The Blue Machine

it’s only when the water itself quietly gets out of the way that the familiar pairing appears. Sea salt really is just what’s left, and it’s the same all over the world. Sea salt snobs need not be too worried. Although the salt itself doesn’t vary, nature may have added a few other things to fashionable cooking salts. All of our salt comes from the ocean, but most of it has been hanging around on land for a few million years before we get to it. We could use lots of energy to heat up seawater to evaporate the water until only salt is left. But it’s far easier simply to go to places where the sun did all the hard work millennia ago. Rock salt is formed when shallow seas dry up, dumping their salty cargo in deep layers on to newly relabelled land. Irrespective of the method used to remove the water, an unpurified salt is likely to carry traces of algae, bacteria and (in the case of rock salt) other minerals. These do produce some variation in colour and taste. This is what you pay for if you’re into posh salt. The pink or black salt carries the chemical imprint of its temporary home on land. Boring old ‘table salt’ has been processed to remove everything except the sodium chloride.