A tour of Tasman Sea Salt's clean energy saltworks is followed by tastings of its unique Tasmanian sea salts and salt mixes paired with local ingredients. Tasman Sea Salt. Photo / Supplied
During a salt sommelier tour on Tasmania’s rugged east coast, Sarah Pollok learns there’s more to salt than meets the eye.
It started, I’m told, like many crazily brilliant ideas do – as a throwaway joke after a few glasses of wine.
Chris Manson, an Aussie lawyer, had met Alice Laing, a Scot working in sports marketing, in London in 2008. Years later, during a visit to his folks in Tasmania, the family laughed about how the state was surrounded by clean saltwater, yet most kitchens stocked Maldon, a famous sea salt brand from Essex, UK.
“You’ve got that amazing pristine body of water there,” Alice says, gesturing to the Tasman Sea stretched beyond the windows of Mayfield Cellar Door in Little Swanport, just up the hill from Tasman Sea Salt’s harvesting plant.
“We thought, surely you could make way better salt here, but at that point. I was like, well, it’s a really good idea for someone else, but we live in London.” However, months passed, and the idea lingered until they decided to uproot their lives and move to Tasmania’s east coast in 2014 with nothing but a business plan.
“My whole family thought we were crazy,” Alice laughed. Today, Tasman Sea Salt is one of the three largest gourmet salt producers in Australia.
They also run “Salt Sommelier” experiences, which may seem supremely niche but prove revelatory about this simple ingredient and demonstrative of Tasmania’s quietly flourishing food scene.
The tour starts beside a small corrugated iron building at the ocean’s edge. “This out here is the cleanest seawater in the world,” says Chris. “And that’s not just me saying that. Where the Southern Ocean meets the Tasman Sea is the cleanest seawater in the world.”
Here, Chris explains the science of salt harvesting as we follow the process with our feet, walking from the coastline past their solar-powered evaporative cooling tower, to warming tubs of brine inside the building and boxes of brilliant white salt.
Suitably schooled up, I then drive up the hill to the cellar door where Alice has a bizarre charcuterie board set up with a single cherry tomato, a ramekin of pumpkin puree, a dark chocolate truffle and more, with piles of salt dotted between.
It’s here I get a masterclass in the art of salt, and it turns out there’s a lot to learn.
1. Salt does far more than make things taste salty
Everyone knows salt makes things taste saltier, but there’s far more to it.
“There are three main ways that salt impacts flavour,” she says, gesturing at the board. The first is straightforward: it makes something taste salty, which is one of the five basic tastes alongside sour, sweet, bitter and umami.
The second, however, is the most surprising and important, according to Alice; it enlarges our taste buds and taste receptors.
“That’s what allows us to taste the quieter, maybe more hidden flavours or tastes in a dish or an ingredient much more deeply,” Alice explains.
The third is balance. “Salt actually balances flavour. It balances out the bitterness or the sourness, brings out the sweetness.” She instructs me to eat half of the dark chocolate truffle, which is silky and bitter. Next, I add a sprinkle of salt and notice a hint of saltiness yet somehow, more sweetness.
“It smooths out the bitterness and brings to life the natural sugars in the chocolate,” she explains. This is why sugary foods like caramel are often paired with sea salt.
The goal, she says, isn’t to taste the salt at all. “If something’s been seasoned correctly, the idea is that you almost shouldn’t notice the salt. It should just taste much more of itself.”
2. Not all salt is equal
Sea salt is more expensive at the supermarket, and for good reason. Table salt, Chris explains, is typically mined and stripped back to almost purely sodium chloride. The intention is purity but the trade-off is flavour and health benefits that come with a diverse mineral profile.
“Our salt is still predominantly sodium chloride, but we’re only about 85 per cent rather than 100 per cent. It’s that extra 15 per cent of your magnesium, your calcium, your iodine, all of the minerals that are naturally occurring in the seawater. They’re the things that are giving that flavour profile”.
For this reason, sea salt tends to have a stronger taste.
“That’s why chefs like using sea salt, because it gives you that flavour enhancement that you’re looking for,” Chris adds.
3. Keep salt in the kitchen, not just at the dining table
That being said, if you wait until serving to add salt (as I almost exclusively do), you’ve missed countless opportunities to make a more complex, flavourful dish.
“If you add a little bit as you go, you’ve built up your flavour as you go and then you’ve got a much greater depth of flavour,” Alice explained.
One example is the pumpkin puree before me. Trying a spoonful, it’s a rich combination of savoury and sweet without any extra seasoning. The trick? Alice salted the pumpkin before roasting it. “Because salt is hygroscopic and sucks up moisture, it really helps with the caramelisation process,” she said. “The salt is working on all these different levels to bring out the natural sugars of your vegetables and also to enhance all of those tastes and flavours”.
4. Store it right and enjoy it forever
During an olive oil tasting in Portugal, I learnt most people store olive oil incorrectly (in clear glass, in the sun or heat). Does salt have similar rules?
“It is a preservative, it kills bacteria, it is eternal,” Alice says. “Salt does not deteriorate. It will last forever and never go bad,” adding that the reason their products have a best before date is largely to meet food safety rules.
The only real enemy, she adds, is moisture.
Commercial salts often contain anti-caking agents but if you have totally natural salt, like Tasman Sea Salt, moisture will make it clump together.
“Keep it dry, that’s about the only thing.”
5. Salt built and broke empires
Conversation shifts from seasoning to ancient history as Alice describes salt’s essential role.
“Salt has actually been responsible for the rise and fall of empires, which sounds terribly aggrandising, but I kind of think it’s amazing,” she said.
Before refrigeration, salt was the primary means of food preservation, determining how far ships could voyage, how far armies could march and where cities flourished.
“We often think of where towns and cities have grown up as being because of ports, access to water. But actually access to salt was just as important,” she said. “The Venetian Empire had a monopoly on the salt trade, and that’s one of the reasons it grew so rich. And then when it lost its monopoly on the salt trade in the sort of 1400-1500s, it started to go into decline.”
Suddenly, I understand why the word salary originates from the Latin word for salt. “They actually think soldiers were sometimes paid in salt, Roman legionnaires,” Alice says.
“It does seem kind of extraordinary because salt is just not that valuable any more.”
Yet, after the Salt Sommelier experience, one would beg to differ.
TASMANIA, AUSTRALIA
GETTING THERE
Fly from Auckland to Hobart direct with Air New Zealand.
DETAILS
Tasman Sea Salt | tasmanseasalt.com.au
Discover Tasmania | discovertasmania.com.au
New Zealand Herald Travel visited courtesy of Discover Tasmania.