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Fleur de Sel is my favorite salt. Sprinkled over a chocolate mousse it incites intense gastronomical excitement. It tastes clean and fresh, like the ocean, and exudes an aroma of bright violets. Unfortunately, unlike most salt, it's not cheap. While you can spend as little as three dollars for three pounds of kosher salt, Fleur de Sel costs approximately 10 dollars for only 5 ounces. But, of course, there is no comparison when it comes to the enormous difference in taste.
The reason why Fleur de Sel is so expensive has to do with its superior quality. To understand the price we pay for Fleur de Sel, we need to comprehend the intricate process involved in collecting it. Fleur de Sel must be harvested by hand with great care, because it is not supposed to touch the coarse grey salt beneath the surface. It is delicately scraped off of the surface where it floats.
Where does it come from?
The salt enters shallow marshes, called œillets, off the coast of Brittany from the Atlantic ocean through an elaborate series of 10 winding waterways. But, before entering the marshes, Fleur de Sel enters a basin, called a vasière, where fish, eels, and other living oceanic organisms are cleared from the water. The complicated system of canals that lead to the œillets is crucial. Ocean water has roughly 27 grams of salt per liter, but, by the time the water ends up in the œillets, it's far saltier, containing 300 grams of salt per liter. Information on how Fleur de Sel is collected and the type you should buy can be found after the jump.
How is Fleur de Sel Harvested?
During the warm dry months (typically, the summer), Fleur de Sel is cautiously raked up with a lousse à de fleur, a tool designed to collect the salt without disturbing the tender crust. The job is done by specialists. Originally, it was done by women called paludiers.
What kind of Fleur de Sel should I buy?
It's true that there is Fleur de Sel from other parts of the world besides Brittany. You can find Fleur de Sel de Camargue from southern France, and you can even find some from Spain. I highly recommend that you purchase Fleur de Sel de Guérande. The tradition of collecting Fleur de Sel began in Guérande, in southern Brittany. It's likely that Fleur de Sel from other regions is mechanically harvested. I'm not stating that those others types are bad. On the contrary, I know that they are artisanal salts. But, the work involved in collecting Fleur de Sel de Guérande is more involved, and, in my opinion, produces the best Fleur de Sel.
Have you used this salt recently or tried dishes with it? If so, what were they and how did they taste?
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7-03-2008 @4:06PM Allison said... Worth it not only for taste, but even more so for health. Like Himalyan Sea Salt that I'm willing to pay dearly for, you'll probably find you use far less salt than that over-chemically-processed white junk food that pours when it rains. That cheap stuff is stripped down (through some processes you'd probably rather not know about) to a single sodium chloride molecule. Fluer de sel and other sea salts contain an abundance of minerals our bodies need. When that need is satisfied, your craving for salt will plummet and you can get back to the real taste of real food.
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7-07-2008 @4:35PM Michael Schmitt said... So, how healthy is this natural sea salt when it is exposed to the air and animals can poop in it and people can walk in it?
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7-17-2008 @5:27AM Feargus said... Nobody walks or poops in French salt pan salt. A friend of mine is a salt maker in the Guerande region and having visited his pans, I can tell you tha most of themare a long walk from any road, out in the salt marsh where livestock and wild animals are far away, and which birds generally avoid because there's nothing there for them to eat (the salty brine in the pans is far too concentrated to support insect or plant life). The pans themselves are extremely old and protected, with just narrow ridges between them to walk on and you can't walk out to them unless you're acoompanied by one of the salt makers who works out there.
Believe me, if you saw the amount of work that went into Guerande salt, you would understand why it's so expensive. Winter is an easy relaxing time,it's true, but maintaining the pans the rest of the year and harvesting the salt is intensive, back-breaking work.
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