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What Is Sea Salt?

One of the constant ingredients in cooking and in manufacturing cosmetics is sea salt. Previously known as bay salt, the taste of sea salt is different from table salt because of the difference in their mineral composition. Table salt is usually pure sodium chloride, made from refining halite, or rock salt. Sea salt is produced by Greece, France, Cayman Islands, Ireland, Sicily, some parts of Italy, and Colombia. In the United States, sea salt comes from the San Francisco Bay, Utah, Maine, and Cape Cod. It usually costs more than table salt.

Mineral salt has been mined for a long time. In fact, the Hallstatt salt mines are testament to age-old mining, with marks that were found to have been made as early as the Iron Age. However, mineral salt is not always readily available, so coastal countries and cities turn to the seas for its salt. The principle behind the production of sea salt is to let brine from the sea evaporate, leaving its salt crystals on land. The sun is an important tool for this process; other cities need to use fuel to produce sea salt. Because of this, the production of sea salt has always been dominated by Mediterranean countries and other regions that have warm, dry climates.

Where sea salt is produced today is called salt works, which used to be known as saltern, an old English word. In the medieval times, salterns are usually established on places that have these characteristics:

1. Easily accessible to a marketplace for it to be sold,
2. A coast that has gentle shelves so that the salt won’t be washed out into the sea,
3. Cheap fuel or where the sun shines strongly,
4. Near a place that offers another product, like a farm or a tanning workshop, so that salt can be used to add value to the other products (e.g. salted meat or leather)

Food experts and gourmets claim that sea salt is better than table salt in terms of taste and texture, but their differences are not easily noticeable once they have been dissolved. Sea salt contains minerals that dissolve at different rates, thus resulting in flavor changes when it is laid on the tongue. However, other salts that contain large amounts of minerals, like gray-colored rock salt or pink Himalayan salt, can be indistinguishable in flavor to sea salt.

While sea salt has some iodine content, it is hardly enough to meet a human being’s daily nutrition requirement, so it is not a viable alternative to iodized table salt for regular consumption. If sea salt is all that’s left, the consumer is well-advised to have other sources of iodine at hand, such as processed foods or dairy products. To respond to this concern, there are more suppliers who come out with iodized sea salt. To sea salt’s merit, it has other minerals that are lacking in regular table salt, like calcium, sulfate, potassium, and magnesium. There are also some traces of heavy metals including lead, cadmium, strontium, and mercury.

It is a common misconception that sea salts come from just about body of water. Suppliers take various factors into consideration, including age, mineral content, and how much the body of water was exposed to human intervention. Sea salts in the markets today often come from the Dead Sea, the Pacific Ocean, the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the Mediterranean Sea, and bodies of water in the Himalayas.

Aside from sea salt, you could also search for various organic products such as organic foods, organic coconut oil, organic agave nectar, organic nut butters and organic chlorella which would surely be able to provide you with a lot of health benefits.

By: David Tang

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