Team Salt

Of all the projects we chronicle in The One-Block Feast, this may have been the most far-fetched. Especially once we’d read Michael Pollan’s account in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, in which he scavenges water from trash-strewn wetlands and evaporates it on his stove top into brown salt that, he writes, “actually made me gag.”

But Team Salt persisted because we knew we had to have seasoning for our dinner, and figured—what with the San Francisco Bay to one side of us and the Pacific Ocean on the other, we had some water to choose from. It would be copping out to just go buy salt.

The process proved surprisingly easy, and the yield was much higher than we had expected. And our salt looked pretty (pure white), smelled fresh, tasted exactly like the ocean, and made a fine seasoning for our feast.