China had a long history of producing salt from seawater, dating back to the era of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. Yet strangely, the history of sun-dried salt was extremely short. The true method of solar salt production did not appear until the Song Dynasty. Before that, people had always boiled salt, burning seawater with firewood to obtain the coarse-grained sea salt they needed.
As for coarse salt, it could undergo secondary processing—dissolving, filtering, removing impurities, carbon filtration, and other procedures—to produce edible salt.
Of course, it could not compare to modern refined salt.
But in this era, that already counted as good salt.
"How do you dry salt?" Lu Zhi asked.
"It's very simple. Dig pools, fill them with seawater, and let the sun evaporate it. Let the seawater in the first-level pool dry for a day, then move it into the second-level pool, and so on. After passing through nine pools in succession, the seawater will turn into brine. Once it enters the tenth pool, it will crystallize, forming salt crystals. Then you can begin harvesting," Jiang Hao said.
Lu Zhi's eyes widened. "It's that simple?"
"It isn't complicated at all. It's just that no one knows this method." Jiang Hao smiled.
"But what if it rains? Wouldn't all that drying be for nothing?" Lu Zhi asked.
"That's true, which is why you need to choose good weather. Of course, sometimes there might not be more than ten consecutive days of clear skies. If there's heavy rain, we can seal the brine from the later stages in brine pools beforehand, then release it once the weather clears up. That saves a lot of trouble. Still, salt drying is ultimately work that depends on the weather," Jiang Hao said.
"Then boiling salt seems better." Lu Zhi felt that