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Bloomberg Businessweek / SEPTEMBER 2, 2019THE ELEMENTSin geography from the University of Washington, then
moved to San Francisco in 1999. He spent a couple of years at
Tickle Inc., an early social networking site that was acquired
by Monster.com in 2004 and subsequently shut down. He
then decamped to business school in Copenhagen, nearer to
his Scandinavian extended family. In 2006 he moved to Oslo
to work for Opera Software, an experience that convinced
him he could successfully launch a startup. In July 2009 he
set about trying to develop an app for curating other apps. But
founding an app-discovery company a year after Apple Inc.’s
App Store opened might not have been the wisest of moves.
He and his business partner had different visions for how to
proceed and couldn’t build it quickly enough. Without soft-
ware engineers or money to hire them, the company went
nowhere. Jacobsen describes the experience as “a slow, pain-
ful burn and death.”
But his time in Europe had given him a better idea. A girl-
friend had floored him by spending $10 on a small pack-
age of Maldon, a British brand of sea salt known for its
pyramid-shaped flakes. He remembers sprinkling it on top
of a cheap meal of canned mackerel, olive oil, arugula, and
tomato sauce. “I was blown away by how much better good
salt made something,” he says.
After moving home to Portland, he scoured stores, looking
for flaky salts, but all he could find was Maldon. He became
obsessed with producing his own sea salt. His first attempt
involved plunking an inflatable kiddie pool in his backyard
and filling it up with ocean water, to no avail. “So I started
trying to heat seawater in pots and pans and ovens,” he says.
He found that steadily applying low heat over the course of
a day produced satisfyingly tasty grains. Those early experi-
ments formed the basis of the two-week process Jacobsen Salt
uses at Netarts Bay.
Set against the backdrop of Douglas fir trees in Tillamook
State Forest, Netarts Bay is home to the 6,000-square-foot facil-
ity where Jacobsen’s 11 full-time saltmakers produce 180,000
pounds each year. He didn’t arrive there by accident. In
June 2011 he loaded his Portuguese water dog, Lykke, and a
bunch of five-gallon buckets into his Subaru Forester and made
his way north to Neah Bay in Washington, gathering 27 samples
of seawater as he went. Once back in Portland, he made salt
from each sample in search of the crunchiest flakes, the best
coloring, and the right aftertaste. The waters of Netarts BayThe Jacobsen facility in Netarts Bay proved to have a winning secret ingredient: oysters, thousands
of which populate the seven-mile-long estuary.
Jacobsen spent the rest of his summer weekends guarding
steam kettles in the shared commercial kitchen of KitchenCru,
an incubator for culinary startups in Portland. Every Friday
he’d get to the kitchen and spend the next 72 hours there,
taking the occasional half-hour nap in the dry pantry as he
sought the optimal temperature to form large flakes.
The main traits of a great salt are generally held to be
color, texture, and flavor. Color is pure presentation—how
white a crisp, shiny salt looks sprinkled on food. A salt’s
texture affects where it lands and how it dissolves on your
tongue, which influences taste. Flavor, following from the
chemical composition, is what really distinguishes one salt
from another. Sodium chloride is the backbone, but salts
with a bitter aftertaste contain potassium. Something like
Maldon has virtually no potassium. “Flaky salts have a really
high percentage of sodium chloride and really trace amounts
of other minerals,” says Dan Souza, editor of Cook’s Illustrated
and a chef on the PBS cooking showAmerica’s Test Kitchen.
Salt that’s pleasingly tangy will have had calcium and potas-
sium deposits boiled out, followed by a slow, steady evapo-
ration of magnesium.
Jacobsen eventually brought samples of his salt to a new-
vendor fair hosted by a local grocery chain. Ryan White, the
chain’s buyer, liked it so much he asked for orders for each of
the grocer’s 13 stores. With a viable business in sight, Jacobsen
applied for a saltmaking license from the state department of
agriculture, received a permit to pump water out of the bay,
won U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval, got funding
from friends and family, and formed his company. For several
years he drove bay water to Portland before finally buying an
old oyster farm on the Netarts coast, adding some tanks and
pans, and hiring a staff. He was, as far as he can tell, the first
person to set up a salt works on the Oregon coast since Lewis
and Clark, who temporarily established one about 50 miles
north in the early 19th century.J
ust outside his facility, Jacobsen hoists a chunk of cal-
cium as big as a human head. “This is what oysters are fil-
tering out of the seawater to build their shells,” he says.
After making its way through a lone PVC pipeline, the water
reaches a drafty shed where two gargantuan pots, wider than
monster truck tires, complete the work the oysters begin. The
pots are boiling hot; Jacobsen says he’ll never reveal the pre-
cise temperature.
The filtered brine is transferred to the oyster pans, where
it slowly cooks over a period of three days. During this
“low-boiling” period, as magnesium leaches out, salt crystals
form and clump together, densifying and sinking. When a
batch is ready, it’s shoveled from the pan, becoming flake
salt. The brine is then boiled off completely, leaving smaller,
coarse crystals that become the basis of Jacobsen’s kosher salt.
Batches of both varieties are then transferred to drip pans
and dropped off in two sauna-like dehydrator rooms, where
they dry out for three more days. Kosher salts are packaged
on their own or sent out for flavor infusion. The prized prod-
uct, though, is the flake. Before being packaged, it’s sifted by
hand in gold pans and sieves to remove any trace of calcium.