The mountain is calling

Salt production and types of salt: Everyone knows salt in countless variations. Whether pink, white or black, it is always salt. It looks like a normal spice. But appearances are deceptive, because salt is not called "white gold" for nothing. It used to be extremely expensive and was used to pickle food. Find out more about pickling in salt in our article: Now it's time for salting - pickling or pickling in salt. Salt was and still is a very precious commodity on this earth. What would the roast at a family dinner or the cake for coffee be without salt? Boring and tasteless!

But where does the salt actually come from?

Salt extraction

Like almost everything else in this world, industrial salt extraction has evolved from a backbreaking job to a high-tech process. Despite technological advances, we still extract sodium chloride (salt) from the rock or the sea to this day.

Below we take a look at the different methods of salt extraction.

Salt from the sea

Most of us have experienced first-hand that seawater is salty. Childhood memories: Just arrived at the campsite or hotel and already in the water. Oops, you get water in your eye when you jump in. That stings! Such scenarios or similar experiences are certainly familiar. But how do we extract the salt from the water? The answer: salt marshes - one of the many methods of salt extraction and types of salt.

A salt garden consists of many small concrete pools, reminiscent of children's pools, spread over a large area. Seawater is fed into these many small pools. The pools are located at different levels to ensure that mud, algae and sand settle in the first pools. This process is repeated again and again over the entire surface of the basins and cleans the water. After passing through several cleaning basins, the water reaches its final station. This is where the workers extract the salt.

The water is dammed up in the collecting basins until it has completely evaporated and salt crystals have formed. The salt workers push the crystals together to form heaps, which are then piled up to form whole mountains of salt. These mountains of salt are then taken to the factory for further processing. There, the salt is cleaned one last time, packaged and made ready for trade.

EXCEPTIONFleur de Sel (flower of salt), highly prized by most master chefs, is skimmed by hand and sold uncleaned.

Salt from the mountain

To understand why salt has settled in our mountains, we need to look back many millions of years to the time of the primordial oceans. Even better, to the time when the primordial oceans dried up.

Even then, the oceans contained salt. After the water had dried up, only a meter-thick layer of white gold remained. Over the course of several million years, higher and higher layers of clay and sand covered this layer of salt until it finally disappeared underneath. Earth movements and climate changes caused the salt layer to bury itself deep under the rocks.
Today, the mineral is freed from all these layers in order to put it on our plates or in our soups. This type of salt extraction and salt types take place in salt mines.
The inner workings of a salt mine consist of huge halls and kilometers of corridors. In the halls, the walls are blasted to expose the salt. The resulting huge chunks are crushed, cleaned, sieved and finally ground. After these steps, the salt from the mountain is also sold.

EXCURSE: Evaporated salt. This type of salt is also extracted from the mountain, but it is obtained from salty springs and rocks through which salty water flows. The extracted brine is heated until only the salt crystals remain.

Brine

Brine exists in both natural and artificial reservoirs.
Natural brine reservoirs still exist, but these brines are usually too thin for economically viable salt extraction. For this reason, salt often has to be added artificially.

The high-tech process of extracting salt from rock salt deposits

Today, we extract brine from the earth's surface via rock salt deposits. To do this, these deposits are drilled into and two pipes of different widths are inserted into each other. The pipe is inserted into the borehole to a depth of up to 1000 meters. Fresh water is pumped through the space between the two pipes to dissolve the rock salt. The dissolved rock salt (brine) is pumped up through the inner pipe and is ready for further processing and subsequent sale.

Types of salt

Now that you know how salt is obtained, we have a list of different types of salt for you so that you always have the right salt at home. Find out more about salt and how it can be used in a cultural context in our article: Why do you give bread and salt?.

Are you wondering what effect salt has on your health? We have the answer in our article: Salt and health - effects on the human body