MARSHFIELD, Maine — There’s not much that’s simpler or more elemental than salt, a mineral that is a necessary requirement for human life and is found in great abundance in the ocean.
But unlike years ago, when a search for salt at the store may only have turned up heavy bags of rock salt to throw on icy walkways or dark blue Morton Salt canisters, the salt options today are abundant and unusual.
Here in Maine, there are companies that evaporate seawater to make fine-grained, mineral-rich sea salt and others that add unique Maine flavors, such as smoked maple sugar. For the last few years, there has even been an entire store in Portland dedicated to the mineral.
Judit Vano-Tydeman, co-owner of the Salt Cellar in the Old Port, said this week that she and her husband, Don Tydeman, first dreamed of opening a salt store after seeing one in Budapest, Hungary.
“We took a risk,” she said. “We said either we’ll take off or stagnate. We really did not know. We just believed in our salt.”
Their first store, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which they stocked with gourmet finishing salts, relaxing bath and spa salts, salted chocolate and more, took off. It did so well that four years ago they opened another in Portland. That store has been growing in popularity, too, she said, with sales each year increasing by more than 20 percent. When asked what she thought explained the trendiness of all things salt, Vano-Tydeman pinned it to the growing prevalence of cooking shows.
“I think we started at the right time,” she said. “If we had started five years before, it might not have been the right time.”
One of the products they carry comes from the other corner of the state — Maine Natural Sea Salt is made in Marshfield, near Machias, by Steve and Sharon Cook. Steve Cook said they started the company 17 years ago and believe they were the first in the state to make Maine sea salt.
“I went to a health food store and saw sea salt for sale,” he recalled. “I thought, we could make that. We have plenty of ocean. And we started looking into it.”
It wasn’t easy. They first had to learn how to evaporate large volumes of filtered seawater, which is brought to their property in a tanker truck and then placed in greenhouses. The salt-making season for them runs from April to October.
“I’m a firm believer in solar-evaporated salt,” he said. “It’s cost-effective, it’s solar, it’s renewable and it’s better quality. It has a lot of flavor, and it’s not processed. A lot of people have said it reminds them of a swallow of seawater.”
Steve Cook said he believes the growing local food movement has brought him a lot of his customers.
“People want to know where their food is coming from,” he said. “My aim is to have a salt that’s not just gourmet. You don’t have to be a salt snob and buy a $20 jar of salt. I want to be somewhere in the middle, with the people who enjoy their food and cooking and care about where their products come from. That’s my market.”