Original subtitles

Life as we know it begins with salt.

Born into this world 4.5 billion years ago,

it spread across the planet,

seasoning our oceans

and settling in dense deposits beneath the earth's crust.

For thousands of years, humans have done the most extraordinary things

to harvest salt.

In the Horn of Africa, at the far end of the Great Rift Valley,

in the shadow of where it's thought that humans first evolved,

lies one of the lowest points on the planet.

A volcanic chasm some 150 meters below sea level,

home to a body of water ten times saltier than the ocean.

This is Lake Assal.

Camel caravans have been moving salt out of this otherworldly landscape

for centuries.

Back then, they called it "white gold."

Omet Moosa is among the last still working the salt today.

We are salt.

It's in us.

It's all around us.

At any given moment each of us is carrying more than two saltshakers

of sodium chloride inside of us.

Coursing through our blood, swelling our cells,

allowing our heart to pump, our muscles to retract, our brain to feed.

But it's more than biology.

More than necessity.

Dig deeper,

and you'll find that the history of salt is the history of us.

Ooh, my beautiful camel Ooh, my beautiful camel

We will see what will happen together

All the camels get tired All the camels get tired

Except you

All the camels get tired All the camels get tired

Except you

We'll cover it in salt like this,

with the feet sticking out.

You go to a restaurant,

the food was under-seasoned.

It's the worst thing that can happen to a cook.

A guest asking for salt... Whoo!

That will, uh, create an instant panic.

When I first started out as a cook, salt was just salt.

It was the same fine table salt that any restaurant had.

Only when I started really traveling and exploring the world,

I realized there's more to salt than just salt.

Skimmed from mountain ponds.

Carved from caverns.

Boiled from the ocean.

Dynamited from mines.

Pink mountain. Black volcanic.

Blue crystal.

Of all the salt wrested from the earth,

few have the quality or the cachet

of the salt skimmed from the tidal pools of France's western coastline

Fleur de sel.

In its meandering journey from the Atlantic,

through the marshes and tidal pools,

the salinity grows in intensity as the water evaporates.

Here on Île de Noirmoutier,

salt has fueled the island's economy since the dark ages.

Its 13-hundred-year history is filled with ebbs and flows.

But one piece has remained constant.

The delicate work extracting Fleur de sel must be done by hand.

Seasoned veterans like Elisabeth and Fabien spend years

learning to skim the fragile crystals from the water's surface.

It's true that when we look at a marsh,

we can recognize its owner.

The way we shape it with our hands...

we inevitably put a little piece of ourselves into it.

In my marshes you can find my obsessions and my defects.

The part of me that is very organized...

that thinks there is no time to waste.

Everything has to be managed as well as it can be.

What is a good day for a salt worker?

It's a day when you can dry your clothes outside.

As a matter of fact, we don't extract salt.

The salt forms in front of us as we pick it.

It's different from the salt that comes from mines or from Djibouti.

That salt was formed thousands or millions of years ago

and comes from dried-up seas.

We follow the crystallization process.

It's difficult to harvest,

and it takes time.

That's because it's a surface phenomenon.

However, there is a mysterious aspect to this.

There isn't a formula for Fleur de sel.

"You can't say, "With this much water

and that much sun...

Poof! I can make some Fleur de sel."

I ask myself a lot of questions about how it works.

Sometimes I happen to make white salt. Other times it's more gray.

Sometimes there's algae in the marsh. Sometimes there isn't.

I've discussed this with my salt worker friends,

and sometimes there is no answer to these questions.

In nature, you have to adapt.

And that's what I explain to the kids.

We can live just fine if we adapt.

My son, Gustave, and I do everything my parents said not to do.

We walk barefoot.

I teach him to use drills and different tools.

We make dams out of dirt.

All the things we wanted to do as kids.

And it's cool.

Let's go check on the water plug.

See if it is opened or closed.

He already has his own marsh.

It's open.

- Can you close it? - Yes.

He says it's his marsh. It's Gustave's marsh.

Great.

And it is his marsh.

What we do in Noirmoutier is something not many other places do,

but we keep doing it.

We dry it with the sun, and we don't use any machines.

We don't use any energy at all.

We put the salt on a big table and let it dry under the sun.

And when it is dry, we sort it by hand.

Fleur de sel has something different,

something more...

I think something more crunchy.

Some people find that it tastes like violet.

It is like Beaujolais.

There are different flavors every year.

Everyone finds what they want in it.

Salt is layered into every aspect of our story.

The numbers tell the tale.

There are more than 14,000 different uses for salt,

from making rubber to melting snow.

Just 3% of today's salt is used in food.

