The salt you and I eat today tastes nothing like what our great grandfathers and grandmothers ate. Back then, salt was harvested naturally and consumed pure—free from additives and without excess processing.

Much of the artisan traditions of salt-making have been replaced by mass-production techniques that yield subpar salt at a fat profit margin through cheap labor and corner-cutting. And many of the companies that once prided themselves in making the best salt have disappeared into history.

Happily, a few of these companies still stand. In this post, I’m going to tell you about one of them called Maldon, which makes sea salt flakes so tender, they taste like the sea and melt in your mouth like snow.

Pepper is the culinary spice made by grinding peppercorns, the dried berries of one of 3,600 species of small trees, shrubs, and herbs in the Piperaceae plant family. The species in this family are pantropical, which means they grow throughout the tropical regions of the earth.

In order of magnitude, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Brazil, and China are the world’s biggest producers of pepper. They produce respectively 163, 89, 53, 42, and 31 kilotons of pepper per year (1 kiloton = 1,000 tons).