My life skills in Daming Liver

Chapter 35 Caution
This is the method of purifying refined salt that Su Ze learned from his mentor in Zigong Ancient Salt Field.

Speaking of it, the principle is actually very simple. Coarse salt has a bitter taste, which is actually impurities such as magnesium and calcium in seawater, which is also brine.

Brine is toxic, and the main process of refining refined salt is to remove brine from brine.

Although brine is poisonous, our ancestors have long used brine to make a delicacy, that is-tofu.

Adding brine to soy milk can coagulate the protein in soy milk, and finally become a solid food such as tofu.

The Zigong Ancient Salt Field used this principle in reverse when purifying refined salt, adding soy milk to the brine, using the characteristics of the reaction between soy milk and brine, turning the brine into solid froth, and then skimming off the froth, you can Refined salt without brine impurities is obtained.

Su Ze has to admire the wisdom of these salt workers. These kitchen households, who may not even know the words, can sum up such a chemical purification method in their daily life. Maybe this is the wisdom of life.

Su Ze filled the bamboo tubes made by his own woodworking skills with refined salt, and divided the eight catties of refined salt into eight bamboo tubes.

[Make salt bamboo tube, woodworking experience +8, Lv2, 2/200]

I have to say that carpentry was a practical skill in ancient times. After reaching level 2, Su Ze felt that his hand holding the carpentry knife was more stable.

Looking at the refined salt in eight bamboo tubes, Su Ze felt a sense of accomplishment.

According to the price asked in the ghost market that day, a catty of refined salt was asking for 150 Wen, and Su Ze was going to sell it as soon as possible. Even if he sold it at a low price of [-] Wen per catty, then eight catties would be [-] Wen.

The fineness of Fujian copper coins is not bad, one tael of silver is almost equivalent to [-] Wen, which means that the income of making salt for a day is close to half a tael of silver!

The cost of making refined salt is soy milk and fuel. To increase production, you only need to dig stone plates on the rocks by the sea.

The salt drying method is really a magic tool!
Through this drying of salt, Su Ze finally understood why the method of drying salt is better than the method of boiling salt, and the method of drying salt saves fuel!
In fact, from the perspective of preparing crude salt, the efficiency of the two is similar, and there are many processes required for drying salt, and salt cannot be formed by drying seawater.

If the seawater is only basked, and a large number of impurities in the seawater are not removed, then only bitter brine is obtained, and the cost of soymilk used for purification will increase, and the cost of preparing refined salt will be too high.

The sun-salting method requires a site and a tidal flat that can store seawater. If Changningwei's beach happens to be a tidal flat instead of a beach, it would not be easy to sun-salt.

The sun-dried salt method saves fuel, which is the reason why the sun-dried salt method replaced the boiled salt method later.

Take Changningwei as an example, what can be burned every year is the dried rice and wheat stalks, the withered reeds in the reed fields, and the small branches on the nearby mountains.

Big trees cannot be cut down. The Ming government has a record of old and big trees in the mountains and forests of various places. Whenever the emperor or the Ministry of Industry needs to build them, all places will apportion tribute timber. Fujian itself is mountainous and woody, so it is also apportioned. hardest hit area.

In recent years, Taoist emperors have been practicing Taoist temples, and everyone in Fujian is trembling. They have repeatedly reiterated the ban on logging. In some places, people are even prohibited from going to the mountains.

Even small branches are hard to find. After thousands of years of development, the Fuguang area is now a densely populated area.

The gentle slopes have been turned into terraced fields, and the places that are not suitable for farming have also been planted with mulberry or tea trees under Zhu Yuanzhang's call.

Mulberry trees and tea trees are both economic crops, and they cannot be cut down casually.

The only good thing is that the winter in Fujian is not too cold, and there is no need for too much extra heating costs.