For 2,600 years, the Chinese government controlled salt.

The oldest monopoly in the world.

The taxes levied paid for the imperial army

and for the Great Wall.

The English language teems with dozens of words rooted in salt.

Sausage. Salary. Salacious.

The word "salt" is scattered throughout the pages

of our most sacred scriptures.

"Salt of the earth."

"One fresh and sweet, one salty and bitter."

"Everyone will be salted with fire."

- Hi! How are you? - Hi! How are you.

- Actually, it's a big season. - Oh, yes.

Every human tear, every drop of blood,

every bead of sweat...

...is seasoned with salt.

Once upon a time, a gram of salt cost roughly the same as a gram of gold.

Today, a kilo of salt goes for about 20 cents.

Not Fleur de sel.

A kilo of salt from Fabien and Elisabeth's ponds

sells for more than ten dollars.

By the time it finishes its journey,

this Fleur de sel will be in kitchens around the world.

Back in the early days of noma,

it was the days of limited budgets, limited guests.

We didn't have any machinery. No real modern equipment.

And the first thing that came to our mind was,

"What if we covered things in salt?"

It was about wrapping something around an ingredient,

so that the essence of it got held together.

First thing we did it with was...

during the winter, and it was with, uh, celeriac and beets.

And a very mundane, simple ingredient like celeriac

suddenly turned into something luxurious.

I remember we would pack it in, uh, mountains of salt and a few hours in

you could scoop out with a spoon, much like an ice-cream,

you could scoop out this incredibly tender and flavorsome celeriac.

The best I'd ever tried at that one point.

Okay.

We may take salt for granted today,

but not long ago salt was everything.

Salt has shaped spirituality since the beginning of civilization.

Influencing our beliefs, our rituals and the stories we tell about ourselves.

Maras has been here since the pre-Incan era.

Maras has been passed down from generation to generation,

and we're still working the salt.

These are the tears of Ayar Cachi,

the god destined to establish the Incan empire.

Locked in a cave by his jealous siblings,

he cried until he created the Salineras de Maras.

The Incas turned this sophisticated network of salt ponds,

3,000 meters in the Andes, into a thriving ecosystem.

It continues today, virtually unchanged.

A testament to the ingenuity of one of history's most advanced societies.

We start by moving the salt around.

In Quechuan we call this "chulquir."

And then we step on it.

After we do that, we pick up the pink salt.

Pink salt can be used for all types of food,

like roasts, mains, sauces. Lots of things.

After the fall of the Incan empire,

Maras salt was mainly used in the small communities

that surround the salt pans.

Today, thanks to a unified cooperative and a global distribution channel,

its value is appreciated well beyond the Andes.

Maras salt is just one part of an increasing awareness

of the Incas' contribution to the food world.

And when the best chefs in the world want to understand

a wild ingredient, or perhaps a forgotten technique from this region,

they come to Cleto.

Cleto's central mission is a different kind of preservation.

He wants to connect centuries of wisdom to the food and traditions of today.

Teaching is my passion.

I love teaching the things I've learned in my life.

Like the little I've learned about Andean culture

and the history of the Incas.

Historically, charqui comes from Inca times.

Here in the upper Andes,

salt is added to alpaca and other fresh meat to make charqui.

Dried, portable, potent and delicious.

You may know it as jerky,

but it started as a way to enjoy meat through the cold winter months.

My mom and my dad would make charqui.

That's the first time I learned to make charqui.

Charqui is also a preserve.

If we leave the meat here, it will go bad after two to three days.

But if we do the charqui process, we will be able to preserve it.

Salt is the gift of time.

A pinch can stretch a season into an eternity.

From bacalao to prosciutto

to salted vegetables,

preservation through salt

meant we'd always have food close at hand.

Which allowed us to explore the world at large.

At noma,

when we were nothing more than five, six, seven months old,

we stumble upon ramsons.

There's this little seed on there.

A bud of sort.

One of our foragers told us that in the old days

they used to make capers from these.

We just had to salt it and let it go through a fermentation process.

It's an extraordinary versatile ingredient

that has the punch of garlic,

the sweetness of cooked onion, the salinity of a caper

- and the acidity that you might get... - Mmm.

...from a lactic ferment such as kimchi or sauerkraut.

Nadine.

It's just incredible.

Oh. It works.

What happens when you add salt to vegetables or a piece of meat?

Let it sit long enough and lactobacillus, a probiotic bacteria, will begin to form.

Feasting on natural sugars,

drawing out acidity and preserving life, sometimes indefinitely.

The pickled vegetables of eastern Europe.

