By Rhianna Rees
The 2023 SSIA conference Lunch: sourdough flatbread, celeriac roulade, charred beetroot and seaweed zaatar; seaweed shortbread
Recently, I stumbled upon a wave of news articles, all about a discovery consumers were having, that 'Chinese crispy seaweed' wasn’t seaweed at all— it was cabbage, masquerading as a deep fried snack. Then, just last week at a careers fair, when I asked students if they'd ever eaten seaweed, many of them said "yes! I've had crispy seaweed in a Chinese takeout". Cue the groan.
There's a culinary sleight of hand in this, a deep-fried, seasoned cabbage, standing in for what is perceived to be a much healthier snack. Most of us in the UK are not accustomed to eating seaweed on a regular basis, which is probably why salty crispy cabbage could pass as seaweed, but what if we regularly sat down to eat a full plate of locally sourced seaweed? Or even interacted with seaweed in our diets regularly? What could that look like?
In Japan, seaweed is consumed daily. In restaurants, it's the guest of honour and proudly listed on menus. If you’ve ever spotted an article on seaweed for food consumption, odds are, the accompanying picture is a bright green, wiggly mass of wakame, usually seasoned with sesame and soy sauce. It has more of an umami hit than the crispy cabbage, with many people claiming it tastes "fishy" (often how the umami in seaweed tastes to an unfamiliar palate). Then there’s nori - possibly the most famous seaweed of all, adorning sushi rolls and consumed as seaweed snacks. In fact, the UK is the biggest consumer of nori in Europe. In these snacks, and dishes in sushi restaurants, we are getting our pallets used to umami flavours, slowly but surely.
A picture of a Wakame Seaweed Salad
There’s something familiar and about consuming seaweed in sushi. I'll admit, when I first tried sushi about 15 years ago, I didn't know it was seaweed. Probably because I wouldn't have associated the crispy dark green sheets with the slimy beach cast seaweed I would often have found on the shores of Bournemouth and Brighton beaches.
Nori sheets are light, crispy, and delicate. In Japan, individuals lovingly pressed Pyropia into paper-thin sheets and reserved it for the upper echelons of society. Meanwhile in Wales, people boiled the poor thing until it surrendered into a lump, to be mixed with butter, oats, or bread. Welsh Laverbread, which is made from the very same genus as nori, is a PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) product, traditionally made in the homes of Welsh folk, referenced in hospitality guides and revered, but not globally exported.
Welsh Laverbread
Nori, with its chic, cosmopolitan vibe, has become the epitome of food fashion. It’s light, it’s crispy, it’s exotic. Laverbread, bless it, is more... well, practical.
And therein lies the crux of the matter. We often and historically consumed seaweed in times of desperation, when food was scarce and we had little to eat, or else we prepared it in a way that pales in comparison to your modern-day ultra processed foods.
Back when I worked at SAMS, at the grand launch of the Seaweed Academy in 2022, I tasked the local catering college (as part of UHI) to create a menu of finger food all featuring seaweed in some capacity. The students, initially baffled by the task, rose to the occasion. And what a spread they created: Carrageenan cheesecake, haggis purses with kelp, dulse shortbread, and hand-dived scallops with seaweed vinegar. Plates as pretty as a painting and, for the chefs, a newfound appreciation for seaweed as a functional and flavourful ingredient.
The 2022 Seaweed Academy Launch catered by UHI Argyll catering college
As we embrace seaweed, we are starting to understand the complex flavour profiles of over 20 commercial species, we're only now uncovering some of the major health benefits, and, perhaps most importantly, understanding its role as a sustainable, locally-sourced food. Perceptions change - after all, lobsters were once used as prison food and fertiliser, with laws passed to stop prisons from serving lobsters more than twice a week as it was considered 'cruel and unusual punishment'. Now? They’ve clawed their way to the top of the culinary food chain, to be served with butter and a side of pretension.
Seaweed’s moment is coming, and with the organisations like ours, championing aquaculture and industry development. It won’t be long before we see it take centre stage. And maybe, just maybe, the next time someone orders ‘crispy seaweed,’ it won’t be cabbage in disguise.
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