Seaweed Odyssey

First time foraging

2010-05-29T08:47:00.000-07:00

“You’re not 50 with curly hair!” says the man standing in front of me. His name is Fraser Christian. He’s a forager and fisherman and he’s about to take me seaweed foraging.

I got in contact with Fraser at the beginning of last summer through his costal foraging school website. His Dorset-based business offers survival, foraging and fishing courses along the South West coast taking in Wales, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall.

All summer we'd been trying to arrange to meet up for a bit of a skill exchange – he finds it, I cook it, but bad weather, the wrong tides and general scheduling issues etc. had thwarted every attempt. So, in the autumn, with the temperatures dropping rapidly and the seaweeds getting more leathery we decided to get on with it and meet up whatever the weather or tidal conditions.As we'd never seen each other before, I guess I wasn't quite what he was expecting.

After a rather geeky seaweed book swapping session we headed down to Lyme Regis to get going with the foraging. One thing that struck me was just how easy it was. As a born and bred city dweller I had it in my head that it would be complicated with all sorts of potentially deadly varieties lurking in amongst the edible ones, much in the same way as mushroom foraging. So it was a happy surprise to find out that most of the algae was edible. The major concerns being the cleanliness of the water and how long the weed had been out of the sea, but little else.

The weather had been pretty rough the day before, which we were worried about, but it actually worked in our favour as some deeper sea varieties had been washed in land. Here are the varieties we found: sea lettuce, kelp, regular dulse and pepper dulse, sea spaghetti, serrated wrack, bladder wrack, Irish moss.

There were also a few other random ones.
I'll try to start posting a bit more and discuss the results and recipes I came up with from our massive haul soon.
Seaweed pictures by Fraser Christian

Irish Moss Pudding

2009-11-19T14:29:00.001-08:00

It may sound surprising, but seaweed can actually be great in desserts. This recipe is a traditional one from the Scottish Hebrides. The natural gelling agents in the seaweed (in this case carrageenan) come out when it is boiled to create an interesting set jelly-like dessert. The texture in this one is almost like that of ricotta as it is very slightly granular. Supposedly in Scottish folk medicine, this pudding was used as both a cold remedy and a cure for upset stomach.

Makes 6 puddings

Ingredients

10g dried Irish moss

750g whole milk

3 strips lemon zest

3 strips orange zest

2tbsp caster sugar

1 egg yolk

Rehydrate the Irish moss in cold water for around 5 minutes, rinse, drain and squeeze out the excess water.

Put the milk, Irish moss, lemon and orange zest in a pan on the stove and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and allow to simmer for around 20 minutes, until the Irish moss is just starting to dissolve.

In the meantime, mix the egg yolk with the sugar to form a smooth pale paste.

Strain the milk mixture through a fine sieve onto the egg yolk and stir thoroughly. Discard the Irish moss.

Once the sugar has thoroughly dissolved, pour the mix into 6 individual ramekins or pudding bowls.

Leave on the side to cool and then transfer to the fridge and wait until they are totally cold before serving.

Recipes for Eat Japan

2009-11-11T08:15:00.000-08:00

This month I was asked to create some recipes for the Eat Japan website. You can see the results here.

Seaweed Butter

2009-10-23T10:12:00.001-07:00

This week on the BBC programme Masterchef the Professionals, they mentioned seaweed butter. Admittedly it was only a passing comment, but none the less it was there.

The contestants on the show were set the task of preparing afternoon tea at Michelin starred Mayfair restaurant Sketch, for a panel of renowned pastry chefs. The seaweed butter formed part of a salmon and aubergine caviar sandwich.

I haven’t managed to get to the bottom of which seaweed they made the butter with, but the idea itself is one that has been used in Brittany, France for many years. In fact most seaweeds can be used to flavour butter, but my particular favourite is kelp and it imparts a deep umami taste to the butter.

It is also one that I have presented to several chefs whilst doing seaweed cookery demonstrations – some of them being Michelin chefs. I can’t claim to have introduced it to Pierre Gagnaire of Sketch though.

Here is my recipe for kelp butter. The kelp imparts the butter with a light saltiness and deep ocean flavour which works really well with beef, fish, gnocchi, pumpkin ravioli or just spread on to some crusty bread or a cheese biscuit.

Kelp Butter

125g unsalted butter

15g dried kelp

Take the butter out to the fridge and allow to soften so that it is easy to work with.

Put the kelp into a spice grinder and grind to a coarse powder – it should be just a little bigger than particles of sand.

Mix the kelp into the butter until it is evenly distributed.

Lay a sheet of cling film flat on a surface and place the butter on it in a long line down the centre of the cling film. Now fold the sides of the cling film round the butter, twists the ends. Continue twisting until you have a long evenly shaped sausage. Now tie the ends. Leave to chill in the fridge over night. When you are ready to use the butter simply unwrap it and slice off what you need. Wrap the rest up again and store in the fridge for up to a month.

Wakame crackers

2009-10-14T09:52:00.001-07:00

This week I went along to Ottolenghi with my good friends Ana and Teresa from Flavours of Spain to talk to Yotam and his team about seaweed. They had been quite keen to add seaweed to their menu, but weren't entirely sure how to go about it. This is one of the recipes I came up with for them.