The sheep milk cheeses of the Levant.

Barrels of herring in Scandinavia.

These products aren't just staples,

but pillars of the cultures they come from.

Few dishes play a more central role in a country's culture

than kimchi does in Korea.

The act of making kimchi is an act of community done by millions

across the country each fall, just before the first frost arrives.

To Koreans, kimchi is as essential as water or air.

That's how much our body requires kimchi.

It's a food that our body calls out for.

I may be able to live without my husband, but I can't live without kimchi.

Koreans eat a lot of vegetables.

We preserve vegetables in salt,

then mix them up with seasoning and process them with fermentation.

That's what we call kimchi.

When I was young, about ten years old,

I remember my mother making kimchi with neighbors.

They drank makgeolli and sang songs after making kimchi.

It would take three days for my family to finish making kimchi.

And then we went to another house to help them make kimchi.

And then to another house.

People exchanged labor with one another.

It's a precious and delightful memory for me.

Hello, hello, nice to see you! Welcome.

- Cabbages that are just right for Kimchi. - Wow. Wow.

It's fabulous, isn't it? The smell.

How beautiful.

Really like the spring onions, too. Issue the bill.

Okay.

Today, we've changed from a kimchi-making culture

to a kimchi-buying culture.

Kimchi has become a commodity to be purchased.

So people have replaced the high-quality ingredients

with cheaper ones in a race to the bottom.

That's when I decided that I needed to start my own kimchi business.

My goal is to reproduce the high-quality flavor

of the kimchi that our mothers used to make.

Even though I have a kimchi producing company,

I believe my true talent lies in teaching about kimchi and culture.

KIMCHI SONG

Kimchi, kimchi, delicious kimchi Kimchi, kimchi, let's make kimchi

Are you ready?

Yeah!

Kimchi, kimchi, delicious kimchi Why is kimchi good for me?

Do you want to know?

Yeah!

Kimchi is packed with lactobacillus

That cleans out your bowels

Kimchi prevents disease And keeps us healthy

Kimchi is a super food

Let's enjoy kimchi

Yeah!

Now I'll show you how this big cabbage

becomes small like this.

To make this large cabbage small, we need salt.

Right?

I'm really concerned that kimchi won't be eaten by future generations.

Now our kimchi is ready! Oh?

Are you giving me a big hand? Thank you so much.

Families eat out more.

They don't make kimchi at home.

And they don't feed kimchi to their children very much.

Is everyone wearing gloves?

Yes!

Then try to add the chile paste.

Let me see how it's going.

Yes, add the paste like this.

Great job!

When kids make kimchi themselves and bring it home,

they start eating kimchi.

This is because they make it with their own hands.

Fermentation is more than preservation.

It's flavor.

As microbes work to break down larger compounds in food,

they amplify existing flavors and create new ones along the way.

Sharp sour flavors.

Rich umami flavors that humans had never tasted before.

Layer by layer, you add the seasoning

and put it in a jar.

Then we bury the jar in the ground for fermentation.

Ripen deliciously.

All strong flavors in the world are addictive.

After trying kimchi once,

people keep coming back for more.

Salting food is something you gradually learn.

Step-by-step.

As a young person, you cook your first egg.

You add salt to it. And you figure out how much do you like.

Some more, some less.

I think as a cook,

and probably the one thing that most home cooks forget,

is to taste and season.

Mmm.

Food can transform from bland, uninspiring,

perhaps even...

...something you don't like, to being delicious,

crave-able, "Give me more," "When can I have it again,"

"Please cook it next week." You know?

That's a pinch of salt that makes that difference.

Of course, as a professional chef, if you don't know how to salt,

you... I don't know.

Can you even call yourself a cook?

Salting is at the essence of everything.

It really is.

We'll build a big huatia!

For all of our differences,

for all the things that make one human unique from another,

one society distinct from another,

we have a few things that tether us together.

None more than what we eat.

Food is everything.

Mother Earth, we honor you.

Elena, daughters... Cheers, nieces, nephews...

- Cheers, Dad. - Cheers.

Salt may be necessary for survival,

but it's also essential for one of the most indispensable ingredients

in the human recipe.

Our pursuit of pleasure.

Gustave, could you bring me the Fleur de sel, please?

You can put it on. Put a little here.

Awesome. We're in for a treat.

It's what makes our lives more delicious.

Imagine a roasted potato without salt.

A fried egg without salt.

A meal or a life without seasoning.

Wow.

That looks great.

Oh, yeah?

Thirty-five minutes.

Whoa.

Food is never just food.

It's a mirror.

A microscope.

A road map.

Good?

It's the story of who we are.