Nothing I do will induce the board to run my search. I apologize if this is treated elsewhere, and would appreciate a link.
I’m reading Salt. Being an inquisitive person, I naturally want to go to the coast, collect some seawater, and make my own salt. Would those of you with similar inclinations please tell me whether you favor evaporation or boiling, how best to accomplish either operation, how much water I should use (I just want to make enough to know that I did it), and anything that would reduce impurities or toxins in your run-of-the-mill Pacific ocean water.
The first thing you’re going to want to do is strain out all the suspended particulate matter. Some of it will be sea life, some of it will be sand, if you collect your water from the surf.
Any particular sort of pan? Kurlansky’s sources have named cast iron once or twice, but I don’t know if that’s useful information (they’ve also named lead, which is clearly not a good idea).
You would probably want something with a wide opening for increased evaporation, also, something easy to scrape off the dried salt at the end. As a WAG, maybe a cheap teflon saucepan?
It’s also possible to just evaporate the water until theres just a faint deposit of salt on the bottom of the pan. That means your water solution is saturated and you can bottle and store that. It’s a lot more convenient to make than dried salt and you can use it in soups and the like with the same effect.
I might try evaporation this summer. I’m interested in seeing if I can get crystals of discernibly different sizes. My partner doesn’t trust the ocean, though, so I’m trying to learn how I can get rid of contaminants. So far, mixing some egg white in the boiling seawater, then skimming the scum off the top seems best (Kurlansky’s other option is adding blood, which I’ll take a pass on).
I suppose you can filter the water first, to get rid of large pieces of crud and sea life. Then you can simply evaporate it (or boil it). In The Old Man and the Sea Hemingway’s hero laments that he didn’t splash sea water onto the thwarts of his boat so that it’s dry and give him some salt to eat his lunch with. Morton-Thiokol in Salt Lake City basically just isolates little lagoons of Great Salt Lake water and lets it evaporate.
One problem is that the resulting salt isn’t pure sodium chloride. There’s magnesium sulfate and potassium chloride and other random salts in there. In one of his endless series of footnoters (in, I think, City of the Saints, his account of his trip to Utah), Sir Richard Burton describes a procedure some people used to eliminate some of these other, unwanted salts. It involved “washing” the salt with salt water.
By the way, when Jesus speaks of “salt losing it’s savour” in the NT, he’s taking about salt made either this way or from salt deposits (which ultimatelty derive from evapoerated sea water) which has material, but greatly reduced sodium chloride content. What can you do with such saltless “salt” except (as he suggests) throw it out?
