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I received a gift of pink rock sea salt and would like to know how best to process it into flakes. Briefly tried a box grater but that resulted in fine granules. The container includes three walnut sized crystals. Is there some kind of gadget that these are used with? Suggestions?

AO

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  • Mortar & Pestle? Cutting board+Rolling Pin? Do you have a salt grinder?
    – talon8
    Sep 6, 2017 at 17:13
  • Thanks for your reply. Just tried your first two suggestions on one of the crystals. They tended to pulverize into granules rather than flakes. I'll look up salt grinders on Amazon. Maybe some sort of bladed instrument would do the trick for creating flakes. Hmmm.
    – A. Oloroso
    Sep 6, 2017 at 17:30
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    The most common tool I can think of would be a proper salt mill/grinder (looks just like your typical hand held pepper grinder). You would need to use something else to break it into pieces small enough to fit in it first.
    – talon8
    Sep 6, 2017 at 17:48
  • Or see this related question: cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/16482/…
    – talon8
    Sep 6, 2017 at 17:49
  • With that small a crystal, I would be surprised you can do anything else than grate it into granules.
    – Max
    Sep 6, 2017 at 18:15

2 Answers 2

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Flakes form when salty liquid evaporates. With naturally formed flake salt, like harvested sea salt flakes, it's skimmed off the top of seawater pools. I have read, but not confirmed, that higher-volume commercial flake salt manufacturers boil salt water dry and collect the salt from the cooking vessels.

So the good news is that you don't need to buy any fancy gadgets; the bad news is that if you're just interested in obtaining flaky salt and not doing this for some other reason, you probably don't want to do this.

You could try dissolving your salt in water and then boiling it down, but I'd be surprised if you managed to get a consistent flake scraping it off the bottom of the pan. Pretty sure that just buying flake salt and saving your big old salt nugs for grinding or grating would be the way to go... but hey, it's your salt.

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  • OK. Good to know that you really need to buy the flakes rather than make them.
    – A. Oloroso
    Sep 6, 2017 at 23:18
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    Nice flat cookie sheet, with edges. Preferably not to rusty or gungy yet. Dissolve salt in just enough water to cover bottom of pan. Teflon/silicon coat is nice, but not required. Put it in an oven at 350°F or 200°C or whatever for an hour or so until it dries. Pull it out of the oven and let cool. Turn the cookie sheet upside down over a cutting board, or pieces of newspaper, and whang on the sheet. Flakes of salt will fall off of it. Sep 7, 2017 at 3:02
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There is a thing called a morter & pedistal. Make sure it has groves in it for grinding. Hard stone is the best. Onix or marble.

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    A mortar and pestle (note spelling) will result in a fine salt powder, rather than flakes.
    – R.M.
    Sep 9, 2017 at 0:00

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