FROM THE SALT BARONS DESK
Remember all those weeks ago, when I was boasting about how water we had just dropped into our evaporation tanks had started to crystallise after just seven days! Well as I sit here now, shivering and waiting for a snap of cold air from the Southern Ocean to go away, I am reminded how reliant my little business is on sunshine and warmth. I am also reminded that building our very first salt evaporator in a paddock surrounded by tall mature gum trees, may not have been the best idea I’ve ever had. In the middle of summer when the sun is high in the sky, our big evaporation pool gets upwards of eight hours of blistering sunshine a day. It gets so hot in there that you can almost see the steam rising from the pool. Now though we are lucky to get four hours of direct sunshine before the shade takes away all of the heat.
So the question is what do you do about this problem? The answer of course is that you build even more evaporators, in more strategically placed positions, to try to eek out every last ounce of warmth from the sun as it sinks lower and lower in the sky with every passing day.
This is Salt Vap Five now under construction. It sits on a north facing bank that gets about eight hours of full sunshine a day. Once commissioned it will have a minimum of a hundred and sixty of our evaporator trays, which will effectively double our capacity. When its finally up and running, in about a weeks’ time, it will be interesting to see just how much salt we can make even in the middle of winter.
But why stop at doubling production? Our goal at the start of this year’s main evaporation season is to triple our production, so that for each batch we can now make a minimum of 100 Kilograms of pure natural sea salt. We will keep you up to date with our construction program over the winter.
So why am I banging on about production so much. Well its all because of you my salty little followers. When we started this project back in January, we were hopeful it would be successful. But even we were blown away with how well things have gone. In fact, things have gone so well that we now have a bit of problem. The problem is of course we are fast running out of salt. By my reckoning, if the new evaporators don’t yield salt quickly, we will have run out of our raw material by the end of this month. As a result of this, we have for the moment at least, suspended all market activities until October. If our new evaporators are as good as we hope they will be it is possible we could be back earlier. Either way we will keep you up to date with all developments as they happen.
Fear not though!! You will still be able to buy our salt at our local stockists, and the online store will still be open for business. Which leads me to my next little announcement. Even though we are low on product, one of the ideas we had when we first started making our flavoured salts was to make our product reflect the seasons. Some of you at our last few markets would have had the opportunity to try the range of salts we called our Autumn and Winter range. Well we are now ready to launch those salts to the world. It took a bit of tweaking and valuable advice from those of you who tasted the new flavours, but we think we have the balance about right now. In the future we will be marking the change of the seasons each year with the introduction of our seasonal flavours and we hope you enjoy them all. The new flavours now available are;
Smoked – a combination of Pohutakawa and Manuka Chips to make a smooth smoky flavour
Mint & Rosemary – Infused with fresh mint a rosemary, a slightly damp salt that is a winner with roast meat.
Szechuan Pepper – a fragrant peppery flavour with a slight back warmth.
Red Wine – Cabernet Sauvignon reduced to a syrupy consistency adds a slight sweetness and fruity scent to your salt as well as a deep red colour
We hope you will enjoy these new salts we now have on offer. The variety packs available online will now only be made up of the winter flavours until spring arrives. We do still have a limited stock of our original Spring and Summer flavours available but for now any new salt made will be going into the Autumn and Winter range.
Well keep yourselves warm over the winter and keep an eye out for more news on our Evaporator expansion plans. Spring will be here before you know it and then we expect to be fully into making this little business expand and spread the good word about Northland and the fantastic local artisan producers we have up here.
Keep on seasoning.
The Taipa Salt Baron