Quote:
Originally Posted by Targan
---SNIP---
Around 2.5% of seawater is salts. Around 60% of those salts is sodium chloride, the salt you want for cooking. If you evaporate the seawater in bowls or pans or whatever (using sunlight or heating it over a fire, it doesn't matter which) you'll easily get useable salt but it will be bitter because of the other, non-sodium chloride salts in it. I doubt such poorly refined, bitter salt would be as valuable a trade item as more palatable, better refined salt.
There are various methods that can be used (by those with the knowledge) to re-dissolve and re-evaporate out the salt so that you end up with purer sodium chloride. One low-tech method described to me is used on the island of Bali and involves leaving a bundle of sticks in an evaporating bowl of seawater. The salt crystals grow up the lengths of the sticks, and are then re-dissolved in fresh water and the process repeated to purify the salt.
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1. Considering the additional magnesium, calcium, and potassium content of the sea salt, I'd be loudly touting those health/nutrition facts to outsell the "merely salty" white salt (use "white bread vs. whole grain bread" analogy to push the sale at MUCH higher prices--all the traffic will bear!
). Oddly enough, and counter-intuitively to boot, sea salt's Iodine content is apparently generally a trace amount, so you'd have to stretch the truth to use that as a selling point.
2. As to the bundle of sticks technique, I wonder if a suspension of strings in a supersaturated seawater solution would make RockSalt "candy"?
