How to Make Salt From Seawater

By Amy Machnak
Published on November 8, 2012
article image
by Adobestock/Ivan Kurmyshov
Blue sea texture with waves and foam

How to Make Salt From Seawater

Of all the projects we attempted as part of our One-Block feasts, this may have been the most far-fetched. We had read of other people’s efforts, most memorably Michael Pollan’s in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, in which he scavenges water from trash-strewn wetlands and evaporates it on his stove top into brown salt that, he writes, “tasted so metallic and so much like chemicals that it actually made me gag.”

But we persisted because we knew we had to have seasoning for our dinner, and figured–what with the San Francisco Bay to one side of us (the same bay that Pollan harvested, actually) and the Pacific Ocean on the other, we had some water to choose from. Also, the other raw materials that we had “imported” for our feast–grapes for the wine, olives for the oil, and milk for the cheese–at least were transformed from their natural state by our own hands. It would be copping out to just go buy salt.

The process proved surprisingly easy, and the yield was much higher than we had expected. And our salt looked pretty (pure white), smelled fresh, tasted exactly like the ocean, and made a fine seasoning for our feast. As to whether it was safe to consume or would behave like normal salt in cooking, we weren’t sure. We were just happy that we had, in fact, made our own salt from local seawater.

Pacific Sea Salt

We hauled drums filled with Pacific seawater to our Menlo Park offices and reduced several gallons to salt.

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