How to Produce Salt
There are various ways to produce salt, including extracting it from sea water, separating it from sand, or even extracting it from plant leaves. Some methods involve evaporating the water to leave behind salt crystals, while others use mechanical processes. Each approach has its own unique benefits and challenges, making salt production an interesting and diverse field.
Getting Salt From Seawater
If you live by the ocean, you are in luck. You can extract sea salt by evaporating the salt water. You can do this naturally, or you can boil the water, or heat the water. Make sure you run the saltwater through a cheesecloth or filter before you evaporate the water to remove sand, impurities, and other things you don’t want in your salt. As long as you do not scorch the salt, you can heat the saltwater to speed up the process of evaporating the water.
Salt From Brine Springs
There are brine springs, and some caves can produce salt water. The water from these sources can be boiled in the same manner as seawater. Additionally, there are salt mines and other salt sources buried in the ground, but again, this isn’t necessarily a guaranteed way for you to produce salt where you live. These springs and caves also produce salt, when distilled, that has other minerals in it. These minerals may not necessarily be healthy, so be cautious when trying to distill salt from these sources.
Extract Salt From Sand
Sand frequently has salt in it. Native Americans used to use a way of separating salt from sand. They would pour sand into a jar and mix it up thoroughly. Once it was thoroughly mixed, salt would stay dissolved in the water, but the dirt and sand would sink to the bottom. The salt-infused water would then be siphoned off of the dirt and sand into another jar, and then they would boil it to remove the water, only leaving salt.
Make Salt From Plant Leaves
Many plants contain high concentrations of salt. Among them are Coltsfoot, saltbush or goosefoot are among many. To extract salt from these plants you need to harvest their leaves. Once you have the leaves, you need to dry them, you can hang them to dry, or you can speed up the process and put them in a solar dryer. Once the leaves are dried, you need to set them on fire. Place them on a flat surface, in a windless place and let them burn, in a manner that a cigar would burn. The ash will contain a high salt content, while not necessarily appetizing, it will have a high salt content and can be used as a substitute for salt.
Extract Salt From Plant Roots
Many plant roots have very high salt content. Walnuts and other nut trees have high salt-content roots, along with dandelions to name a few. In order to extract salt from the roots, you can follow this process;
- Dig up the root.
- Wash the root and chop it into pieces.
- Bring a pot of water to a boil and add the root pieces to the boiling water.
- After it boils for a while, the water will turn black.
- Remove the root from the water.
- Continue to simmer the water until all the water is evaporated.
- The black substance that remains is high in salt, while it will taste pretty bad, it can be used as salt because it has a high salt content. Most importantly, it can be used as salt in other applications, including making batteries.