Makes: 45 crackers approximately

10g dried wakame

200g plain flour

¼ tsp baking powder

5 tbsp olive oil

Sea salt

Put half of the wakame in to a bowl with 6 tablespoons of cold water. Leave to rehydrate for about 5 minutes.

Sift the flour and baking powder and put them into a food processor with the other half of the wakame. Blend until the wakame has broken down into breadcrumb sized pieces. Now tip the flour mix into a bowl and put the rehydrated wakame and its soaking water into the blender. Blend to a rough paste.

Make a well in the centre of the flour mix and add the oil and the wakame paste, mix with your hand to a smooth dough, which is soft but not sticky – you may need to add a couple more tablespoons of water.

Leave the pastry to rest for 15-20 minutes covered in cling film.

Preheat the oven to 160˚C/Gas 3. Lightly flour a clean work surface and roll the pastry out as thin as you can get it – 2-3mm thick is ideal. Cut the pastry into even squares – 5cm approx - and carefully transfer to a baking tray lined with parchment paper. Press three fork marks into each, brush with water and sprinkle on a little sea salt. ‘A little’ is the key word here. If you add too much they will be very salty.

Bake the crackers for 12-15 minutes or until they have gone hard and very slightly golden, but not brown. Remove from the oven. Cool on a wire rack and then serve. They are particularly good with creamy goat’s cheese.

Storage: they keep for around a week in an air tight container.

Kombu – king of the seaweed world

2009-08-10T15:30:00.000-07:00

Imagine sitting cross-legged on the floor of a low ceilinged Japanese room. A kimono clad woman shuffles in carrying a tray weighed down with local delicacies - grilled yellow tail with a scattering of ginger, a fan of the freshest mackerel lightly pickled in vinegar, steaming rice, seaweed salad, oysters cooking on their own miniature charcoal grill, pickles, the list goes on. Each tiny morsel is carefully arranged on a hand-painted ceramic dish creating a subtle and beautiful picture. In the centre is a red and gold lacquer bowl, covered with a lid. Inside the bowl there lies the pure essence of Japanese cuisine – suimono – Japanese broth.

Although a seemingly simple dish, suimono offers a complex mixture of flavours and aromas. The taste of lightly smoked fish mixed with a mushroomy depth fill your mouth with savoury intensity. Nestled in the centre of the broth there is usually one star ingredient, be it a prawn, mushroom, vegetable or seaweed strand, but, in actual fact, the true star here is the broth itself – dashi, which is the backbone of any good Japanese meal. From tempura and noodle dipping sauces to simmered fish, meat and vegetable dishes and the classic miso soup, dashi is the theme running through them all.

Generally dashi is made of kombu seaweed simmered to release its deep umami taste and smoked, dried bonito flakes, which are added at the last minute to give a rounded, fuller flavour to the stock (see previous post: what is dashi and umami? for more information on this topic). Just as dashi is at the heart of so many Japanese dishes, kombu is at the heart of all good dashi.
The king of seaweeds both in flavour and in size, kombu - or kelp as it is known in English - grows in belt-like fronds of up to nine feet in huge aquatic forests just beyond the coastline of Asia and Europe.

The tradition of kelp harvesting can be found all over the world and in the 19th century kelp gathering was a common coastal sight in many countries. It was usually women who waded out at low-tide to the rock pools and coves filling their baskets with the hand-cut fronds. Much of their labour found its way into animals’ feeding trays or fires for potash production, but also into cooking pots. If you go to Brittany today, you can still find kelp butter spread generously onto crusty bread (recipes to follow in the next post). Although the European seaweed tradition has died out to a large extent, in the unpolluted waters of Brittany, Galicia and Galway they have started it up again and they are even trying out new seaweed cultivation ‘farms’. Seaweed eating is being revived too.

Like most seaweeds, kelp has a natural affinity with fish, adding that familiar iodine seaside kick to the dishes you use it in, but in actual fact its robust texture and depth of flavour mean that it can also hold its own in meat dishes. Once simmered the flesh of the seaweed becomes quite tender with a texture almost similar to that of a fat asparagus spear. Poaching chicken breast wrapped in softened kelp gives the chicken a whole new dimension and texture. One butcher in Yorkshire even chooses it as his preferred ‘vegetable’ in his traditional style steak pies. A final useful kelp tip is that it reduces the cooking time of dried pulses and beans while imparting them with a savoury umami goodness ideal for stews and cassolets.

So, next time you go for a swim in the sea and feel the familiar leathery slap of kelp against your skin, treat it with a little respect.

Image supplied by Clearspring Ltd.

Dashi and Umami

2009-05-21T09:33:00.000-07:00

Last year a substantial amount of my time was devoted to co-editing a new cookbook: Dashi and Umami, the heart of Japanese cuisine. Crossmedia 2009). Having worked as a chef in a ryotei -kaiseki restaurant in Tokyo it was a real pleasure to absorb myself in Japanese cuisine once more. (At this point I should confess that my job in Tokyo was far from glamorous. I went from the dizzy heights of head-chef in a London sushi restaurant to a trainee in Tokyo. Only doing the simplest of jobs, BUT I also did plenty of watching. It really was an amazing experience.

Anyway, back to dashi and umami. Basically, the book is a combination of a cookbook, with recipes by some of Japan’s top kaiseki chefs including Yoshihiro Murata of Kikunoi in Kyoto (the heartland of kaiseki cuisine) and an information book with an encyclopaedic section about all things dashi and umami from the best ingredients to use in dashi to the science behind the way umami works. There is also a comprehensive glossary.

So, what are dashi and umami? Let me explain:

Dashi

This is basic, Japanese stock and the backbone of most Japanese dishes. In its simplest form dashi can be made from kombu - kelp, but it is more commonly made from a combination of kombu and katsuobushi - dried bonito fish which is shaved into flakes. If made in this way you get ichiban primary and niban – secondary dashi. Ichiban dashi is usually used for clears soups and other dishes where the aroma is important and has a much lighter more fragrant flavour. Niban dashi, which is made by using the ingredients from ichiban dashi again, has a much stronger fuller bodied flavour as the ingredients yield their flavour much more quickly on second use.

It is also possible to make dashi using a combination of kombu and niboshi – small dried fish, which had a slightly more bitter taste popular in miso soup. Finally there is one more kind of dashi known as shojin - vegetarian dashi which is generally made from a combination of kombu and dried shiitake mushrooms.

Umami

The fifth human taste after sweet, salty, bitter and sour. It is something that Westerners still find quite hard to quantify although it is well known and understood in the East. Perhaps the best way to explain it is as ‘savouriness’. To my mind it is an almost earthy taste. It is most commonly derived from: glutamate, which can be found in seaweed (such as kombu), Parmesan cheese, cured hams, tomatoes and onions amongst other things; guanylate, which is abundant in mushrooms, especially when they are dried; and inosinate, which is generally found in meat and fish.

The synergistic effect

Evidently dashi contains large amounts of umami as it always made from umami-rich ingredients; but, the cunning thing is that it is made from a combination of different umami substances which significantly enhances the umami content. This combining of umami substances is known as ‘the synergistic effect’. Rather than being a simple case of one umami substance plus another umami substance equals double the umami content, it is supposed to be something more like ten times the umami content. Hence the fact that umami, as well as dashi, is the backbone or ‘heart’ of Japanese cuisine.

Images supplied by Cross Media.

Dukka with Sea Salad

2009-03-10T09:45:00.000-07:00

Last week I was focusing a lot of my attention on North African cuisine as I had to write a feature about a Tunisian Extra Virgin Olive Oil for Clearspring. During my experimentation I came up with a recipe for dukka – an Egyptian spice mix which is commonly eaten with bread dipped in olive oil with a little bit of seaweed in it. By adding some seaweed you can get an interesting texture and flavour to your mix at the same time as reducing or even eliminating the salt in the recipe. So, here it is:
Dukka with Sea Salad

This traditional Egyptian nut and spice blend works well with a little seaweed.

90g Hazelnuts
90g sesame seeds
30g Cumin seeds
60g Coriander seeds
5-10g sea salad (dry)
Sea salt, to taste

To serve:

Extra Virgin Olive Oil, as needed
Flatbread or North African bread, as needed.

1. Roast the hazelnuts, sesame seeds, cumin and coriander separately either in the oven or a dry frying pan. Snip the sea salad in to small pieces and toast in a dry pan. Rub the skins off the hazelnuts and then mix everything together including the salt. Blend roughly in a food processor. Be careful not to blend too much or else the oils will start to come out in the nuts and seeds.

2. To serve: dip warm bread or flat bread into Extra Virgin Olive Oil and then into the dukka. It is also fantastic sprinkled on to salads, eggs, rice dishes and much more.

3. To store: dukka keeps well for over a month in an airtight container.

Seaweed sensation at Borough Market

2009-03-10T09:20:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post my seaweed adventures are supported and followed with interest by my good friends Ana and Teresa who own the company Flavours of Spain. They have a stall at Borough Market now, so I went along a few weeks ago to find out a bit more about how they are doing down there. You can read about the results here.

A little introduction

2009-01-12T14:55:00.001-08:00

Despite its common association with Asian cuisine, and in particular Japanese, seaweed has strong historical roots in many parts of the world spanning many continents. However, many of the traditional dishes have dies out. Today there are only a handful of places such as Wales, Ireland, Brittany, Hawaii and Iceland still using it traditionally.

For a multitude of reasons seaweed is having a resurgence at the moment. From well known experimental chefs such as Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal to the more classical such as Raymond Blanc, chefs are beginning to appreciate seaweed once more. For its flavours, textures, versatility, nutritional benefits, history and sustainability it is stimulating the taste buds and imaginations of many.

As it is such a diverse foodstuff I have decided to do my own experimentation with the help of my friends and seaweed suppliers http://www.flavoursofspain.co.uk/

So, if you're interested then keep an eye on this blog for established and new recipes and if you have any old seaweed recipes knocking around, let me know!