{"id":1310,"date":"2020-06-11T13:15:42","date_gmt":"2020-06-11T12:15:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nourished.eu\/?p=1310"},"modified":"2023-06-06T07:19:19","modified_gmt":"2023-06-06T06:19:19","slug":"the-wonders-of-seaweed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nourished.eu\/index.php\/2020\/06\/11\/the-wonders-of-seaweed\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wonders of Seaweed"},"content":{"rendered":"

I first cooked seaweed for myself on a boat off St Kilda. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d had an unusual spate of warm, dry weather and my vegetable cupboard had turned yellow despite my best efforts. On a run ashore I had spotted the fine chestnut tangles of sea spaghetti floating out of the crystal clean Atlantic waters, I cut some and headed back to the boat to see what the passengers would make of it. They were a game lot and we all crammed in to my tiny galley to watch as the strands turned to a vivid green when placed in the hot water. As a child seaweed had figured highly on the Scanlon dining table. My father would pick carrageen and dulse and make potato cakes for Sunday breakfast. Other exiled Irish relatives who found themselves in Wales would cook up a sludge of laverbread which always looked wholly inedible and was served with roll mop herrings, another bizarre family favourite. My Kildan supper was saut\u00c3\u00a9ed in garlic butter and oil and served with lamb. It had nothing of the foul smelling slime that I remembered. I watched giggling passengers pass around the bowl of and a pair of scissors . I wanted to learn more so I bought books, went on foraging courses and strolled on the beach, sketching, picking and later cooking weeds. I was hooked.<\/p>\n

\"Erik<\/p>\n

Seaweed is Algae. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a generic term, like seagulls, and it falls in to three main categories; red, brown and green. There are no poisonous seaweeds, some don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t taste very pleasant but, they wont kill you and for that reason it is the perfect way to get in to wild food foraging.<\/p>\n

For thousands of years seaweed has been part of our diet. There are records dating back to the 1st<\/sup> century BC which mention sargassum being used to treat thyroid problems. In the Tang Dynasty the Chinese were successfully treating goitres by using the iodine rich thyroids of sheep which they made in to pills, potions and powders. In the western world outlying Islands helped support themselves with kelp harvests which were exported to the mainland for use in agriculture. It is only quite recently that seaweed fell out of favour in the west. In the early 20th<\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0century many inland countries were developing diseases which were associated with poorly functioning thyroid. Over farmed soil deficient in iodine led to goitres. In America in the 1920\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s it was common to wear a bottle of iodine around your neck to protect you. The problem became so bad that Americans began to iodise salt which helped to prevent diseases within problem areas like the Mid West which was aptly named the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Goitre belt\u00e2\u20ac\u009d . In the midlands of England you might suffer from a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Derbyshire Neck\u00e2\u20ac\u009d whilst in Germany you might wear jewellery called a Kropfband which was used to cover the scars left by surgery. Japan and China were virtually immune to all this, and I had to double check this figure, but, forty to fifty percent of their diet is from seaweed. Remarkably the figures from the WHO, advise that you need 150 micrograms of Iodine a day, show that the average Korean diet contains 2,000 % more than that a day!.<\/p>\n

Whilst we are on the subject of salt, did you know that the pouring salt (ubiquitous on all dinning tables and used to kill slugs) is salt with all the goodness taken out?. Salt in its natural form is made up of minerals. These are striped out during processing and then sold as supplements. This is very clever business to deconstruct food and then sell it back to us as necessary to health. This is what happened with iodine until the health costs were taken in to account and salt was iodised. A process that has continued in the West. As I always say if you want to substantially help your body use good salt!<\/p>\n

Back to seaweed and what it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s made up of. It might surprise you to learn that it has more vitamin C than an orange of equivalent digestible weight. It is packed with calcium (astonishingly ten times as much as milk) and it has lots of good old fibre. It is the only vegetable to contain B vitamins, although there is still some argument as to whether we have the ability to digest them in their seaweedy form. And where do you think fishes get their Omega 3? Seaweed! It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also home of vitamins; A, B\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s C D E and K and minerals; Iodine, Iron, Copper, Zinc, Potassium, Manganese. Do you remember Dr Gillian McKeith from the 80\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s (she purported to be a Doctor but no-one know what of) well her mantra included telling us all the we needed to arrange bowel movements after every meal and to eat spirulina. It turns out that she was right about the Spirulina!. But, you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need to buy foul smelling fish food in plastic tubs. Seaweed is a tasty addition to any diet and fun to find.<\/p>\n

Since the beginning of this century the seaweed industry in the west has developed significantly. Virtually every where that I travel I come across another group of algae fans or seafood chefs who are playing around with recipes to incorporate seaweeds lovely umami taste. If you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have access to beach there is the Pembrokeshire beach food company, Mara in Scotland, The Cornish Seaweed Company and Seaman in Denmmark (who just won best cocktail of the year award for his Cointreau seaweed combo). All of these businesses offer all manner of dried products, \u00c2\u00a0they are beautifully packaged and vary in price but they are a great place to begin by adding a sprinkle of dried flakes before going headlong into Dashi making or steeping your own gin<\/p>\n