Star bright white, medium coarse, clean and clear flavor. There’s faint tangy minerality, the taste of the sea that’s been prized for the past twenty centuries. This salt has none of the bitterness that dominates the flavor of standard table salt.

The salt is dried naturally in pools under the sun near the Sicilian town of Trapani, which has been a center of salt production since the time of the Phoenecians. Today the process is still largely done by hand. When I visited it was salt season, which runs July through September. Men were shoveling and wheelbarrowing salt. The only machine in use was a conveyor that lifted it to form mounds. You can see lozenge-shaped mounds through the grasses along the shore when you drive up the coast. They're covered in orange roof tiles so the rare rain doesn't melt them away.

Trapani sea salt makes a great substitute for Kosher sea salt, which is a mined salt and, to my taste, has a more bitter flavor.