My darling niece, Dana, is the urban hippy I once aspired to be.

Just after Christmas, she and her lovely boyfriend, Michael, stopped by on their way to her parents’ place on Hornby Island for a meal and a quick visit, and as we ate and drank and chatted away the afternoon, Dana explained her latest project: making salt from seawater.

I can’t even articulate how excited I was about this project. I was ALL IN.

She explained the method, which she learned from Folklife Magazine:

First, they gathered a large pot of seawater from Grassy Point on Hornby Island (picture by Michael Poure):

Next, they let the pot sit overnight so any sediment settled to the bottom. They slowly poured the salt water into another pot through a filter to remove any sediment.

They next boiled the filtered seawater on the stove until it was reduced down to a couple of inches of sludge. They lowered the heat and let it simmer down to the consistency of wet sand, after which they removed it from the heat and let it dry naturally.

The result was about 400 grams of very white, granular seasalt.

On their way back from Hornby, Dana and Michael generously dropped off a 70-gram jar of the salt. When I texted her my thanks, she mentioned that she wanted to make flaky salt from it, and again, I was all in!

After a bit of online research, I discovered that to make flaky salt, you simply have to re-dissolve the salt in four times the water over heat, then pour it into a low ceramic or glass dish, after which you dehydrate the liquid at 160 degrees for eight to twelve hours. I had 70 grams of granular salt, so I dissolved it over heat in 280 grams of water.

Once the water was dissolved, I poured it into a ceramic dish, which I placed in my Breville Smart Oven on “dehydrate” for eight hours. I checked it every few hours for progress. You can see here after several hours that the crystals are forming and the water is evaporating:

After eight hours, I removed the crystalized salt from the dish and set it on paper towels to absorb any leftover water.

Once the water evaporated, I was able to scrape the crystals into a jar, and we have….FLAKY SALT!!!

And here is Dana’s Grassy Point flaky salt (left) compared to commercial flaky salt (right):

This was SUCH a fun experiment, and I cannot imagine how amazing it would be to receive a gift of a small jar of Grassy Point Flaky Salt from Dana who had made it from scratch!

Just imagine sprinkling handmade Grassy Point flaky salt on a homemade fougasse!

Dana and Michael are heading to Mexico in February and hope to make some salt from the waters of the Gulf of Mexico! I hope I’m on the receiving end of a little jar of that!

And here are a couple of pictures of the cutie-pies during one of their visits (where we stayed up until three in the morning drinking champagne and chatting and laughing our asses off):

And the song of the day is Ray LaMontagne’s “Highway to the Sun”: