Salt, part deux

Little did I know I would have two posts on salt on this blog but there appears to be some interest in it.

First, many have asked about the salty soil used in the salt extraction process below.  I.E.- can you use this technique on all soil or is there something special about this soil in particular?  The answer is that there is something special about this soil in particular.  This region of Thailand sits on a salt dome  so there is quite a bit of salty soil, but this is certainly not true for all of Thailand.  It all has to do with geology/geomorphology, but that is about the extent of my knowledge.  Wikipedia has a neat little article on salt and briefly mentions some other ways salt is extracted around the world.  Also, this book on salt suddenly seems a lot more interesting now.

Lastly I wanted to mention an article recently  in the Mekong Times on salt production in Cambodia and export to Vietnam.

Salt Production at Ban Non Wat

Last year when I was working on the excavations at Ban Non Wat in Thailand, the squares I was working in had a lot of very very deep holes. There were so many of them we were kind of baffled about what they were used for. One suggestion was that they were used for salt production as this is a fairly common practice in this region today. While I was at Ban Non Wat this year, we were fortunate enough to see a local village woman making salt. One of the Thai archaeologists asked her about the process and she said this was only her 4th or 5th time making salt, as each time she had done it she produced enough salt to last her 10-15 years. This was a technique she had learned from her mother (although it is not exclusively done by women). I documented the process in photos below.

This is the area where she was doing he salt production. On the very right-hand side you can see the very edge of a big pile of soil she was extracting salt from. The large contraption on the left is a new technique for making salt she was trying out. The traditional method for extracting salt is in the center.

This is a small hole she had dug where she put the salty soil and some water together to make a nice salinated mixture.

This is a funky angle but to the left is the corner of the same little pit above. Next to it she dug a deep hole where she put a ceramic jar. She dug a small hole between the two areas and stuck a bamboo tube between them that acts as a conduit for the salty water to drip from the small pit into the jug.

The salty water from the small jug above is then placed into these larger ceramic jars where it is stored until just the right moment.

This is the new contraption the woman was trying out to filter out the salt into the salt water solution. She’d never tried it before but it does the same thing without all that hole-digging.

Here’s another view of the operation a few days later. The storage tanks are on the right, the big mound of salty soil in the middle, and on the left is a little rectangular pan on a fire.

A closer view of the pan. After a few days in the jugs she has now moved the salinated water to this pan and is boiling off the water to get the salt.

The final product after the boiling process-salt! Looks kinda like couscous.