FLOWERS OF THE SEA

I always have in my pocket a little box of fleur de sel… I like the taste of it, its sea spray fragrance, its windy aromas…

The beautiful fleur de sel is the result of the love between the sea and the East wind after a beautiful summer day. I suggest that you put less salt in your food before cooking it and have the fleur de sel on your table. The Guérande fleur de sel comes from the sodium chloride dissolving in the sea during its crystallisation and sublimated. This phenomenon does not happen every year. Many aspects have to come together, wind direction, temperature, atmospheric pressure. Lionel, our salt worker, and his wife are experts in the area.

While I was creating my spices powders and joyfully mixing the flavours, I felt the urge to mix some spices to the fleur de sel to magnify this meeting of the far away and the Briton universe of Cancale. This is how the Flowers of the sea were created, this original collection that allow you to sprinkle these blends on products from the sea and the land, creating an infinity of new flavours.

Last homage to this logical journey, I decided to create a new collection of powders by pairing the world spices with the spices of my country: ocean spices, seaweeds from the Cancale marine garden in Cap Fréhel. Since middle school, I am friend with Jean François Arbona, the most educated of all the seaweed gatherers and farmers in Europe. In Saint-Malo with his wife and team, they gather some wild seaweeds such as dulse or kombu, and they grow others like wakame. They are then washed and slowly dried for a few days under a shelter, in the Briton wind. They arrive at our laboratory – warehouse in Cancale, where we grind them to propose them pure, paired with each others or associated to spices like pepper, hot pepper, cilantro and sesame.