A famous name is born. Since , our salt has been made with the same traditional artisan methods in the coastal town of Maldon. It is unchanging yet ever-changing, constant yet continuously challenging. However, the salt always remains the same. The Osborne family have been making the finest quality salt for a century.
Today sees Steve Osborne at the helm, following in the footsteps of his father Clive, grandfather Cyril and great grandfather James. We hand harvest our gourmet flakes to ensure they are perfect in both taste and texture. We then package them and send them out around the world. We take it upon ourselves to inspire chefs and gastronomes plus each new generation of up and coming talent, wherever they may be. It was a clear, cold morning. Steve had on black corduroys, a quilted Barbour jacket, and brown suede lace-ups ill-suited to the marsh.
In his youth, Clive, too, had gone to work in London, as a lighter salesman, before returning to the family business. Steve helped with marketing and learned the ins and outs. Here was a go-go kid just back from the city, with big ideas, coming home to the sleepy provincial saltmaking shed.
The younger Osborne wanted to buy land to expand, but his father argued against it. When Steve took over, there were just three salt pans here. He added a fourth the next year, then three more the year following. In they opened a second facility, a few miles up the coast at Goldhanger. He also built an administrative and packaging plant to free up space for saltmaking.
Now they have 37 pans; the great-grandson has multiplied production a dozen times over. In , at the Downs, Clive Osborne replaced coal with natural gas, which was more efficient and made it easier to regulate temperature, to produce crystals of the right size.
Back in the coal era, Cyril had a famously deft touch. Of course, there was that day when he crawled into the flue with a fag between his lips. Coyote in Wellies. The saltmaking now begins with a steel barge docked out front on the Blackwater. At high tide, pumps fill the barge with seawater.
The water passes into six settlement tanks, and then into other filtration tanks, and then finally it is pumped into the pans. Inside, the operation resembles a lobster pound housed in a schvitz. The square pans are steel, three yards on each side, and not much more than a foot deep.
An intricate system of flues heats each pan evenly from beneath, as the brine solution thickens. The air is humid and steamy and is rumored to have health benefits. The saltmakers boil the brine, then reduce the temperature until inverted-pyramid crystals form on the surface, like the skein of ice on a martini.
At some point, the crystals, under their own weight, fall to the bottom of the pan like snow. Gary then rakes the crystals and shovels them into plastic draining tubs, like garbage bins, which hold pounds each. The salt drains for 24 hours. Then comes the drying. Clive upgraded to an industrial oven. Back then, the family lived in a house across the street; Clive came over every night at 10 p. Several years ago, Steve introduced a Rube Goldbergian oscillator, a modified grain dryer of his own design.
The salt, once sifted, drains into pound bags, which get trucked up to the packaging plant. By this point, many of the pyramids have crumbled into flakes. Finding a fully intact crystal is a little like getting a two-yolk egg. A few years ago, Maldon changed the design of its boxes, making them simpler, cleaner, simultaneously more retro and less frumpy.
Long gone is the impressionistic close-up of a sweaty mixed salad. The pans are heated and then cooled to remove any remaining impurities and to speed up the crystallization. Once crystallized, the salt floats to the top of the water, where it can be raked off by hand. After draining on its own for two full days, the salt is moved to an oven and dried. The company has just eleven employees, and total production is just tons a year.
Maldon sea salt can now be found on supermarket shelves throughout the UK, but despite its popularity, it isn't a mass market product. The Maldon Crystal Salt Company doesn't package it in bulk, so it is always sold and used in small amounts. Join Love Sea Salt on Social. What is the Best Gourmet Sea Salt? How is Maldon Sea Salt Made? Share 0. Maldon Sea Salt Flakes.
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