Peter Burt works at the famed Raymonds Restaurant in St. John’s, dealing with the restaurant’s suppliers around the island and ensuring the table-bound food is up to snuff for the restaurant’s reputation.
He’s also one of its suppliers.
On the two days a week Raymonds is closed, Peter goes into the building to make sea salt for his one-man show, The Newfoundland Salt Company. He was inspired to start the company simply because he thinks it’s ridiculous for an island surrounded by salt water to import salt.
Filmmaker Rosemary House recently released an interactive video anthology The Hungry Month of March, that features people like Peter who demonstrate how our new boom in food culture is, as House says, “steeped in the tradition of sustainability and self-sufficiency.” In House’s video on Peter, he rightfully says, “We import everything, and we shouldn’t. We have everything here.”
Newfoundland Salt Company’s product is first rate because Peter only bottles and sells “Fleur de Sel.” During the cook of filtered seawater, translucent crystals of salt form at the surface, known as “Fleur de Sel.” Eventually, as the water boils off, the bottom of the pot is filled with salt too, but the Fleur de Sel is considered top-quality salt, and that’s what Peter sells. Taste his product alongside standard table salt to be converted.
His popular product comes from a process he mastered by mistake. One day his alarm didn’t go off, he slept through the cook, and discovered a little extra time makes for larger, better quality crystals. It took two years of experimenting, a year of perfecting it, and now he’s got clients for it as far flung as LA, Toronto, and New York, despite his limited supply.
You can also find bottles of it in select vendors around the island, like Rocket Bakery, Grates Cove Studios, and the St. John’s Farmer’s Market.
The company will be expanding the summer, by launching a new operation in Bonavista, out of 45 Church Street. They’ll be producing sea salt made with water from Trinity Bay area, including a finer sea salt that he can export year round.
Newfoundland Salt Company already has some ties in Bonavista — craft soap shop East Coast Glow use their salt in its exfoliating “Newfoundland Sea Salt Body Scrub with Wild River Mint and Shaved Iceberg Water Soap.”
I live on a Caribbean Island - Bequia - and my good friend Jerry Simpson - has started a business Grenadine Island Sea Salt - harvesting local salt from the Caribbean sea and using a similar process producing some amazing varities of sea salt, plain or with turmeric, fresh basil or other naturally grown spices added. I have a Yoga studio right across the beach from where he harvests - and we see him and a few local chaps filling huge barrels with Caribbean Sea water and then off to the natural processing. The distillation process removes any impurities that come from the environment - bird droppings etc. Beautiful pure salt with none of the additives of boxed table salt used to keep it from too much moisture. Good for you Peter
300L of seawater at a time to make ~6kg of salt? I wonder how his energy bill looks. And the water is coming right off the back of Robin Hood Bay….
Great story Peter! Have to get some of that NF Salt.
So so happy to know that a Newfoundlander was smart enough to to know you should look locally for your resources. My grandfathers were Robert J Murphy of Avalon Telegraph Co William J Browne who served in Parliament .they were well known on the island probably in the forties and fifties.I am proud to be a Newfoundlander born, though raised. In the United States and happy to hear the entrepreneurial spirit the island is still alive.