Shio Salt

The word shio can refer to granulated salt, but it also means “salt water,” “ocean current,” or “tide.” Although Japan has always had plentiful shio in liquid form, the country’s humid, rainy climate has never been suited for large-scale production of dry salt. Our ancestors made do with salt ash, which they produced by spreading seaweed on the beach to dry between storms, rinsing the dry seaweed in an isolated saltwater pool, and then boiling the brine over a wood fire to evaporate the water and crystallize the salt, which ended up mixed with ash from the burned seaweed. What a long, laborious task to produce salt on an island surrounded by the salty ocean!