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Cooking with Seawater

7.2K views 10 replies 11 participants last post by  Capt Len  
#1 ·
What are you experiences?

Never would..never have..only some foods..only when moon is full..goes well with rum...
 
#2 ·
Plenty of times, usually to cook freshly collected seafood. Some fresh water usually mixed in with the salt. Where I spent the summers everybody had big fire blackened pots. Summer bonfire lobster and crab cookouts, clams, mussels....Good memories. Used to snorkel and grab the crabs off the bottom, dig clams at low tide. Buy lobster fresh off the boat or later when they move in close to shore you could sometimes grab them in fairly shallow water at low tide.
 
#3 ·
First crossing from Frisco to Hawaii on my own boat, we tried to make spaghetti with sea water. Every other crossing, be it on a 600 foot ship or a 65 foot ketch, the only thing I'd had to do with food was as a consumer, so I knew nothing about preparation at sea.
Not a long (about 35 minutes actually), but a really frustrating story later, especially when the crew is letting you know they are a tad hungry, the pasta was completely inedible. A few weeks of trying to get the ratio of sweet water to sea water correct was just as frustrating and I have never attempted to use sea water for cooking, ever again. It probably wouldn't have saved a cup per gallon of fresh water, anyway. Boiling crab and lobster yes, but actually cooking, not so much.
We were taught a Fijian recipe for Moray eel that requires cooking the eel in sea water five separate times, to wash out the toxins, before one can begin to cook in earnest, but that's probably not what you are looking for.
 
#5 ·
Interesting experience by Capta. We use straight sea water to boil pasta, as a rule. No fresh added at all. Pasta is so bland, I'm surprised it could become too salty, unless what it was added to was salty.

Seawater salinity does vary by locale. On average, I think a gallon of seawater has about 6tbs of salt in it. Certainly more than one would add to fresh water to boil pasta. Still I'm surprised by the uptake.

Mid-post, I thought to see what the chefs say. I read that salted boiling pasta water will uptake 3% of the salt to the pasta. That would mean, in a gallon of seawater, you would adding a little less than a half a teaspoon of salt to a pound of pasta. It does sound like too much, but depending on what is added, it could be easily balanced.
 
#7 ·
With pasta, I use half sea and half fresh water. I once tried straight sea water, and the admiral complained. I don't boil any other foods on board.
 
#10 ·
Wait.
So, you guys don't bring along a gallon of thoroughly used pasta water, just topping it up for each new batch of pasta? You just throw it all out and make up a fresh batch every time?
Huh. The things I never realized.

No, I don't salt the pasta water, or the corn water. Not at all. Incredible how little salt you need once you've gotten used to not using it, and you taste the FOOD instead of the salt.