Bamboo salt is Korean. We have never pretended otherwise. What we have done is build the kiln here, source every input within four Indian states, and take the price down by about a third in the process.
Jugyeom has been made in Korea for centuries, but the nine-firing sequence as it is practised today is largely traceable to one man: Insan Kim Il-hun, a doctor of traditional Korean medicine who in 1980 published a text that took the process from the two or three firings then common to nine.
The number was not arbitrary to him. Nine carries weight in that tradition. What is interesting, and what we have spent two years measuring, is that the crystal does in fact change between the eighth pass and the ninth — it melts. Whatever the reasoning behind the number, something real happens at it.
We could build a second kiln. We have chosen not to, because the ninth pass is judged by eye and we have one person who can judge it.
Cast iron, pine-fired, in Nagpur.
Roughly one every five weeks.
Everyone who touches a batch, start to finish.
Our master firer's experience.
Every input has an address. We publish them because a supply chain you cannot name is a supply chain you cannot defend.
Bought directly from twelve agariya families, above the state floor price, on the second harvest when the crystal has grown coarse. Roughly 43,000 people farm salt in the Rann for eight months a year, in a desert that floods. It is among the hardest work in Indian food.
Bambusa bambos in its third year, verified by node count. We planted 41,000 culms last monsoon against roughly 8,900 burnt — a ratio of about 4.6 to one. This is the only part of the process where we can put back more than we take.
Peeli mitti, screened and worked to a stiff paste. It seals the culm while still venting steam. Too wet and it cracks; too dry and it falls off in the fire. There is no substitute we have found.
Firozabad has blown glass for four hundred years. Our smoked apothecary jars and the hand-blown collector's vessels both come from there, and the collector's pieces carry the faint spiral of the blower's pipe.
A brand is defined at least as much by its refusals as by its catalogue. These are ours, in writing.
Those two roasts are sold direct only. Not because of exclusivity theatre, but because they are easy to counterfeit and impossible for a customer to verify by eye. If a shop offers you Navama, it did not come from us. The 1× and 3× are cooking salts and we are glad to see them in kitchens at volume.
No festival sales, no seasonal markdowns, no influencer codes. A price that moves is a price that was never honest. The only concession we make is the ₹390 trial, and that is credited back rather than discounted.
Bamboo salt is a food. The research on its mineral composition and in-vitro antioxidant activity is real and we cite it precisely. The leap from that to a health outcome in a human being is not supported, and the category is full of people making it anyway. We would rather sell less.
Glass, bamboo, wax, kraft and moulded bagasse. No void fill, no shrink wrap, no plastic-lined mailers. It costs us about ₹34 more per parcel and adds a day to packing.
When a batch is gone we start the next one, and it will taste marginally different. We will tell you how.