“Working with young apprentices from Eastern Europe, Maximino Guerreiro, cleared the channels that allow water to run between the pans, fed by gravity and controlled by gates. The ancient practice, still followed today, is to let seawater evaporate in progressively smaller, shallower, and lower pools—the salt pans—until the salt is so densely concentrated that workers can just scoop it out of the water. The salt is harvested every five to seven weeks, depending on the heat of the sun and the force of the drying north winds.

I watched as Guerreiro and three shirtless young men bent over shallow rectangular pools of seawater dense with salt, using wooden rakes to draw the salt to the sides of the pans. This was traditional sea salt, the kind that the marenotos had collected by hand. Any pebbles or twigs would be sieved out, and the salt would be packaged just as it came out of the pans, its mineral content intact. Mechanically harvested sea salt must be washed and purified to rid it of potential contaminants introduced by machinery; the process robs it of some of its healthful minerals and many of its micro-nutrients. The pyramid-shaped piles of salt the workers had built up at the sides of the pans over the previous days looked like miniature Alps on a blinding winter's day. It was a disorienting image on such a hot morning.

After they broke for lunch and a siesta, the young men returned to the pans. They had exchanged their rakes for long-handled skimmers that looked something like butterfly nets. Again they bent over the water, but now they worked more slowly and deliberately, looking for irregularly shaped mica-like formations skittering along the surface, visible only if viewed at the right angle, glinting in the sun. This was Fleur de Sel, The Cream of the Salt Pan—called Flor de Sal in the Algarve. The neonate crystals float for only a few hours, and must be skimmed quickly and daily, before they precipitate to the bottom. I put my hand in the water, which was less than a foot deep, to skim out what looked like an oversized dragonfly's wing. I crumbled the fragile wet crystals and licked some salt off my fingers. It vanished as fast as if it were indeed snow. The flavor was wonderfully sweet and nuanced.”

-reprinted with permission, “The Cream of the Salt Pan - Fleur de Sel, the best salt in the world, suddenly got less expensive” by Corby Kummer, Atlantic Monthly, March 2002

A few years ago the proprietor of my favorite Boston gourmet shop came up behind me and put something white into my basket. It was a two-pound bag of salt. "We just got this in from France," he said. "Fleur de sel, like no other salt you've ever tasted. So sweet, so creamy, so good, you won't believe it." His eyes burned with enthusiasm. "Please try it," he said.

I knew fleur de sel from a trip to the rocky Brittany coastline, where workers rake salt from shallow waters in an ancient tradition practiced almost nowhere else. And, I was told, no other salt tasted so rich and fresh. The chef I had come to see, Olivier Roellinger, sprinkles the moist, gray-white crystals on a number of the superb seafood dishes he serves at Les Maisons de Bricourt, his inns and restaurants in the village of Cancale, near Mont-St-Michel.

I had long before left ordinary supermarket salt behind for kosher salt, which has a far gentler flavor with no nasty iodine residue, and whose quantity is much easier to control and judge while cooking. But the fleur de sel—from Guérande, on the Atlantic coast—was a revelation, with distinct mineral tastes and a roundness of flavor I hadn't thought possible from salt. The crystals slightly pricked the tongue and then dissolved, leaving a flavor nearly as sweet as it was salty—a mysterious and marvelous sensation.

Chic aside, fleur de sel continues to offer a matchless culinary experience. Last August, in Portugal, I discovered an even sweeter, whiter, and not incidentally much less expensive fleur de sel than the one that comes from Brittany. It is harvested by young and idealistic marine biologists whose intention was to produce algae.

“I put my hand in the water, which was less than a foot deep, to skim out what looked like an oversized dragonfly's wing. I crumbled the fragile wet crystals and licked some salt off my fingers. It vanished as fast as if it were indeed snow. The flavor was wonderfully sweet and nuanced.”
— Corby Kummer

-reprinted with permission, “The Cream of the Salt Pan - Fleur de Sel, the best salt in the world, suddenly got less expensive” by Corby Kummer, Atlantic Monthly, March 2002