Making Sea Salt

When I started working through recipes, trying to figure out what I was using and where the ingredients come from, I found that there is one group that is almost never local--spices.  Of all spices, there are two that are so important that many recipes don't even tell you how much to use--just "add to taste".  Salt is everywhere.  Salt can be used in everything. It's the only rock we eat.  And we eat a lot of it because our bodies can't produce sodium on its own, even though our cells depend on it.  It's an essential part of our bodies.

I wondered about where salt comes from.  I have some very nice foreign sea salts at home, as well as smoked salts, black salts, spicy salts, chunky salts, kosher salt, table salt, and other finishing salts.  But none are local.  So, I started looking around for local salt.  Considering that we live right next to a giant salty ocean, I thought this would be easy.   But I was so wrong.  I could not find local salt anywhere.  Not even at The Meadow.  This was really confusing to me.

Did you know that if you go out to Seaside, at the beach there is a Lewis and Clark historical monument that describes how they made salt there in brass kettles?

Remembering this gave me an idea.  I could boil the ocean and make my own salt!

I had big plans for making salt.  I figured there could not be that much salt in ocean water, so I planned on camping on the beach for a weekend, starting a fire, carrying buckets of water up to be boiled down for two days straight.  I would return home Sunday night--dirty, smoky, with a bag of precious salt that would make all our meals taste magically better.  That's the way Clark would have done it.

Doing some research, I found that you cannot camp on the beach in either Oregon or Washington.  The coastal campgrounds are all a hundred yards or more back from the beach.  None have spots on the actual beach.  Camping in non-designated areas is illegal, and it is impossible to make salt in jail.  Also, the Oregon coast in February is nothing but wind and rain.  Both of which make campfires really hard to do.  

Reality was sinking in that this might not work.  I might have to just settle for French sea salt (horror!).  

However, my next idea saved the day.  I should find out how much salt is actually in sea water.   I imagined the need for massive amounts of water--hoses and buckets over each shoulder.  But I learned that sea water is actually around 3.5% salinity.  That means 3.5 lbs of salt for every 100 lbs. of water.  Not bad! Now how much water is 100 lbs. of sea water?  Not as much as you'd think.  One gallon of sea water is approximately 8.5 lbs.  So, 100 lbs of sea water is just under 12 gallons of water.  At REI I found a camping water jug that holds 7 gallons of water.   Doing some quick and fuzzy math:

7 gallons x 8.5 lbs = 60 lbs of water x 3.5% salinity = 2 lbs of salt.  

2 lbs of salt sounded perfect!  I wouldn't need to camp at the beach after all!  The project was back on track.

When I told my wife that I wanted to go to the coast for the day, she thought that was a great idea.  We'd bring the kid and the dog and have a beach day.  That weekend the weather was surprisingly nice--we'd only need scarves and windbreakers.

When I told her I was going because I wanted 7 gallons of ocean water so I could make my own salt, she thought I was crazy.  Hazel, in an act of female solidarity, thought I was crazy too.  (Max thought it was brilliant, btw.)

Oceanside is our current favorite beach.  It is not too busy, the dogs can run, there are places to eat nearby, and the drive out through Tillamook State Forest is nice.  Additionally, Oceanside has very clean water.

In February the ocean water in Oregon is very cold.  I'd hoped that I could somehow dip the jug into the water or lean it over and scoop up water.  But the 7 gallon thing is too big and I had to keep walking out further and further to get it submerged to get the water inside.  Pretty soon I was up to my waist in ice cold water, waves rolling into me and my giant blue jug, with people watching me from their dry blankets on the beach.  I got much wetter than I'd planned.  Actually I was soaked.  But 7 gallons was mine!  Hazel and Kim kept their comments to themselves.

Once home, I started working on how to get the salt out of the water.  You have to evaporate it.  My first thought was baking it in pyrex dishes.  My thought was that slow evaporation would be nice because I could maybe get some nice Fleur de Sel-ish salt crystals.  But 4 hours later, all I had was a teaspoon of salt powder.

Then I moved to just boiling it in my ceramic dutch oven.  This worked good, except the off white interior made it hard to tell what was going on.  And as the water evaporated and thickened, it started makeing weird "Pang!" noises that made me imagine my pot was going to explode.  

What worked the best was the old fashion way.  4000 years ago chinese salt makers boiled down water in pans (read Salt for more info.  It's amazing).  This method still works today!  Although it is slow, it is reliable and easy.  Using a stainless steel 8 inch omlette pan worked great.  

In the end I boiled about 6 gallons of water, and now I have about 1.75 lbs. of pure, local, Oregon salt.

If you want to make your own salt, here is how you do it:

1.  Convince yourself this a what you really want to do because people will outright laugh at you when you tell them you are collecting 7 gallons of ocean water to make your own salt.  They will also stare and point when you walk yourself fully dressed into an ice cold ocean with a giant blue jug.  Good times.

2.  Get a big jug.

3.  Find a beach with clean water and be prepared to get very wet.

4.  Filter the water through some fine mesh cloth to get out sand and other bits of stuff.  I used a clean white t-shirt.

5.  Use a non-reactive pan to boil the water down.  A stainless steal omlette or saute pan works best.  It will take many hours.  Plan several days.

