Ingredients · Salt
Grey Sea Salt
Sodium chloride
What it’s like, and how to use it
How to use it
The everyday cooking salt — soups, brines, bread dough, pasta water. It is moist, so it clumps in a shaker and belongs in a salt pig or a bowl. Grind or pinch it. Not for baking where precise dry weight matters.
With food
Bread and butter. Soup and stock. Vegetables. Meat and fish of any kind. Caramel and chocolate.
With spices
Black pepper. Anything — it is the base of most blends that are not salt-free.
With tea
Not a tea ingredient.
Its story
Where it comes from
The tradition is Guérande in Brittany — more than 2,000 hectares of salt marsh, the Pays Blanc, the White Land. Our shop note says French; no supplier record names the saltworks, so we can tell the Guérande tradition but cannot say our salt is from Guérande.
What happened
Guérande's salt is worked by paludiers, each tending fifty to sixty crystallising ponds and harvesting sixty to ninety tonnes of grey salt a year — and until the 1950s most of them were sharecroppers, paid in a share of the salt rather than in wages. The marshes were first recorded in the cartulary of Redon, whose earliest mention of Guérande salt pans is dated 15 December 854. Their hardest history is tax: for more than four centuries the gabelle made salt one of France's most hated levies, and Brittany was one of the free provinces outside it. In 1784 Necker recorded a minot of salt at 31 sous in Brittany against 591 in Anjou next door, so smuggling followed — of 4,788 arrests at Laval between 1759 and 1788, more than half were women and children. By 1970 the marshes were nearly lost to a marina development; the paludiers organised instead, and won a Label Rouge in 1991, a Ramsar listing in 1995 and EU protected status for sel de Guérande in March 2012.
On the shelf with it
Sold on its own, and in these blends.
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Sold outGrey Sea Salt, Fine
Regular price From $6.99 CADRegular price -
Grey Sea Salt, Coarse
Regular price From $6.99 CADRegular price
