Ado Project

Current experiment:
reforming salt crystals with color and flavor

One litre of water can hold 291 grams of NaCl @ 100° c. Using this rule, I have made two batches of brine.
1.

• 10 Laurel Leaves
• 291g Kosher Salt (Diamond Crystal)
• 1 Litre Tap Water (For experiment purposes, and to know the actual effects of tap contaminants, I went with straight tap water. In the future for actual production I will go with local well water first to know how the hard water affects the crystal formation and flavor. I will go with distilled water on the third attempt to taste it in its purity. Since Sel Gris is my current favorite salt, I will predict that hard well water will appeal to me most.)

2.

• 24 Pequin Chiles
• 291g Kosher Salt (Diamond Crystal)
• 1 Litre Tap Water

The water was brought to a boil with only the flavoring agents. The salt was introduced once boil was reached. The heat was turned off after all the salt was absorbed. The brine was poured into two shallow glass evaporation pans and allowed to evaporate at room temperature. The evaporation took 10 days at 75° F ambient temperature. Standard square pyramid crystals formed in both batches. #1 (Laurel) has a light green hue and #2 (Pequin) has a yellowish-orange hue. The crystals are too large to pass through a fine chinois, so I went with a coarse chinois to remove the flavoring agents and break up the larger crystal formations. The Laurel was simply picked out by hand. The Laurel were dessicated enough to allow pulverizing them in a VitaMix 5200. The pulverized Laurel were added back into the batch. There was nothing left in the chinois after passing the salt.
The Pequin Chiles did not dessicate enough during evaporation. During the pass through the chinois the meat of the chiles freed itself and mingled with the crystals. However, to my delight this actually stained the salt even further a deeper hue of orange-yellow and further contributed to the overall scoville attraction. There were large crystals and chile skin left in the chinois after the passing. I kept the crystals to *seed upcoming batches of this salt.

*You can grow larger crystal formations with the use of seed crystals.

Now I need to taste and take pictures...