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Making My Own Salt

My sister-in-law got a free rental weekend for a house in Nags Head. I had just read an Instructable on making sea salt and since we were headed to the beach it seemed like the perfect time to try it.  I found a few more articles and blogs on it and the basic process is
  1. Get sea water
  2. Filter out the sand and other junk
  3. Evaporate the water either by leaving in the sun or boiling or both
  4. Grind up to the consistency you want
I got a nephew to got out in the surf with me and get a gallon milk jug and a couple two liter soda bottles of sea water.  First lesson learned - bring a bucket and wide mouth bottles or a funnel.  It is too hard to get the water in the surf to go through the little hole in these bottles and jugs.  It would have been better to have a bucket and then pour it in the jugs, filtering it along the way.

When we got home I filtered it through some coffee filters which was a very slow process. I went back and reviewed the instructions and they all just filtered through cheesecloth. I'm sure it went a lot faster with the cheesecloth but the coffee filters trapped smaller pieces of dirt.  If I was doing more than a gallon and a half (my containers weren't totally full) I would have used something else for the filter.

Let the evaporation begin! I started with a big stock pot and put it on the stove at a medium heat.  From reading people did this to speed things along and also to kill any bacteria in the water.  The first point is good, I'm not sure about the second.  By the time the water gets down to super saturated salt water I don't think anything would be able to live in it, but since we have to get a bunch of water out of it boiling seems like a good idea.

Once it got down to a quart or so, which took several hours over a couple of days, I moved it to a smaller pot and only used low heat instead of medium or medium-high. I cooked it on low for another day and I could start seeing salt crystals forming on the side of the pot and forming in the water.


Another day and the crystals are all over the bottom and only about a cup of water left.  Make sure and stir every now and again.  Some instructions says that the salt can scorch.  At this point I moved the pot outside during the day so finish the evaporation. Hmm, it just won't finish.  I gave it several days sitting in the pot but it would just not finish drying although most of them were inside. I finally put it in the oven on low heat for a couple of house to finish things off.

In the end I got a little more than a half of a cup out of the 1.5 gallons or so of sea water.  Here it is:
The salt forms in various crystal sizes so you may want to grind it to make it more uniform.

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