What the Sea Brings: A Little Known Method for Making Sea Salt

This article was originally published in our Summer 2026 print issue. Become a print subscriber to get stories like this delivered to your door four times per year.

Salt is a universal love language. It’s a building block of basic cooking, it’s in our skin, and tears. For thousands of years, we’ve been dredging it out of oceans and carving it out of caves. It’s nearly impossible to believe that there’s something undiscovered happening with salt, but master salter Gregorie Marshall has found a way. Combining a centuries-old method from Poland and Germany with the brackish waters off the Ayrshire coast, Blackthorn Sea Salt has created a first-of-its-kind salt tower to produce their award-winning sea salt.

Marshall’s family tree is more salient than most. Five generations of his family have been in the salt business, primarily importing and exporting it internationally. It was through this family business that he first saw the now- decommissioned salt towers of Eastern Europe, which haven’t turned out salt for human consumption in half a century.

So how do these towers work? The triangular structure offers more surface area for water to evaporate as it falls down the sides. The graduation towers, or salt towers, are coated with blackthorn branches, which create even more surface area and slow down the flow of water. In Bad Nauheim, Denmark, five graduation towers are still in operation as an “inhalatorium,” a spa-like experience as passersby breathe in the salty air. Most towers of this type used inland brine pools or saltwater rivers as their source, but Marshall’s tower is the first to use seawater, and the only one selling the salt it produces.

Of course, the runoff of Marshall’s tower isn’t pure salt just yet. The densely salty water that reaches the bottom of the Blackthorn graduation tower still has to go through the traditional heated-pan method of modern sea salts like Maldon and Oregon-based Jacobsen Salt Co. The slow pan-heated evaporation process gives the Blackthorn salt its unique shape, but the graduated fall outside has already enriched it with the unique flavors and tannins of the tower thorns. It’s a simple process on paper. The salt water evaporates most of the way as it falls down the thorns, then finishes off at a slow heat inside. But in practice, this is a multi-day process that requires constant attention.

The result of this effort has been worldwide recognition, with Blackthorn Sea Salt making its way into the pantries of cookbook authors and Michelin star chefs. Home chefs and salt snobs will have to judge for themselves whether this new method of salt making is up to snuff.