My peppers & salt won't bond!!!

[Gemini Crow Sauce Company]

So, I'm playing around with a 'hot' salt, using coarse ground himalayan sea salt and some dried carolina reaper flakes.
 
what's the best way to have the two stick together in the process and during their life sharing a grinder bottle. Want to avoid the pepper flakes drifting the to the bottom of the grinder.
 
Someone suggested a very very light amount of olive oil spray during the mixing process...
 
thoughts? suggestions?
 
 
 

 

[AJ Drew]

I have no clue how it is done commercially, but have made salts on a very small scale by simmering sea salts with chopped up peppers.  I simmer it down as much as practical, air dry the last part on cookie sheets with wax paper, then grind the finished concoction.  I think I first read about the process in Mother Earth News.  Takes forever.

After thought: Just noticed who you are.  Some of your colors are absolutely amazing.  They jump out but still look very natural.  Your blackberry looks like something I would expect to see next to Amish cheese at a road side market.  Where you use the white labels, you compliment that image greatly.  Natural sea salts would be a fantastic addition to your products.

 

[SmokenFire]

AJ Drew said it right - you've got to put the peppers & salt into suspension and then dry the resultant mix.  It takes a while but your final product will be of superior quality.

 

[JoynersHotPeppers]

AJ Drew said it right - you've got to put the peppers & salt into suspension and then dry the resultant mix.  It takes a while but your final product will be of superior quality.

Yep and very, very time consuming making it very near impossible to have a good price point for the effort. 

 

[sirex]

Now when you say simmer down AJ you mean a solution of peppers, salt and water correct?

How do you get it to form big chunks?

I know from my " other " life if I wanted to make a certain powder into a crystal I would get the powder to the point of saturation and then let it dry. The longer it takes to dry the bigger and clearer the crystals would be.

Seeing as how they are both hydrochloride salts, would the process be the same?

 

[Gemini Crow Sauce Company]

.

After thought: Just noticed who you are.  Some of your colors are absolutely amazing.  They jump out but still look very natural.  Your blackberry looks like something I would expect to see next to Amish cheese at a road side market.  Where you use the white labels, you compliment that image greatly.  Natural sea salts would be a fantastic addition to your products.

 
Thank you...Exactly what I was hoping to achieve with my labels and marketing...The colors of the sauces are so vivid, I didn't want the label to distract the potential customers eyes...TY for the nice words!!

 

[AJ Drew]

Sirex, I simmered to get rid of much of the water but the final drying was on cookie sheets.  I do not know if it was using sea salts or the last part being very slow drying, but it gave fairly large chunks when I broke them off the cookie sheet.  Not the huge rock like crystals that the sea salt started off as.  Hard to describe, more like rocks of lots of smaller rocks.  My guess is really slow drying makes for bigger crystals.
 
On the other life, anyone of any age has had another life.  I think of it as maturing.
 

Yep and very, very time consuming making it very near impossible to have a good price point for the effort. 

 
I goofed with salts after reading a DIY at, I think, Mother Earth News.  But I am willing to bet that commercial efforts could get that time down by putting a vacuum on the drying trays or maybe even freeze drying.  I looked into the later for food storage, very very very expensive equipment.  But there is a set of plans out there to build your own rig for under a thousand dollars us.  Still way too rich for me.

Found this.  There are now home freeze dryers for about 3,500.00.  Much lower than the last time i looked.

http://harvestright.com/product/freeze-dryer-red/