Macadamia Sea Salt Clusters (raw, paleo, vegan)

Sweet, Salty, Melt in Your Mouth Rich Caramel Filled Raw Chocolates. Originally written by Pacific Wanderlust.

I took my favorite 2 minute, raw, vegan caramel sauce, and stuck it between two layers of raw dark chocolate and tossed in some buttery organic raw macadamia nuts for a little crunch. Then I topped them off with some locally harvested pure sea salt made by Jacobsen Salt Co. These chocolates are seriously filled with the finest ingredients on earth!

A few weeks ago my husband and I joined the Girls at Get Dirty Farm Tours (these girls lead some super fun tours in Oregon/Washington!) for a day exploring the Oregon Coast. Our first stop on the tour was Jacobsen Salt Co. where Ben Jacobsen showed us how he makes his clean and pure flakes of sea salt that “taste like the ocean”.

Pictured below, you will see Ben, standing at the edge of Netarts Bay, Oregon. After making test batches of salts from all along the Oregon Coast, he found the highest quality salts to come from Netarts Bay, and then set up shop here in an old oyster pack house over the past few years. He explained that this bay has minimal fresh water tributaries flowing into it, so it has a much higher salt content than most other bays, which also means less contamination from stream runoff, add to that all of the oysters being raised and hand harvested here, as the oysters actually help purify the water, and you have a perfect source for his handcrafted sea salt.

On our tour we learned how Ben cooks down the ocean water to crate a salty slur, dehydrates it into flakes, and then integrates all sorts of beautiful flavors into his salts, like Smoked Cherry Wood, Stumptown Coffee, Vanilla Bean, and Oregon Pinot Noir. But of course you can also buy the pure flake salt with nothing added, my personal favorite.  You can shop for all of these salts here on his website, or find them in fine food retail shops. And as of about a week ago, you can also visit the Jacobsen Salt Co. Tasting Room in Portland, Oregon.

A delicate flake of melt in your mouth sea salt fresh from the drying room. It really doesn’t get any fresher than this folks!

The rest of our Farm to Sea Tour included visiting a shellfish hatchery, and walking out to the oyster beds in Netarts Bay at low tide to learn how to hand harvest oysters. I am never been a fan of oysters, so I won’t go into much detail here, but I still really enjoyed the tour! And I was surprised to learn oysters are one of the most nutrient dense raw foods you can eat, as when your body eats one, every part of the oyster is used, there is essentially no waste. But that still didn’t convince me to eat more than just one!

Above is a collage of how we spent the rest of the afternoon. The Get Dirty Farm Girls set out a beautiful lunch at a picnic spot on the coast, (of course the Queen of Food Allergies had to bring her own lunch!) at then at the shellfish hatchery we got to see the algae lab! We also snacked on Sea Purslane, one of my new favorite wild edibles, which has a delicate sea salty crunch to it. I could see this being a beautiful garnish and great in salads. I really do love my natural sea salts!