SC - a Salty story

[Reia M. Chmielowski]

At 15:47 1/5/99 , Elysant wrote:

>"La Baliene Sea Salt is from the clear blue Mediterranean.  Evaporated to a 
>sparkling white by sun and sea breezes.  It is then washed in more clear 
>Mediterranean sea water...The French, as fussy about health as they are about 
>food, make great claims for the rare salts contained in Sea Salt".
>
>Is this a lot of marketing hype then and nothing more?  It seems to taste a 
>bit different from the regular salt.  (I'm no culinary expert as some on
this list 
>obviously are, but I just wondered).

Sea water contains (in order of concentration) oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine,
sodium, magnesium, sulfur, calcium, potassium, and a bunch of other stuff.
As it evaporates various "salts" precipitate out of it due to the increased
concentration of those ions.  The most common of those salts is halite
(NaCl), or what we call table salt.  Another salt is sylvite (KCl), which
has a more bitter flavor.  I don't remember right off hand what the order
of precipitation is, but if seawater is allowed to completely evaporate
then you will have a collection of different salts.  Each one precipitates
in turn, based on the concentration of ions remaining in the solution.  

When oceans are evaporating on a large scale they tend to precipitate one
salt at a time for long periods.  As time goes on you can get many meters
thickness of one salt or another.  As geologic conditions change these
layers can get buried under other layers of sediment, and eventually get
compressed enough to turn into rock (lithification).  If this package of
rock is then uplifted and becomes part of the continent it may be mined.
Because of the thickness of each layer it is possible for the miners to
obtain a product that is just halite, or just sylvite, or whatever.  

Therefore I suspect that the "healthful" attributes of sea-salt stem from
the fact that there are more minerals present...

Kareina (a geologist, can you tell?)

============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================