6.  Use a splatter guard because the water splatters a lot as it thickens.

7.  Finish drying the salt in a glass dish.  Rake it occasionally to keep it from clumping up too much.

8.  Enjoy it more than any other salt you've ever had in your whole life.

Cookies from Scratch by Hazel Lucey

As you all know my dad (Jason) is a great chef. Me on the other hand an 8 year old is picking it up! I have been looking in one of his little boxes of recipes for a long time, but we never seem to have any of the ingredients. So today (March 8th 2010) I looked hard and I decided to make Raisin Cookies! But it was a secret I didn't tell anybody what I was making.

After a while of putting things together I got done with all the ingredients I needed help stirring. So my dad came in still not knowing what I was making and stirred it real good. After that as you could imagine I had to tell him what i was making. So I did and he was very proud!

So then we put 12 in the oven and we had 26 more in so there were 38 cookies in all! Thats a lot of cookies! When all of them were ready my dad and I shared one cookie! YUM! I had made my very own cookies! Even I was proud!

Here are the ingredients:

Grind or chop 1 cup raisins-pour 1/2 cup hot water over them.

Stir in 2 tsp.soda & let sit.

Cream 2 cups sugar, 1 tsp. salt & 1 cup crisco.

Add 2 eggs,2 cups oatmeal and 4 cups flour.
Add raisins and 1 cup nutmeats.
Drop on ungreased cookie sheet/ press with fork dipped flour and bake for 10-15 minutes at 375 degrees.

Local Sourcing Crab Cakes in Portland

Right now is dungenous crab season and it is one of my favorite foods.  Luckily, if you live in Oregon, we have these delicious little critters crawling around on our coastal shores.  Oregon crabbing has done an excellent job of sustainably harvesting the local crab resources.  Another benefit--Dungenous Crab is listed as a "Best Choice" by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch.

All of that eco-goodness aside, Crab is delicious.  And when something is so good on its own, you don't want to mess with the flavor too much.  Crab cocktail is a good example--plain cold crab meat with a little cocktail sauce and lemon--has a great clean flavor.  The crabby goodness is not muddied by all kinds of other stuff

Pretty much the only way I like crab cooked is in crab cakes (or stuffed into fillet mignon). I've been disappointed many many times by this dish in restaruants.  Sometimes there is too much fillers.  Sometimes there is too much bell pepper (WTF would you put bell pepper with crab?).  There seem to be a lot of ways to F* up crab cakes, and everyone seems to do it differently.

So, I started reading.  About 12 of my cook books have recipes for crab cakes.  About 6 of my cookbooks have good recipes for crab cakes. Cynthia Nims has a good, clean recipe for crab cakes in her Crab cook book. It is amazing how much crap people want to put in their crab cakes.  Interestingly, every recipe I had included green onions.  These were worthless in my estimation--no real favor benefits, just some green flecks.  What I was looking for was something simple that kept the crab texture and flavor clean while adding some depth and complexity.

Now, by "depth and complexity", what do I mean?  Crab has a bright, strong, wet flavor.  It's sort of a transient flavor also--the after-taste is different than the initial bite.  To my pallete, strong earthy flavors wouldn't work.  Herby flavors might be okay.  Acidic flavors only is small amounts.  Salty would be good.  Black pepper could be neat.  Hot pepper could be neat too, but in very small amounts.  Sweet could go in too.  Bell peppers are not okay.  Slippery flavors wouldn't be good.  Either would fruity or bitter.

Overall, the ideal crab cake should have a clean crab taste that is supported by mild earthy and herby undertones and peppery highlights.

After many trials and errors, this was as close as I could get to the perfect crab cakes:

Lump Dungeonous Crab
I kept it lumpy because crab paste cakes was not what I was going for.  I have to be honest, I bought my crab meat at Costco.  One pound of fresh dungeonous crab meat (from Pacific Fresh in Clackamas) for $16 is a steal.  And since it's 100% dungenous crab, it can't be from too far away.  Again, I run into my "local industrial" conundrum.

Bread Crumbs
From leftover bread I got at the farmer's market.  I forget the name of the bakery, but you can find several local bakers at the Hillsdale Farmer's Market through the winter.  Where does the wheat come from?  I have no idea (saving that one for another time).

Egg 
From Noris Dairy.  They do home delivery.

Butter
From Noris Dairy also.

Olive Oil
From Belle Ragazze Olive Orchards

Shallot
From the Farmer's Market. I'll update with the farm.

Spices
For this one I tried several things.  Spice is very important to crab cakes, I found out.  A few recipes call for Old Bay seasoning, which I bought and didn't like for its too strong celery flavor.  What turned out to be the best was my own BBQ seafood rub.

In a blind taste test, one out of one pregnant wives prefer my BBQ seafood rub to everything else.

• Black Pepper
• Salt
• Paprika
• Brown Sugar
• Garlic Powder
• Dried Oregano
• Cayenne

All in all, this combination turned out really good.  I may refine it over time, but I was satisfied with these results far more than the cook book recipes.  And, on the local sourcing score card, I did okay:

Local Local: bread, egg, butter, shallot

Industrial Local: Crab

Other stuff:  spices

Total score: 75%  (I'm giving myself half points for the crab).