Natural Fine Salt for Specialty Meals

Fine Brine From Appalachia: The Fancy Mountain Salt That Chefs Prize

PHOTO: Nancy Bruns, CEO of J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works, gathers fine salt from an evaporation table in Malden, WV

From an Article by Noah Adams, NPR, WV Public Broadcasting, November 25, 2015

Thanksgiving feasts are always in need of something special. Can a sprinkle of artisanal salt noticeably pump up the experience? Let’s meet a new Appalachian salt-maker in West Virginia and find out.

J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works is nestled in the Kanawha River Valley, just southeast of the capital city of Charleston in the small town of Malden (not to be confused with Maldon, a sea salt brand from the U.K.). It’s mostly pasture land, with cows nearby.

Amid the livestock, there’s a new, small — you could call it micro — salt works. ”This is our well, in the field over here. It goes down 350 feet,” Nancy Bruns, CEO of J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works, says.

The wellhead is simple, white and about 2 feet high. It took a couple of weeks to drill, and then came the salty water. ”It did gush; it absolutely did gush. We went through a lot of fresh water on the way down. And we all had cups, we were tasting it on the way down, and I just said no, keep drilling, it’s not salty yet.”

She’s a seventh-generation descendant of salt workers who started the original J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works in 1817. This is a revival of that company.

Long ago, when the mountains rose up, an ancient ocean went underground. But some of it stayed near the surface. The pioneers needed salt and the meatpackers in Cincinnati did, too. There was only one choice: drill deep. Fifty companies did, burning timber and coal to evaporate the water. Slaves were brought in for much of the labor. It was a big, noisy, extractive industry.

At the new Dickinson Salt-Works, an almost-worn-out electric pump is the only real industry. There are two large and peaceful greenhouses — here they call them sunhouses. ”It gets up to around 150 degrees here in the summer,” Megan Parker, the operations manager, says.

Megan Parker is happy to be using sunlight instead of burning fossil fuels.

The salt water is stored in large trays lined with black polyethylene. You can see the beginning of white salt crystals — they’re in graceful, almost mystical patterns.

“It is magic. It’s my favorite part of the process, to see a bed that, like this on our right, that’s completely clear, clear liquid, and then the next day you come in and you start to see these beautiful crystals forming,” Bruns says.

Finished salt crystals are spread out on an evaporation table before being raked and packaged. A 3.5-ounce jar of finished salt from J.Q. Dickinson is shown in the original Article.

Bruns uses a wooden rake to gather finished salt crystals into a pile. Her company will produce about 10,000 pounds this year to be dried, sorted, put in small jars and shipped out to top restaurants like The French Laundry in northern California, Husk in Charleston, S.C., and Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore.

“I think of salt as like wine, so the minerality of our salt is different from the minerality of any other salt, kind of like a pinot noir grown in California is different from a pinot noir grown in France. Could be exactly the same vine but because of the earth that it’s grown in it gives you a different flavor,” Bruns says.

A suggestion from the expert salt-maker for your holiday feast? Whisk up some dark caramel sauce, sprinkle away and approach cautiously with a small spoon.

WARNING — Don’t try this with toxic Marcellus brine.  Actually, fracking activities would very likely contaminate the naturally occurring salt veins overlaying drilled and fracked shale deposits. These issues have arisen with the brine wells of the Axiall chemical plant at Natrium in Marshall County, WV, where Gastar has drilled and fracked in the Marcellus shale.

Kurt Dettinger, General Counsel to WV Governor

Don Rigby and Kurt Dettinger are working to bring an ethane cracker to West Virginia; and, the County Commissioners in the Northern Panhandle are doing so as well. Caiman Energy with natural gas processing plants in Marshall County plans to send its ethane to Canada.

During the Marcellus Natural Gas Liquids & Shale Gas Infrastructure Summit in Canonsburg, Pa., Dettinger, general counsel for West Virginia acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, and Rigby, executive director of the Wheeling-based Regional Economic Development Partnership, spoke of efforts to attract a $1 billion ethane cracker that would bring hundreds of jobs to the Mountain State.

“It would be up to the individual investor and their needs,” Dettinger said, when asked which site he believed would be more likely to attract a cracker, though declining to name the companies considering the project. “We will just be glad when they choose West Virginia.”  However,  Texas-based El Paso Midstream Group is seeking ethane supplies to send 90,000 barrels of ethane daily to Louisiana via an 1,100-mile pipeline.

During a presentation at the conference, Caiman Vice President Art Cantrell stated, “If built, new ethane crackers are projected at four to five years out,” as a reason to send the ethane north of the border,” to Canada for cracking. Caiman has completed a purchase of 150 acres adjacent to the Ohio River south of Moundsville – the former Olin Chemical site – where Caiman will build a processing plant for its propane, butane and pentane.

State officials and business leaders are getting more optimistic by the day about West Virginia’s chances of landing a multibillion-dollar ethane cracker plant that could create more than 500 full-time jobs. Last week, Bayer CEO Greg Babe told a chemical industry trade publication that his company has received several inquires about the use of its sites in Institute and New Martinsville for a cracker, which would process ethane from Marcellus Shale natural gas in the Appalachian Region. After hearing about Babe’s comments, state Commerce Secretary Keith Burdette predicted that a company’s decision to build a cracker plant would come “sooner rather than later” and possibly by the end of the year.