This is also the reason why the economy of the south gradually overwhelmed the north after the Song Dynasty. As the ancestors of the past dynasties continued to cut down trees and open fields for heating, the cost of heating in the north increased day by day. After the increase in food production in the south, the north declined even more.

At this time, Su Ze began to feel that the reason why the industrial revolution was called a revolution was not only because machines improved production efficiency.

The most important thing is that machines have changed the way humans use energy!
The exploitation of coal and oil allowed the high-efficiency energy hidden in the ground to replace wood, which brought about the explosive development of productivity and made machines a hundred times more efficient than manual work.

Back to the salt cooking method, the biggest consumption of the salt cooking method in the Ming Dynasty is fuel, which is why salt workers are called stove households, because their main job is to cook stoves.

From the time when Zhu Yuanzhang set up the kitchen households, he "give the pastures for firewood collection", and then allowed "reed fields for use", and some salt farms also allowed to go up the mountain to cut wood for cooking stoves to cook salt.

However, during the Jiajing period, many surrounding forest farms were "excessively felled, and no vegetation grew", and some reed fields were also degraded by salt and alkali due to excessive depletion.

At this time, the Salt House even began to distribute "stove donations" to the surrounding areas in order to maintain the fuel demand for cooking salt and starting the stove.

Coarse salt is prepared by sun-dried salt method without burning firewood for heating. Coarse salt can be produced directly by using solar energy, which greatly saves energy consumption and reduces fuel input for salt production.

After pouring the salt, Su Ze thought of a drawback of the drying salt method.

The southeast coastal area will soon enter the typhoon-prone rainy season. When there is no sun, there will be no way to dry the salt. I still have to hurry up and dig out the stone plates on the rocks, and hurry up to make a fortune.

After a few days of busy work like this, at the end of NO.20, Su Ze called Lin Liangjun, the little carrot head, and said:

"Is the ghost market open today?"

In the past few days, Lin Liangjun saw Su Ze busy at the seaside every morning and at the family temple in the evening, and he didn't know what Su Ze was busy with for ten cents a catty of coarse salt.

After working hard these few days, the total coarse salt produced is less than [-] catties, which is only [-] cash.

It's still far from the 32 taels of fine silver for fighting in the guard.

Moreover, Fujian coarse salt is hard to sell. The official coarse salt in the county town is only twelve yuan a catty. Su Ze may not be able to sell so much coarse salt.

The ghost market already sells coarse official salt, so why buy Su Ze's?
But seeing that Su Ze, a scholar, is so busy, and he has no other way to make money, little luotou can only bring other children to be busy with Su Ze all day long.

Hearing that Su Ze was going to the ghost market again, Lin Liangjun yawned and said, "The ghost market is open today, brother A Ze is going to sell salt?"

"I'm going to test the market today. Are there any rules for selling things in the ghost market? Are there any reliable people in the guard who can go with me?"

Lin Liangjun said suspiciously: "The ghost market only needs to pay taxes to the ghost market owner. When the stalls are collected, tax collectors will naturally come. If we just set up a stall in the future market, we will pay a fixed amount of taxes. That's fine, that's what Uncle Zong said."

"Reliable people? Can't we just sell them?"

Su Ze shook his head and said, "You are a child. My figure and appearance are too obvious. I am not suitable for setting up a stall in the ghost market to sell things. Are there any ordinary people in the guard? It is better to be low-key."

Lin Liangjun didn't understand why Su Ze was so cautious, but he still said:
"Uncle Zong's youngest son, Uncle Qing, is an honest man, that is, Lin Chun's uncle. How about asking him for help?"

Su Ze nodded, and immediately went to invite Lin Deqing with Lin Liangjun, and invited him to go to the ghost market together.

Now Su Ze's reputation in Changningwei can be said to be in full swing. Everyone knows that he is a capable scholar, so Lin Deqing naturally agreed.

Su Ze carried five catties of refined salt on his back, and walked towards the ghost market together with Lin Deqing and Lin Liangjun.

(End of this chapter)