Luisenhaller Deep-Sea Salt, 500 gr

Luisenhaller Deep-Sea Salt, 500 gr – Fine-Grained

Valfrids is proud to present Luisenhaller deep-sea salt, from a family-owned company in Göttingen, Germany, with a history dating back to the 19th century. The salt is extracted from a 250 million year old underground pristine ocean 450 meters below ground. It is therefore completely uncontaminated, no environmental toxins have reached it.

Luisenhaller deep-mined salt is a multipurpose and gourmet salt commonly used in the kitchen for cooking. It is completely natural, made without treatment or bleaching and free from chemical additives. Use it the same way you would Celtic salt.

Best kept in a pot or jar with a large enough opening where you can reach in with your fingers. We call it ‘finger salt’. It lacks anti-caking agents and is therefore better suited to a pot or jar with a lid than to a salt shaker.

This is a fine-grained salt, but the degree of granulation depends on the cooking temperature in the pan, the outdoor temperature, the humidity and a little on the daily shape of the salt pan. Just like with a classic natural product. A genuine handcrafted product.

At the bottom of the page you can see the mineral content.

Luisenhaller is the only evaporative saltworks still in operation in Europe. In a whole year, they produce about as much as the big producers do before the lunch break in one day. But the products are not really comparable. Luisenhaller’s salt is extracted as a 27% solution from 250 million-year-old sea salt deposits at a depth of 450 meters. The brine is pumped up and heated in large, shallow pans until the salt crystallizes and can be skimmed off. It is a process that is at least a thousand years old. And apart from the hydropower that was originally used—which was later replaced by electricity—not much has changed at Luisenhaller. It is one of the very few places where you can see how salt was made in the past. The production facility, with its massive oak building and 19th-century machinery, is a historic landmark that can be visited by appointment through the Göttingen Tourist Office.

Who was Luise?

There was a time when companies didn’t use globally protected fancy words or cryptic acronyms invented by well-paid design agencies as their names. Instead, they simply bore the name of the owner’s mother.

In Luisenhaller’s case, the name of the mother of the brothers Louis and Theodor Laporte, who bought the saltworks as second owners in 1863. Unfortunately, this brought them no luck. Neither did the geologist Philipp Rohns, who founded the salt works in 1850, and several other owners who came after them, all of whom tried in vain to make the salt works a commercial success. This was first achieved by Hermann Bartold Levin, the son of a Göttingen cloth manufacturer, who took over the salt works in 1881 and, as the forerunner of all subsequent generations, made the business flourish. Luisenhaller was subsequently run successfully by his sons and grandsons and has remained an independent family-owned business to this day; Jörg Bethmann has been at the helm since 1994.

See photos below from Luisenhaller’s history.