coast range
for almost two and a half years
'til we finally found this spot here,
which is an old oyster farm,
remarkably well-suited to salt making too.
It's a completely natural product,
one of the most essential minerals to people.
Our body is largely made up of saltwater.
- Once we harvest, let it drain, we rinse the salt.
Rinse it with fresh cold water, fresh, clean, cold water.
And so we rinse out any brine
that might still be on the salt.
You have two big holes on each side.
Between 12 and 24 hours, we'll rotate it 180 degrees,
sort of knock it around a little bit,
so that we can reposition it so it will continue to drain.
If you don't drain it real well,
you end up with salt at the bottom.
It will end up bonding together,
creating more of like a rock salt that we can't pull apart,
we can't sift, and it ends up becoming waste.
At that point, we actually spike our boils with that salt.
You end up getting something like this.
You can see it's very white, flaky.
This is unsifted. It still needs to be processed.
Once they're finished draining, we put 'em in a dehydrator.
And this can last depending on the salt.
One batch could take 47 hours to dry.
Another batch could take 24 hours to dry.
So now we're in post-production.
This is Amanda.
She is in charge of post-production,
and every single flake of salt
passes through those gloved fingers.
- So once the salt is all dried
and comes out of the dehydrating room,
it comes over to the sifter.
You put a scoop in the top,
and it gives me a chance to take out any impurities,
like the calcium that bonds to the salt during the process.
It has two separate screens in it and two different spouts.
It will separate the kosher and our flake.
Our kosher, it's more like your everyday,
all-purpose, more practical to use.
And then the flake that we have, it's a little larger.
It's more for like, finishing or wet infusions.
But then every once in a while
we get these really big flakes.
That's what we call pure flake.
(salt tinkling)
This is that great, big, beautiful, almost like diamonds.
It just makes a different sort of sound,
almost like a tinkling sound.
This is like the gold, it's kind of hard to come by.
You can see the difference in the sizes.
It's so large it won't go through that sifting machine.
When that happens, I scoop it into these tubs,
and this part is by hand.
I go through every single flake,
and if I find any impurities, if it's not a perfect flake,
it gets picked out and sorted.
The structure of these flakes just happen on their own.
It's natural.
They form point side down in the evaporating pans,
and you can really see all of the lines.
It's so symmetrical.
They are so rare that it took this many batches,
seven different batches,
to come up with about 10 pounds, little over 12 pounds,
and I touched every single piece that was made out here.
So that's kind of cool to be able to say that.
- We have our pure flake salt
that's used by a ton of chefs all around the country.
And then we have a bunch of different
really great infused salt.
So we're gonna try some salt.
Thought it would be good to try some oysters
with our salt, of course.
Oysters being from the same bay that we get our salt.
Rosemary is one of our most popular infusions.
Top it with a little bit of Rosemary Salt.
It's vibrant and green and it's just excellent.
Our Black Garlic Salt, it's our bestselling infusion.
It's an umami bomb.
It's like you get this caramelized, sweet, savory garlic
that's been fermented of course to make black garlic
and then dried it out and blend it up into our salt.
Right now we're gonna try it
on a little baguette and butter.
I can't think of a better afternoon snack.
I feel grateful to be a part of the food industry.
It's fun to work with chefs and restaurateurs.
It's an honor.
We are a very small, yet significant portion of the plate.
Everybody's gotta eat and everybody needs salt.
And so if we can do that just a little bit better,
that feels great.
But I'm consistently blown away by the sheer beauty of it.
I mean, frankly, every single plate of salt
that leaves this facility are special.
It's a work of art.
And we're kind of like steering what nature already does
and just kind of, you know, redirecting it
in the tiniest little manner to make our salt.
(upbeat music)