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I have always believed that salt tells you more about a place than almost any other ingredient. It carries the sea, the fire, the hands that made it, and the generations who thought it worth preserving even when the easier, cheaper, refined version was sitting right there on the supermarket shelf. That is why, whenever people ask me what makes ECHOstore's pantry different, I point them to two small but mighty products: Tultul from Guimaras and budbud salt from Miag-ao, Iloilo.
Tultul, also called dukdok, is unique to Guimaras. What I love about it is the process as much as the product. Coastal families gather salt-laden driftwood and debris that the sea itself has seasoned, dry it, then burn it into ash. That ash is used to filter seawater into a brine, which is boiled down slowly and finished with coconut milk before it's set into a solid block. The gata does something wonderful here — it tempers the sharpness of the salt, rounding it out into a flavor that is savory first, salty second. When I served tultul at a recent Slow Food event , it became the ingredient people asked about most.
Budbud salt from Miag-ao follows a kindred tradition, born of the same instinct our coastal communities have always had: nothing from the sea should go to waste, and nothing this labor-intensive should disappear quietly. Like tultul, it draws its character from age-old ash-filtration methods rather than industrial refining. And like tultul, it is now recognized by the Slow Food Ark of Taste as a heritage food at risk of being lost — one more reason I consider it my duty, and ECHOstore's, to keep it visible and in demand. I also met the producer at the Iloilo Coffee Festival last year, making the connection more genuine between producer and myself.
Beyond flavor, these salts matter to me because of what they are not. They are not stripped down to pure sodium chloride the way most refined table salt is. Traditional, minimally processed salts like tultul and budbud retain trace minerals from the seawater and the ash used to make them — magnesium, potassium, calcium, and others in small but meaningful amounts. I am careful never to call salt a cure for anything; that is not the point. The point is that when you choose a salt made the old way, you are choosing something closer to how our ancestors ate — food with its full mineral complexity intact, rather than food engineered down to a single note.
There is also the matter of survival — not just ours, but the artisans'. When the Salt Law was repealed, with help from allies like Senator Legarda, it became viable again for small salt makers to legally produce and sell what their families have made for generations. That is not a small thing. Every bareta of tultul or block of budbud you buy is a vote for a livelihood that almost vanished, and for a foodway that deserves a place on our tables, not just in an archive.
So the next time you reach for salt, I ask you to pause. Consider where it came from, whose hands shaped it, and whether it still carries the memory of the sea and forest it was born from. At ECHOstore, tultul and Miag-ao's budbud salt sit on our shelves not as novelties, but as reminders — that the most nourishing things are often the ones we almost let disappear.
Salt well, and choose consciously.
— Chit
