Welcome to the Salt Pantry

As a local Granite-Stater in search of the best gourmet salt products for my family's table, I've learned a lot about how food salt products are manufactured, sourced and distributed along this journey. 

Here in New England, we source our salts from the ocean and use a variety of techniques to remove the nutrient rich sea salt from the water. Here are some of the ways we do this:

• Solar-evaporated, hand-harvested sea salt is seawater collected, filtered, and sun/air-dried in “evaporation houses” or salt pans. This is common for small coastal artisan makers found here in Maine, Cape Cod, or Marblehead. It produces distinctive crystal shapes and a “merroir,” which is a regional mineral signature. 
  • To flavor our sea salts, we use small-batch wood-fire-evaporation processes and other artisanal techniques for a particular texture and flavor signature. 
• Larger industrialized global producers use industrial vacuum processes for large-scale evaporation. These use controlled evaporation and vacuum-thermal processing to achieve standardization for consistent grain size and massive supply. 

Salt products around the world are also sourced from mining processes, where mined rock salts such as Himalayan pink, Celtic sel gris from France, and other single-origin salts that come from outside the U.S. are sold in a variety of coarseness, and frequently blended with herbs for a delightful culinary enhancement. 

Post-harvest finishing & flavor processing involves smoking, infusing with herbs or truffles, or blending with spices, and are common for retail gourmet products, both small makers and large-scale packagers.