Salt Made by a Volcano
Making sea salt is simple and expensive. You take seawater and you remove the water. The removing is where the cost is — most sea salt in the world is produced either by long solar evaporation in hot climates, or by boiling, which means burning something.
Iceland has neither strong sun nor cheap fuel. What it has is heat coming out of the ground for free.
How Norður do it
Norður Salt draw seawater from the coast at Reykjanes and evaporate it using geothermal steam. The heat comes from the same source that warms almost every house in the country. No oil, no gas, no coal in the process.
What comes out is a flake salt — thin, pyramid-shaped crystals that crush between your fingers rather than dissolving as grains. Around nine in ten Icelandic homes are heated the same way, so producing salt with it is less an environmental gesture than an obvious use of what's already there.
The company is small. This is not an industrial output.
Why flake salt is different
The shape does the work. A flake has more surface area and less mass than a grain of the same footprint, so it dissolves faster on the tongue and delivers salinity as a short burst rather than a steady background.
That makes it wrong for pasta water and right for anything finished at the last second — a fried egg, tomatoes, butter on bread, meat resting after cooking. Used as a finishing salt it does something ordinary salt cannot, and used as a cooking salt it's a waste of money.
Keep both. Cheap salt in the pan, this in a small dish next to the stove.
The variants
Saltverk and others produce infused versions — birch-smoked, lava (blackened with activated charcoal), arctic thyme, seaweed. The smoked one is the most useful of these and the most Icelandic in taste. The black lava salt is largely a visual product and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.
If you're ordering for the first time, get the plain flakes. If you're ordering as a gift, the plain plus the smoked is a better pair than any three-way set.
The commercial honesty part
This is the cheapest thing we sell and it is also the thing we get the most repeat orders on. That combination is unusual and it's worth explaining.
Salt is the only ingredient that touches everything you cook. Swapping it changes every meal slightly, which is a bigger return than any single luxury ingredient will give you. A box lasts a few months. It costs less than most of the chocolate on this site.
If you're trying to decide whether ordering from Iceland is worth it at all, this is the item to test it with.
One thing not to do
Don't put it in the grinder you already own. Flake salt is meant to be pinched with fingers from an open dish — grinding it turns it into ordinary salt and removes the entire reason for buying it.
A small open bowl next to the hob. That's the correct storage, and it's how it's used in Icelandic kitchens.
Norður Salt flakes — 250g, $8.99. Or Saltverk Arctic Thyme — 90g, $19.90. Shipped from Iceland, worldwide.