A Taste of Sitka
Looking around their hometown, they couldn’t imagine a better place to make sea salt.
Just one short block away from downtown’s Lincoln Street is the home of Sitka’s wellness hub. Fisheye Cafe, a brightly lit, cleanly decorated open space invites visitors to fuel their healthy lifestyle with delicious fresh pressed juices, coffee, crepes and other breakfast and lunch delights.
The married couple, owners of Alaska Pure
Sea Salt Co., constantly look for ways to enhance fresh ingredients with their crafted
sea salts pulled straight from Sitka Sound.
“One day, we cooked a whole roast chicken
in a cast iron pan on a bed of veggies inside
the grill with a spruce tip sea salt finish,”
she says. “Sometimes, we will do a whole
meal based around a salt,” adds Jim. “Let’s
do a spruce night!”
Jim and Darcy’s enthusiasm for flavor and delicious food is contagious—and something they are eager to share. As owners of Alaska Pure Sea Salt Co., they often recommend the unexpected to be paired with their product to the visitors who wander into their downtown Sitka store. Jim suggests the “great, clean, bright, citrusy flavor” of the spruce tip salt on poultry and salmon and Darcy the “sweet and savory, fun” flavor of the vanilla bean salt on things you would not expect, like scallops and squash. Without culinary training or restaurant experience, their salt business has grown from their simple passion for good food and a curiosity about how to make a meal extraordinary.
“One of the things we do a lot on the weekends if we have free time is cook together. We just have a blast doing that together. We’ve always loved it. When we go camping, we build a pizza oven out of rocks or we bake a cake on rocks, so there’s that common love of food,” Darcy says.
It was on one such camping trip in 2000 that
Jim and Darcy first experienced the magic of salt making. A pan of sea water from dishwashing was left out on the remote cabin’s woodstove overnight. In the morning, the Micheners discovered a crunchy layer of homemade sea salt sitting in the pan.
After that initial discovery, they started making sea salt for fun, experimenting with the process and using it in their own kitchen. Jim says,
“A year later, we mailed a sample to the salt
guru in the United States—Mark Bitterman of Portland, Oregon—and he was excited that someone was making artisanal salt in the United States. Nobody really was at that time. He said, ‘Good for you, but you have a ways to go to make good quality salt.’” Jim and Darcy decided to keep trying, refine their process and attempt to make the highest quality salt they could. Looking around their hometown, they couldn’t imagine a better place to make sea salt.
“We’re pulling in water from Sitka Sound, and
we don’t have any heavy industry or agriculture here. It’s really a benefit—no herbicides, pesticides or coal burning plant nearby. We’re starting with really beautiful, clean water. Especially as a 16-year fishing guide and
a lifelong lover of fishing, combining Alaska seafood and Alaska sea salt is such a go-to. We’re a fishing town. That’s the backbone of
our entire economy. To pair those two together
in a beautiful setting like Sitka just makes sense,” says Jim.
Jim and Darcy Michener are no strangers to unique flavor combinations highlighted by a punch of their handmade sea salts.
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