Why does salt form pyramids

After a cup of tea, we head out to look at the coast before Osborne shows me the saltworks, still operating out of the original Victorian building nestled alongside the river. The first thing that strikes me is its heat and humidity—something that's perhaps a little naive given that this is a room primarily used for boiling seawater. It's then pumped into a pan and by a process of evaporation, we make a brine solution.

This brine solution is then boiled down, before being skimmed for impurities known in the trade as "lees. After the salt has been raked, the leftover "brine seed" is added to seawater, which acts kind of like a sourdough starter, bumping up the salinity and getting the process started.

We do that for a whole hour cycle and we never evaporate all the brine as that is the catalyst for the next batch. By maintaining a precise temperature, the seed crystal sinks slightly below the surface while another layer of crystal forms on the surface. When this is too heavy, it sinks and another forms and so on and so forth.

Some mind-boggling processes take place in the surface-area-of-crystal-to-buoyancy-ratio but basically, the end point is a pyramid. Once these pyramid crystals have achieved a certain size, they fall to the bottom of the brine and are raked up by hand, before being shovelled into bins and dried in a kind of huge tumble drier.

After drying, the salt is scanned for impurities, weighed, and packed. Apart from the production line and salt drier, the technique behind Maldon salt hasn't changed much in over years. And why should it? The Maldon Salt Company as we know it was established in the 19th century, but salt has been produced here long before the company started trading under that name in The water would flood the pan at high tide, and the vegetation — sea grasses, sea kelp, seaweed and so on — would act as a natural filter and a crystallizer, with traces of salt remaining on the vegetation as the tide receded.

It makes the water at the higher level of the marsh more saline, as those crystals dissolve and recrystallise with the next tide. A Maldon salt maker harvesting the prized crystals. They use traditional methods and keep things as simple as possible. Fast forward to , and salt making in the region is big business. That year the Domesday Book records 45 salt pans in Maldon, and hundreds more scattered throughout the county. He developed the business to meet food-legislation standards, taking us up to a class where we could sell to supermarkets and export.

Steve Osborne's great grandfather purchased the Maldon Salt Company from a local wine merchant in Oh, and my sister worked for 20 years in the packaging department! He makes it look effortless, as if the salt were snowflakes rather than solid crystals — yet when he hands the rake to me encouragingly, it takes all my strength and weight to move it a centimetre. Gary knows what he is looking for. Crystals seed, grow, and fall to the bottom, sometimes singly, but often in misty blooms.

He knows the size and shape that he wants, and the necessary temperature at different stages. These two processes are extremely energy efficient and have the added benefit of greatly increasing the mineral content and flavor of the brine. The clean collected salt water is sprayed over bamboo blinds, which are hung from the ceiling and reach to the floor.

While the salt water runs down along the blinds, some moisture evaporates. The collected salt water at the bottom is re-sprayed again toward the bamboo blinds. Repetition of this process eventually produces saturated salt water. This is then transferred to a large stainless steel pot - about 7 feet in diameter - and crystallized over a gentle wood fire for the next two days to produce a traditionally moist Japanese sea salt. The last important aspect of natural gourmet sea salt is texture.

The formation of salt crystals is based on time, temperature and the salinity of the brine. The salt artisans craft becomes apparent as he orchestrates the conditions affecting his brine to harvest the salt crystals at just the right time to produce his signature gourmet sea salt.

Some extraordinary examples of salt crystals with amazing textures come from the Balinese salt makers at Big Tree Farms. These salt artisans follow an inherited traditional process that has been passed down from generation to generation since the Majapahit Dynasty some 1, years ago. The Balinese produce sea salt in three distinct crystalline forms in large open salt pans under the Indonesian sun. The first is the Coarse Grain "Hollow Pyramid" crystals that are the natural product of the cool windy days marking the end of the monsoon rains.

Fragile crystals are gently scooped from the surface of the brine to dry in the exposed wind and sun.