Ben Jacobsen started making sea salt professionally only last year, but the crystalline flakes coaxed from water he gathers from Netarts Bay on the Oregon coast have the elegance of a fine fleur de sel, the delicate crunch of Maldon and the blindingly white flakes of a Caribbean beach at noon. If the sign of a good finishing salt is a balance of salinity and minerality, the flavor you find in a pinch of Jacobsen Salt is so pitch-perfect it tastes like it's from a centuries-old European workshop instead of a start-up in the Pacific Northwest. Not bad for a former software marketing executive. The 37-year-old Jacobsen first fell in love with sea salt when he was a student in Copenhagen. But it wasn't until he returned to Portland, Ore., and answered an open call at the alternative supermarket New Seasons that he decided to turn a hobby into a career and go with Plan B. In what's now a familiar story, Jacobsen taught himself a forgotten craft. After tasting the waters at more than two dozen sites up and down the Washington and Oregon coast, Jacobsen decided he liked Netarts Bay best, then worked out the permitting and had a metalworker manufacture customized evaporation pans. Once or twice a week, he drives a GMC Sierra from Portland to the coast and back, where he and his two employees start the 45-hour process of making salt. He expects to streamline the supply line soon, and start to make the salt in the buildings of an old oyster farm on Netarts Bay. It's a laborious process, but that's what gives the salt such a satisfyingly thin, fragile bite. The salt is a sleeper. Jacobsen is still relatively unknown outside of the gravitational pull of Portland's deeply attractive gastronomic scene, but he has a few well-placed fans. Chris Cosentino uses it at Incanto in San Francisco, as does Renee Erickson at the Walrus and the Carpenter in Seattle. "It's very clean, very pure." said the chef April Bloomfield, who uses the salt at the Breslin in New York. It's tactile. I like when you pick it up it's so delicate. You can crush it between your fingers and scatter it about. Pick some up and you'll want to crush it and scatter it about, too. $10 for 4 ounces; jacobsensalt.com.