We are two paludiers, salt farmers, working ninety-six clay pans on the marsh west of Guérande. The salt is raked by hand from June to September and packed in tins.
The sun and wind take the water. We rake up what is left.
Nothing is added and nothing is heated. The work is letting the sea in, waiting for the weather and pulling out what forms.
Spring tide, early morning
Twice a month, at the biggest tides, we open a wooden gate and let the Atlantic in. Over three weeks it crosses a chain of clay basins, each shallower and saltier than the last, and reaches the pans at almost eight times the salt of the sea.
Warm afternoon, east wind
On hot days with a dry wind, a skin of crystals forms on the brine, thin as frost on glass. We lift it off with the lousse, a flat wooden blade, before it grows heavy and sinks. That skin is fleur de sel.
Evening, every other day
What sinks keeps growing on the clay floor. We pull it in with the las, a rake with a four-metre handle, and heap it on the ladure, a low platform, to drain overnight. The clay is what turns it grey.
All three come out of the same few centimetres of brine. They differ in where they form, how fast, and what they do in a kitchen.
Skimmed from the surface on hot afternoons. Fine, crisp flakes that stay dry on the plate and crunch before they melt.
Cook with raw scallops and oysters, sliced tomatoes, soft-boiled eggs, salted-butter caramel. Add it at the table, not in the pan.
Pulled from the clay floor. Coarse, moist crystals, grey from the clay, that dissolve slowly and season from the inside.
Cook with pasta and potato water, a salt crust for a whole bass or a celeriac, brines, trays of roast roots.
The grey salt, dried in the sun on the bank and stone-milled. It still tastes of the marsh but pours like table salt.
Cook with bread and pastry dough, vinaigrettes, marinades, everyday seasoning at the stove.
From June to September we walk small groups along the banks at the end of a harvest day. You watch the pans being worked, try the lousse yourself and taste the salt straight off the clay.
We pack on Mondays in the hut and send by post. Choose your tins and email us the order; we reply with the total, the postage and a payment link.