The first installment of a two part series on smoking salt. See the link at the bottom of the page to Experiments in Smoking Salt: Part II. Chilefire also hosts a Salt Smoking Discusion. Please Join us!

William Fettes Douglas - The Alchemist

The alchemists believed naturally occurring dew contained the divine salt or "thoughts of the One Mind". Dew was likened to Gods sweat, so to tease salt from it would give you quite a condiment indeed.

My first smoked salt: The smoke and taste this salt provides is shocking, just a few grains as a finishing salt has a remarkable impact on flavor.

2 hours of smoke & these crystals are beginning to color a slight amber with deep smoke aroma.

I am surrounded by wisps of the sweet smoke of orange and mesquite woods, it is a windy spring night aboard the boat, blustery, with a slight chill that is unique to spring on the water. Tonight the smoke from the onboard cooker adds gravity to the evening, seemingly weighing down the passage of time.

As Spring opens this year I look forward to more nights like tonight, spending time tending my smokers. In the coming months expect to see a bit more exploration around here on the fine art of wood smoking; tonight I am working something I have never tried in the smoker before,

Salt

Salt is fascinating. Like water, salt is an absolute essential, without it ultimately we will die; and yet natures only guarantee that we seek it out is our "taste" for it. Unlike water, food or air, our bodies do not symptomatically crave it. We go without ever craving it until we become ill, and ultimately die.

This basic relationship we have with salt has created an incredible and epic history. Politics, religion, science, human history is as intimately intertwined with salt as our biology; and culture is full of hidden references to salt that we take for granted in today's relatively salt rich world.

Roman soldiers were paid at least partly in salt, it was their salarium, or 'worth in salt'. The tradition of paying soldiers in salt is not at all unusual, It is said to be from this that we get the word soldier - 'sal dare', meaning to give salt. In many times and places around the world salt has been used as currency. In Latin, salt is Sal which is the root for many familiar words, including Salary, Sale, and even Salvation. The Bible makes a number of references to salt, and generally held it to be incorruptible - thus a covenant of salt is one that can not be broken [2 Chronicles 13:5]. (1) Salt is strongly symbolic in Judaism and Islam as well and appears equally in eastern religions.

This is illustrated by a story in the Hindu "Chandogya Upanisad" which is one of the oldest and largest works of Hindu mystical teachings. “A boy at the age of 12 years left his family to learn from a school. On returning at the age of 24, the young man's father realized that his son had learned the scriptures without understanding the nature of Brahman. He therefore asked his son to sprinkle some salt in a glass of water. The next day the father asked his son to find the salt in the water. As the salt had dissolved, the search proved to be futile. The father asked his son to taste the water from the top, middle and bottom of the glass and asked him how it had tasted. The son replied salty and the father asked where is the salt the son replied he could not see the salt. His father replied that just in the same way you cannot see the spirit, the Brahman, which encompasses the universe but it is there. That is the reality, that is the truth and you are that truth”.

Salt was used symbolically in a very similar way in the middle East and West in the traditions of alchemy. Alchemy, in it's most common and romanticized understanding is of course, the pseudo-science of "transmutation", of changing of lead into gold. Alchemy however was also the foundation of what led ultimately to what has become modern Western science.

The alchemists believed naturally occurring dew contained the divine salt or "thoughts of the One Mind". Dew was likened to Gods sweat, so to tease salt from it would give you quite a condiment indeed.

The Art of Smoking Salt

I have scoured the web looking for information on smoking salt but thus far I have been unable to find anything of interest or utility. Smoked salts are beginning to appear on shop shelves however, being offered by 4 or 5 different salt crafter's. Rather than pay the $15.00 an ounce that Whole Foods was asking, I decided to try to make it myself. What I have come to find is that smoking salt is something of an art.

While I have many many times cooked with salt, this last week has been the first time I have cooked salt, and my first experiments have been of mixed results. My very first try I smoked kosher salt for about two hours in a hot ( 225° +) smoker, with a pan of water, orange wood chips following the smoking of a rack of lamb. We didn't try the salt until the next day , and when we did, it was amazing! The smoked salt brought a really pure smoke flavor to whatever it was sprinkled on.

I have spent the last several days trying to reproduce the same thing again, with significantly less luck. I am not sure what it was that I did right that first time, but I have been unable to reproduce the effects, so I am going to get more systematic going forward. I received neary 7 pounds of salt in the mail today, just over a pound and a half of Maldon sea salt, and about 5 pounds of Himalayan pink salt. I am planning on working a series of small batches until I have mastered it and I will post the results and the methods I find successful here.

My goal is to create a series of finishing salts from different woods. My first experience with smoked salt suggested that salt is a unique carrier of the smoke flavor, and I would like to make a set of jars, each containing a sample of salt from a different wood, hickory and mesquite are what I am working with until I have a system down; alder, orange, cherry, lemongrass, and cedar are to follow.

I have several basic experiments I am going to try going forward:

• Cold smoking a batch of 12 salt samples measuring 1 tablespoon each for 24 hours, removing one sample every 2 hours to find the best length of time for smoking without heat.
• Hot smoking (without steam pan) a similar batch following the same procedures as above but at 255°
• Hot smoking (with steam pan) and another batch following the same procedures as above but at 255°

This will hopefully send me in a good direction in terms of time and leaning toward hot or cold smoking. I am adding the with and without steam pan smokings to try to gauge humidity into my results. I intuitively believe that water will effect the absorption and taste of the salt. Salt and water just interact chemically too much for this not to have an effect - I have no idea which will create a better result.

The other thing I am going to try is an in smoker evaporative salt forming: boiling a cup of salt into a cup of water, and evaporating it back to salt crystals inside the smoker. This experiment would take too long for me to try it it with different techniques very quickly, so I am going start by tasting the water from the steam pan in my hot smoking experiment decribed above; marking the quality of the taste of the water as time passes, and graph when the water becomes too smoky or bitter. Then I will use the resulting time line to as a starting point for my evaporative salt forming; removing the smoke when the brine has reached the best time suggested by the graph.

Read "Experiments Smoking Salt: Part II"