Once an important part of the British diet, seaweed has been out of favour for years. But now this vegetable, packed with vitamins and
minerals, is back in style, writes Lesley Ellis. Photographs by Jean Cazals.
With top chefs like The Sugar Club's Peter Gordon leading the way by putting it on their menus, seaweed has become the ingredient of the moment. So wild food foragers should consider abandoning their woodland wanderings and head to the beach.
Its high vitamin and mineral content has meant there has long been an interest in seaweed among health food enthusiasts, but this doesn't fully explain its current popularity. This is more likely to be due to the rising popularity of Far Eastern cuisine, in which seaweed is especially important, over the past few years. An increase in enthusiasm for natural and traditional local foods has also encouraged cooks to rediscover our native seaweeds and the many ways of using them.
Next time you visit a rocky part of the coastline, poke about the rock pools at low tide. Chances are you will find wavy masses of a finely branched green and red seaweed called carragheen. For centuries, Scottish, West Country and Irish cooks used carragheen as a setting agent for blancmanges and jellies. I gathered a small bagful from a Devon beach and prepared an old-fashioned Hebridean pudding. I boiled the weed in milk and flavoured the thickened liquid with sugar, lemon and vanilla to produce a glossy blancmange with intriguing hints of ocean - delicious drenched with cream. If you're not a beachcomber, you can buy packets of dried carragheen from Caribbean stores, because it is traditionally used in the West Indies to make a spiced milk shake, which is reputed to have aphrodisiac properties.
Other edible seaweeds include the giant kelps - long brown ribbons and hand-shaped fronds, which wash ashore at low tide. In the past these were boiled and served with butter as a vegetable, made into soups, or dried and eaten as a tangy seasoning snipped over food.
Laver is a thin, delicate seaweed that clings like shiny black plastic to exposed rocks around the coast. It has long been enjoyed by the Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, and by the Native American Tswatainuks, who eat it with creamed corn. It also forms part of the traditional Welsh diet. It is commercially harvested west of Swansea, boiled up on a sleepy industrial estate in the village of Penclawdd, and the resulting thick black-green puree is sold as laverbread in Cardiff and Swansea markets. Welsh laverbread is usually rolled in oatmeal, then crisply fried with bacon for breakfast.
The flavour is like olives with marine undertones, and it marries gorgeously with butter, which I add in lavish dollops. The secret of making the laver cakes hold together is mixing the puree with a little oatmeal. You can also wrap each cake in bacon. Laver is also sharpened with Seville orange juice to make a piquant sauce for sewin (sea trout) and sweet Welsh mutton. Experiment by using laverbread in recipes that call for spinach, such as in homemade tagliatelle - the subtle marine flavour is excellent with a seafood sauce.
Two other useful traditional seaweeds are dulse and sea lettuce. Dulse is most popular in Ireland, where it is often mixed with potatoes and butter, adding a salty, savoury bite to fried potato champ, for example. A simple old-fashioned Scottish recipe combines dulse, milk, potato, butter, lemon juice and black pepper to make a thick, fragrant vegetarian seafood broth, best served with crisp oatcakes. In Brittany, dulse is boiled with kelp to make pain d'algues. In Iceland it is finely snipped over haddock as a tangy garnish. Sea lettuce is instantly recognisable: tender sheets of brilliant green, which the French adore fried to melting crispness or chopped into salads.
Of the 20 different seaweeds commonly eaten in Japan, five - nori, kombu, wakame, hijiki and arame - are generally available dried in the UK (don't be sniffy about using dried varieties - Peter Gordon isn't). Nori is Japanese laver, sold as tissue-thin squares which are perfect for wrapping vegetables, fish and chicken, and for sushi. It is also an essential ingredient of Japanese green tea broth. Nori sheets can be reconstituted into a puree for British laverbread recipes - simply tear up the sheets and simmer gently in water.
Kombu - Japanese kelp, is usually sold in tough, dried strips which soften when soaked, and can be cooked to gelatinous disintegration. Japanese cooks use it for stocks including dashi - the classic basis of many sauces and soups. To make your own dashi, place 25g kombu in 1.2 litres of water and bring near to boiling point. Add 25g dried tuna flakes (katsuoboshi - available from Oriental grocers), boil rapidly for two or three seconds, then remove it from the heat and strain. For a more general-purpose stock, add a piece of kombu to a saucepan of water, boil for 20 minutes and add good Japanese soy sauce, a few drops of ginger juice and perhaps a scant tablespoon of sake or dry sherry.
Kombu gives depth and authenticity to all kinds of Japanese dishes, but also try placing strips of kombu around fish before steaming or baking to add flavour and retain succulence. I also use kombu when cooking beans. Adding a strip to the boiling water reduces cooking time and makes the beans more digestible. And I use soaked strips to make an intriguing kelp pickle with a taste somewhere between capers and oceany sauerkraut.
Wakame is one of Japan's most popular seaweeds in soups, eaten raw or lightly cooked and sprinkled with salt. It is widely farmed in Japan and is now cultivated in Brittany for the expanding international seaweed market.
Not all seaweeds found on the beach are good to eat, so when gathering it is best to concentrate on seeking out the species you know you can identify and are likely to enjoy. Most of the popular varieties like carragheen, dulse and sea lettuce are easy to recognise. Spring and early summer are the best times to go gathering, when most seaweeds are young, luxuriant and tender. In winter they can get rather tough and strongly flavoured. It is important that the shore and waters where you pick the seaweed are unpolluted and well away from sewage outlets - avoid any unclear, smelly, muddy or oily areas of coast. Choose a rocky stretch of coastline and arrive an hour or so before low tide so you can follow the tide out. Look for plants that are still growing and attached to their rocks - leave old specimens that have been washed up on the beach, or anything discoloured, disintegrating, bleached, dried up, tatty, doubtful smelling or in any way suspect.
When you find your specimen, cut through the stem, leaving plenty behind so the plant can regenerate. Practise good conservation by taking just a few plants from each area.
To test your seaweed knowledge, see if you can answer this simple question: when is seaweed not seaweed? When it is Chinese crispy fried seaweed, of course. That delectable dark green tangle is made from finely shredded greens, which are deep-fried, then lightly seasoned with sugar and salt. Half marks if you answered samphire. Samphire grows on mud flats, spending only some of its time submerged in seawater, so it is really a seashore plant despite its succulent, oceany qualities.