Originally Posted by
Lux Natura
Night after night, I had placed my salt out to collect the dew, always draining off the oil in the morning.
After I had about 1/2 liter of oil, not knowing what to do with the now mushy salt mixture, I left it on a shelf.
After about a month, I started to see the salt climb the walls.
2 months later, the salt had reached the top lip of the pyrex dish.
At this point, I checked on it daily, just because it seemed there was action afoot.
One day, I found a puddle on the shelf below the pyrex - and in that puddle was a single nearly perfect crystal.
Taking this crystal out of the puddle and drying it, I placed it in a flask, and it is now starting to effloresce.
Interested in seeing what other changes can occur, I have devised a pelican style setup, from which the salt can climb out and then drop back into that which it climbed out of to see if that which climbs out will change over time.
From a bit of thinking about it, what I have come up with is that the pressure inside the matrix of the original salt was lower then the vapor pressure - hence it took on water. This makes sense, as in the preparation of it I cooked off all the water. Placing it outside, it takes on humidity.
Afterwards, out of that water, was born something that had a higher internal pressure than not just the moisture in the air, but the very liquid it was swimming it. So it climbs out. Then it dries off, and even now, it seeks to dry itself even further. Maybe as the molecular lattice is formed, it traps water, and as the lattice contracts, it seeks to expel that water. Even after it has expelled enough water to form a nice crystal, it keeps contracting, forcing more water out and turn white powdery. One way or another, there is some action that drives moisture out - maybe a heat, but it's a slow growing process. Certainly I had not seen this had I not waited many months for it to develop.
To taste, the second salt has much more of a bite than the first. It does not dissolve in water either, so I have not gotten around to comparing pH. I have yet to see what it dissolves in and will test in alcohol.
I am interested in researching more about this - and if people have such experiences, or can suggest texts to look into that talk about these kind of things.
For what it's worth, knowing what the cation of my initial salt was, no other salts I have come across in my research fit what the new salt is. Ideally it should be a simple thing to figure out, but in practice it doesn't line up. As if there is something else in the air that is an anion or something similar that just is not chemically defined in the scientific literature. It may not even be the "cation" based salt anymore either - but I will do some flame tests just to see.
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That the crystal that originally crawled out of the soup. About 5mm by 10mm (1/4 inch x 1/2 inch). Flat top and bottom, with 60 and 120 degree angles. The corner i chipped off handing it and tasting it. You can see the stuff that is drying out from it (the white stuff bottom left, there is some more but the camera does not capture it). Under the microscope it is tiny needles or hairs for the stuff drying out. Might be a nitrated form due to the needles, but the taste is wrong for the nitrate. Tastes much more like the hydroxide version, but it's not a hydroxide either. 
This is the stuff in the pyrex crawling out. I've set up so what crawl out of the top one is thrown back into the bottom one. These sat there for at least 2 months before the salt climbed far enough to get to the lip. This salt tastes actually pleasant and nothing like the crystal that crawled out of it initially. Might be a bicarbonate, but it tastes a bit sweet and round and muted actually. That wet spot on the wood to the bottom right is where the puddle first jumped to, and then went around the wood and dripped down on a container below that shelf, and in that is where the first crystal grew, but that all happened overnight. 
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