The small waxy potatoes, browned in patches, skins glistening with butter, looked inviting, although I did not expect a lunch of them to be a transcendent experience. But that’s just what it was.
As I ate them, fine crystals of salt sprinkled on the potatoes crackled under my teeth, releasing tiny bursts that tasted of the sea and its minerals. There was no sting at the back of the mouth, no bitterness, just a silky, salty essence wrapping each bite of potato.
This is the magic of fleur de sel, a flaky French sea salt that clumps like wet sand. Preserved in each white crystal is a little of the local air, the water and the earth.
On this small island not far from Nantes, where for centuries fleur de sel (roughly, “flowers of salt”) has been rendered from seawater, it is the closest thing to gold. Made only in small regions off France’s west coast, fleur de sel is skimmed off the top of the salt beds like cream from milk. It is finer than the salt below, so fine that many chefs consider it the best salt in the world.
The mere mention of fleur de sel to Alain Passard, chef at the Michelin three-star restaurant Arpege, sets his eyes ablaze and his fingers flickering as if sprinkling the salt out of thin air. “It’s the last gesture of the sculptor,” he said. In his kitchen in Paris, he uses it as a finishing touch on most dishes. “Steak tartare, or raw tuna, oh, and asparagus,” he said, beginning a rambling list of foods he especially likes it with, ending with the most obvious: french fries.
Chefs around France are becoming enamored of its subtle virtues, as are American chefs, many of whom are encountering it for the first time. Even so, fleur de sel is not being used in the same way as regular iodized salt, kosher salt or even other sea salts.
It is never added before cooking to season food, because high heat destroys its delicate aromas and organic materials, like algae, that cling to the crystals, tinting them pink and gray and giving the salt its character. Instead, the sandy crystals are sprinkled over warm and cold dishes just before serving. Often, especially in homes in the salt-producing areas, fleur de sel is passed in a small dish at the table.
It is handled like something precious. And ought to be. Fleur de sel from Noirmoutier and other coastal areas, like Guerande and Ile de Re, is priced like a rare spice. A quarter-pound can easily cost $8 in New York.
As Didier LeClercq, who lives on Noirmoutier, said, you need a good story to explain its price these days. That, it has.
Special climate
Although coastal France, just a few miles away, has the cool wet climate of the north, Noirmoutier seems like a displaced Mediterranean island. Mimosas bloom, the grass stays green and steely rays beam down on the island most of the year, giving it a tropical, strangely mystical feel.
Noirmoutier, which means black monastery, was named for the monks in black dress who lived here in the 7th Century. They were the first to begin harvesting the salt, using techniques that remain unchanged today. Their system of slow evaporation on natural land builds the character of the salt crystals as they form.
Water from the Atlantic flows into marshes that sprawl across the island’s flat lands, where man-made trenches guide it into a series of square beds, sometimes several acres across. As the water travels, it evaporates, concentrating the salt until it eventually solidifies into crystals.
From these beds, fleur de sel and a larger, chunky salt called sel gris (“gray salt”) are harvested by the saunier, or salt harvester. Every other day in summer and fall, the saunier uses a rakelike tool to scrape together the large salt crystals that have formed on the bottom of the hard clay bed.
His strong, swift strokes draw the crystals to one side of the bed, building a conical pile of chalk-white salt. Every few days, the saunier collects the small piles, adding them to a heap of salt that gets as high as the saunier is tall as the season progresses. This is sel gris.
In the afternoons, when the wind is light and the sun and the water are all in agreement, a white paper-thin film forms on top of the water in the salt beds. This is fleur de sel. It is such a delicate, lacy thin layer that a mild gust of wind or a few drops of rain can destroy it. The saunier must collect it before day’s end.
The saunier gathers it with a skimmer, like the tool used for a swimming pool, gently lifting the film without breaking it up. The crystals are finer, the flavor more gentle and the reward greater. For every 80 pounds of the chunky sel gris, the saunier usually harvests only a pound of fleur de sel.
Bernard Chamley, a former saunier who now runs Aquasel, the cooperative for the island’s salt producers, likens being a saunier to being a sailor. “It requires a lot of observation,” he said. “You are always reading the sky and the wind, and little by little it becomes instinctive.”
The saunier must harmonize the weather with the conditions in his salt beds. He must determine how quickly the water is evaporating each day and, using a simple damming system, adjust the water flowing from the trenches into the salt beds to guarantee a steady harvest.
At the end of each season, the sauniers take their salt to Aquasel, in the town of Noirmoutier, where it is stored under an enormous white tarp for a year. This allows it to dry out. Some of the sel gris is ground to make a finer-textured salt, while the larger crystals and the fleur de sel are simply packaged. The salt is not washed, as is done with many of the Mediterranean salts, and there are no additives.
For a man like Louis Boutolleau, harvesting salt is in his blood. “It’s my life,” he said. “I adore the marsh.” Boutolleau, 67, has worked the marshes for more than 50 years. Life on Noirmoutier when he was young, he said, was almost medieval. His family lived without electricity, and they all labored in the salt beds, working in wooden sabots, or clogs. “I’m a little between the past and the present,” he said.
After World War II, when industrial salt became more available and less expensive in France, demand for hand-harvested salt nearly died off for several decades. Then, in the 1970s, tourism on the island boomed. And more recently, there has been a renewed interest in salt harvesting.
In the 1980s, young people from around France who were determined to preserve traditional ways of life came to Noirmoutier and other salt-producing areas to revive the craft.
These new sauniers are different. Abandoning the blue uniform of French laborers, they opt for grunge attire and long hair. Most are college educated and sauniers by choice, not by tradition.
Now, most older sauniers like Boutolleau spend their time teaching. “I have known the marshes in full swing, and I’ve known them when they were abandoned,” he said. “So I want to see it revived.” Their efforts are working. The number of sauniers on the island has jumped from 25 to 72 in the last three years.
But the slow, ancient way the salt is produced has not changed, nor has the mellow gray crystal that comes from Noirmoutier’s marshes.
Legend in its own time
Before industrial salts nearly wiped out the hand-harvested salts, the salt from Noirmoutier was known throughout much of Europe, principally in the northern countries. Sel gris was used to season water for boiling vegetables or pasta, for making salt crusts for baking fish and for preserving salmon and duck. Some artisanal bread bakers would add it to their bread dough.
Fleur de sel is a comparatively recent discovery, more a result of renewed interest in natural salts from far-flung chefs than from local harvesters. Before, sauniers would break up the fleur de sel, because the film impeded evaporation.
But then, in the early ’80s, top French chefs began asking for it. And they were willing to pay a premium. Sauniers quickly changed their ways.
High in magnesium, tinted with algae and low in sodium compared with most other salts, the flavor of fleur de sel is unmatched.
Sam’s Marcey Street Market, 312-664-4394, sells 125 grams of fleur de sel de Camargue for $6.95.
Fleur de sel and sel gris are available at several New York markets, among them:
Balducci’s, 424 6th Ave., 800-225-3822. A 250-gram bag (about a half pound) of fleur de sel is $8.50; a 2.2-pound container of sel fin gris, $2.50
Dean & Deluca, 560 Broadway, 800-999-0306. A 500-gram bag (about a pound) of fleur de sel is $18 and a 5.7-ounce container, $10. A 2.2-pound bag of sel gris is $6.
