Wild food is our passion. It’s filled with nutrients, gets you outside and connected to life cycles, fresh air and adventure. Knowing where your food comes from is important. Hunting and harvesting your food is life changing.
Stay tuned for Soon, here you will find tales of our adventures deep into the forest, along river banks and across cold, hard water.
Homemade Sea Salt
Making your own sea salt is surprisingly easy and a fun winter project if you aren’t afraid of a little cold water.
When we chose our home one requirement we had was to be centrally located. We are an hour from the big mountains and an hour from the sea. Surrounded by lakes and forests. Making my own sea salt is a regular welcomed project here at Wild Shire.
Start by heading to the sea and gathering buckets full of regular old ocean water. I use food grade 5 gallon buckets with lids to keep it from sloshing around on the ride home. I have tried 5 gallon water jugs, which seamed like a great idea, however, they are really hard to fill when you are avoiding submerging yourself in the terribly cold December ocean.
Ocean docks can seem like a perfect, easy way to gather, but boats can contaminate the surrounding water. So, I find a quiet rocky outcrop where people and boats don’t generally go.
Next strain your sea water into a large pot. There will be bits of seaweed floating and maybe even a touch of sand if things got stirred up during your gathering. Just use a fine meshed strainer and some cheesecloth. I usually fill a large stainless pot about half full and set the fire to high. You can do this on your kitchen stove, a camp stove or even a camp fire if you want a little smoky flavor to your salt.
Bring your water to a boil and let it go. Your goal is to boil ALL of the water out and leave only the salt behind. This is a project that will take quite a bit of time, but can be done while performing other tasks. Just keep and eye on your pot and add more water as it reduces.
After a couple of hours, yes, hours, depending on how much seawater you have, you will start to see the salt. This is when you have to drop everything and keep a good eye on your pot.
It will quickly go from milky looking water to crumbly almost salt.
Drop the heat to low.
Using a wooden spoon, stir the salt constantly.
Keep stirring until all of the water has evaporated and you have crumbly sea salt.
You may start to get clumps and larger chunks. break them up with your spoon. Be sure to not over heat at this point or your salt will burn. If you remove the pot from the heat when you are almost to crumbly you can avoid burning. Just put the pot back on the heat for a moment if you discover it is not quite finished.
And there you have it. Your own homemade sea salt.
I made this batch with a single 5 gallon bucket of sea water. I ended up with over a pint of salt.
Happy foraging!