Salt Life at Cape May Sea Salt Company

A surfer turned chef is harvesting New Jersey’s waters for an essential ingredient
 

Before humans—before animals, before plants—there was salt.

Encased in mountains, dissolved in seawater, bubbling in brine springs, salt is everywhere. All animals (including humans) and some plants have evolved to depend on it. The sodium in salt helps our bodies generate nerve impulses and regulates our electrolyte and fluid balance, heart activity and metabolism; we need chloride for digestive and respiratory function. We’re constantly depleting the supply of salt in our bodies and must constantly replenish it.

For Lucas Manteca, founder of Cape May Sea Salt Company, salt is much more than a nutritional requirement and an essential kitchen ingredient. The chef and restaurateur’s life has been shaped by his relationship to the salty sea, from his youth as a surfer to the first restaurant he opened as a chef (Stone Harbor’s erstwhile Sea Salt) to his latest venture as New Jersey’s first commercial salt maker in generations.

Manteca studied at hospitality school in Argentina. Then, attracted by the prospect of surfing in his off hours, moved to Costa Rica, where he opened his first restaurant. It was there that he met Avalon native Deanna Ebner, now his wife, who was working front of house at a neighboring spot. They moved to Miami together and then New York City, where Manteca graduated from the French Culinary Institute.

He went on to work for acclaimed chefs like Dan Barber and Alain Ducasse, at the kind of ultra-fine-dining restaurant that closes for a few weeks or months each year so that chefs can experiment with new recipes and travel for inspiration, something that appealed to Manteca’s wanderlust and creativity. He and Deanna were also ready to settle down; they realized that the Jersey shore could provide them with a stable home base to open their own place, start a family and enjoy freedom in the off-season.

Manteca and Ebner’s first venture, opened in 2005, was Sea Salt in Stone Harbor. Manteca wanted to extend the farm-to-table ethos he practiced in sourcing his produce to a chef’s most powerful ingredient: sea salt. He gathered seawater and improvised an evaporation system in the restaurant’s backyard to make his first small, painstaking batches. Manteca loved the flavor, the texture and the provenance of the salt but could only produce enough for diners at his restaurant to use at the table.

Sea Salt closed in 2009, but the idea of making his own salt stuck with Manteca, who also owns the Red Store in Cape May Point, Quahog’s Seafood Shack in Stone Harbor and the Taco Shop at Cape May Airport. He wanted to turn his sea salt idea into something bigger than a sea-to-table novelty.

A Traditional Take

Manteca knew that salt can be made quickly by heating seawater, but he wanted his operation to be as close to carbon-neutral as possible, which meant relying on traditional methods that coastal-dwelling humans have used to collect salt for thousands of years: sun and wind. Enclosing the operation in a solar-heated greenhouse—the kind of structure most farmers already have on their land—would speed up the process of reducing water from the ocean into liquid salt, then into prized fleur de sel crystals and flake salt for cooking.

After searching for the perfect business partner—someone with a little land, greenhouse equipment, and an open mind—Manteca connected with Derrek Thomas of Windy Acres Farm. Thomas and his wife Stephanie grow flowers and produce on their fourth-generation farm in Robbinsville, just outside Cape May Courthouse. Windy Acres’ partnership with Manteca gives the farm a product it can sell all year long.

The first step in making a batch of sea salt is gathering seawater. “You need to get a lot of water to be able to produce enough salt to commercialize it,” says Manteca—a gallon for every four ounces of finished salt. While Manteca gathered seawater with buckets at first, the duo have developed a proprietary method of quickly filling truck tanks with thousands of gallons per haul. They collect water from certain spots off the coast of Avalon when the tide is high and where the water is as clear as possible.

“What people don’t understand is our water is very clean,” he says. “It could be the water in the Caribbean. We get a very, very small amount of sediment.” While consumers often react with amusement to the idea of salt made with Jersey Shore seawater, Manteca assures consumers that the product is safe and his operation is legal.

“We researched every department—the Department of Agriculture, the FDA, you name it—and there’s absolutely nothing that we’re doing” that is not allowed, Manteca says. “It’s like fishing. There [are] places that you can fish and places that you cannot fish.”

Once the truck is back at the farm—expending the only fossil fuels involved in the production process—the seawater is emptied into aboveground pools and left alone for a few days so that any sediment collected will sink to the bottom. It’s then pumped through a series of fine mesh filters before it goes into huge shallow, black-lined pools to evaporate inside a greenhouse. The seawater is pumped from pool to pool, with a filtration step in between each one, until the sun’s heat—amplified by the greenhouse effect, in which temperatures can reach 130°F and feel like 160°F in the summer months— reduces it to a powerfully concentrated brine.

“If you touch your eyes after you touch that water, it burns,” Manteca says with a laugh. “It’s liquid salt.”

Once the pool of brine concentrates, large, snowflake-shaped crystals will begin to form on the surface and can be carefully skimmed off—this is the coveted fleur de sel, but it’s only available in such tiny amounts that Manteca reserves it for a few select wholesale customers. Pyramid-shaped crystals of salt—which Cape May Sea Salt Company crushes and sells as finishing salt in bags, grinders and tins—fall to the bottom to be raked into piles by hand, then dried on sheets in the sun and wind.

This process is not much different from how France’s salt makers have done it for centuries: hauling water, storing it in shallow clay-lined pools, and waiting for nature to do its work. Manteca gets a boost from the truck and the greenhouse, but he’s up before dawn to work the pools with his wooden rake before the heat of the day, just like the French paludiers.