Fresh from the smoker, my latest batch of mesquite smoked salt crystals. The color of good smoked salt should be as rich as the aroma and flavor it provides, ranging from a light amber to a dark pitch, almost black color.

Almost two years ago I wrote up an article on a series of experiments I was doing smoking salt. At the time I promised a follow up article posting my results in a "couple of weeks". Clearly it has taken me longer to get here than a couple of weeks, but I didn't want to post on the subject again until I sorted out some of the details and techniques and had a chance to do some research.

The art of salt smoking has prompted more inquiries than any other subject I have posted on Chilefire.com - I have received emails from both professionals interested in marketing their own smoked salt and amateur home smokers interested in making up a batch after having tasted the unique salt, all looking for a web resource on the topic. So, after experimenting for over a year and making up a few batches of really great salts, as well as a few total failures I thought it worth starting up the Salt Smoking Discussion Forum

What I Have Learned - The Basics:

There are six basic recommendations I have for the first time salt smoker outlined below. if you follow these basics you should have decent luck making up some great salts.

1. Use Long Smoke Times
Smoking salt take time, salt doesn't absorb the smoke - or cook and react in the warm environment the same way meats will. Salt absorbs flavor as the smokes resins coats the grains, and this take some time. In my experience, depending on the coarseness of the grain, salt needs at least 4 hours in the smoker, but my best salts spend 24 hours smoking.

2. Use Cool to Medium Heat, and Always Cool Your Salt in the Smoker
Heat is tricky, I have made great salts at regular barbecuing temperatures around 225°but have had better luck when the temperature is even lower. Some folks I have talked to swear by cold smoking, but in my experience anywhere from cold smoked at 85° to regular BBQ temps at 225° work well. If however you get a spike in your temperature to grilling temps - for any length of time you're gonna have to start over - the higher heats will burn off the smoky resins and leave you with salt that pretty much tastes like salt. In short - tend your fire. Finally leave your salt in the smoker until the smoker goes cold. I have 't the slightest idea why this makes a difference, but it does. Salt cooled in the smoker has a better aroma and a smoother smoke flavor, sure it takes longer - but has that ever stopped you before?

3. Soak Your Wood
This is the only time you will ever hear me suggest soaking your wood before you smoke with it. Every time I hear someone on TV or the Web say to soak our wood chips before you put them on your fire it makes me cringe - soaked wood makes nasty, bitter meat in my opinion. However when you're smoking salt - and only when you're smoking salt - it seems to work pretty well. Moisture plays a role in Salt smoking and while I have had some luck with using a pan of boiling water in the coals, my best luck has been when I soaked my wood. With salt it doesn't make for a bitter taste.

4. Use Coarser Salts
Coarser grain salts smoke better. The smoke can move through the grains more easily and the smoke seems to stick to the grains better. I mostly use a grain size I can put in my salt grinder, it seems to work best.

My first smoked salt, a hickory smoked Maldon salt I cold smoked in my old Bradley Electric. The salt lacked the taste and color I was looking for. Time, humidity and temperature all play a role in making good smoked salt.

5. Resist the Urge - Smoking Salt when Your Smoking Other Foods is Not a Good Idea
Fastest way to mess up your smoked salt? Smoke it with a pork butt, a slab of ribs, or god forbid a fillet of salmon. Don't do it! Salt takes up the flavor of cooking meat faster than it does the smoke - and the effect is not good. If you are thinking "oohhh! bacon salt!" this isn't the way to do it, trust me. Yuck.

6. Store Your Product in an Air Tight Container
Finally, when your done, seal the salt in an airtight container. The smoky flavor you have carefully layered into your salt is sensitive to oxygen and looses it's tang, smoke flavor and aroma as the essential oils oxidize and evaporate.. Seal it up tight as soon as it leaves the smoker. I use big mason jars that folks use for canning.

You can find the complete" How-To" I have put together on the Salt Smoking Discussion - including pictures of the rig I am using and the processes that I have used to make my best salts. And if you have smoked salt - please consider joining the group and sharing your experiences, recipes, tips and tricks.

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"