It's tricky to find it fresh, you usually only get it in small greengrocers or at the Auld Lammas fair. Used to be quite cheap for a bag. Very salty but quite edible and said to be nutrient-dense.
Haha, I clicked on comment to be the token Northern Irishman bringing this up, but you beat me to it!
I didn't know seaweed wasn't a common food until I moved to the Netherlands and started enquiring about the local seaweed, only to be met with blank looks or people pointing me to the sushi nori at Albert Heijn.
I've been here for years and I still don't understand how such a seafaring nation with such an intimate connection with the coast line could lack a seaweed culture.
Until I saw this article I was starting to think seaweed was unique to rockier island coastlines, but I guess it just comes down to taste/fashion?
After all, you can sail the seven seas as pillage the world of all its spices, but nothing compares to a broodje kaas! Have heard the theory that it's part of Calvinistic protestantism to avoid strong flavours, but then I'd expect to see more seaweed etc in the South.
Cheese and milk products in general are popular because it keeps well in winter, and large swathes of the country would get flooded on occasion; only grass would survive, which cows eat, and cows produce milk. Hard to build underground cold storage as well in case of flooding or just a high water table. Cheese will save us all.
I suspect Dutchies used to eat quite a bit of seaweed and aquatic plants (and that some still do, zeekraal is fairly popular), but that it was just forgotten by most Dutch people/culture.
If you're interested you might want to look for hiking/walking tours into the dunes with some nature-freak and/or chef. Or do some internet searching. I recall going on walks with guides as a kid with the family and they would point out tons of stuff that was edible, but somehow ceased to be popular food.
This reminds me of some other losses of Dutch identity/tradition: Dutch folkloric dances (almost no Dutch person will be able to tell you what they where) or the fact that only Japanese seem to know what "Dutch coffee" is.
Typically you get Salicornia in the Netherlands which is not strictly seaweed but I guess somewhat comparible (aquatic plants is I guess what they call it in the article)
>Have heard the theory that it's part of Calvinistic protestantism to avoid strong flavours
That's very believable. Puritan protestants banned all kinds of things that produce "pleasure". How do you think westerners got so prudish about intercourse?
> but then I'd expect to see more seaweed etc in the South.
Warmer waters carry less oxygen(I think that's the gist of it), so less seaweed grows.
Just think about a perfect beach, with clear blue waters and seeing all the way down to the sand on the seafloor... you know it's somewhere very warm and there's no seaweed.
I happened upon that seaweed farm in Garibaldi last fall when we were over on the coast. Bought a bag of it directly from the tank. It didn't exactly taste like bacon, but it was an umami bomb. If I lived over there I'd probably eat it pretty regularly.
I'm not sure how local it is to east anglia and kent but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samphire is still eaten. Its not /technically/ seaweed but its not far off.
While dulse (which comes from the Gaelic duileasg) grows in cold-water pockets of the North Atlantic and Pacific from Canada to Scotland, “it’s as Irish as potatoes,” according to chef, writer and director of Slow Food Northern Ireland, Paula McIntyre. [0]
Given potatoes are part of the post-Columbian exchange, dulse might be more Irish than potatoes.
In the Republic, they have carrageen; which is a seaweed in the Irish Sea. It's used as a natural thickener and ingredient in foodstuffs like Carrageen Moss Pudding:
The etymology is completely distinct tho, not a cognate.
From Old Irish duilesc (compare Scottish Gaelic duileasg), from Proto-Celtic doliskos, duliskos (compare Welsh delysg), from Proto-Indo-European dʰelh₁- (“to bloom, be green”) (compare duille (“leaf”)).
Whereas Latin 'dulcis' comes from PIE dl̥kús ("sweet")
Actually probably cognate with Latin 'folium' (Italian foglia, French 'feuille'). EDIT: Actually no. Not sure there's a Latin cognate at all; the dʰelh₁ PIE doesn't seem to have evolved to "Leaf" in Latin and the Greek word for "bloom" was borrowed instead? Something like that.
On the other side of the Irish Sea there's a seaweed dish in Wales called laverbread, I guess there's something about that sea that makes particularly edible seaweed.
They're growing dulse on the Oregon Coast at Garibaldi now. I bought some directly from the grower when I was there last year. Made it into a vegan burger that was an umami bomb.
I came here to mention Ireland. Seaweed was a huge food supplement during the famine for those on the west coast, especially. Still in practice today to a degree. I love Ireland.
> Some of us still do! It's tricky to find it fresh, you usually only get it in small greengrocers or at the Auld Lammas fair. Used to be quite cheap for a bag. Very salty but quite edible and said to be nutrient-dense.
I had some potatoes from the Island of Jersey when I was working in kitchens in London, they were incredibly good and paired well with seafood dishes: I had to do some research on a dish my Sous had asked me to create with them and I found out why they were so well matched.
Turns out the Isle of Jersey is often covered in seaweed [0], and they use it extensively in the cultivation of it's potatoes. So even indirectly they are eaten even though things like wakame and kombu are not common outside of fine-dining in London they are still a main-stay of the British diet, well if you Jersey Royals at least.
In the US it is widely available dried along with several others, but is quite expensive. It sounds like Maine Coast Sea Vegetables can't harvest enough to keep up with demand (although flakes or powder are available in bulk). Nori seems like the most popular seaweed in the US, though. I tried a bunch of varieties years ago and found dulse to be my favorite snack seaweed both from the flavor (I like it better than nori) and because it is easy to eat out of the bag while others (besides nori) are quite stiff if you try that.
I have started to use this in some soup stocks instead of anchovy paste. Very tasty. Throw a few strips into boiling water, strain out after 15 minutes, and you have a decent broth. You can also sub chard out of recipes for it in some cases. Its still seaweed, so I would only serve to those who already eat it. If someone doesn't like sushi rolls because of seaweed, I wouldn't push it.
i've never understood why it isn't given out free in pubs - its a pittance to source, and my god, it gives you a thirst. Not to mention it tapping into some kind of trad-pub vibes
I wouldn't say that Dulce/Dilsk/Dillisk is 'lesser known' at all! And along the west coast of Ireland, it's also commonly eaten, and works great as a flavour enhancer in stews.
You can buy packaged nori and eat is as a snack. Also, Onigiri is wrapped in nori, and the Japanese developed a special technique to keep it separated from the rice (so it stays crispy) until you open the package.
Also Japanese people regularly eat mozuku, mekabu, and include seaweed in just about everything in the cuisine at least through dashi but also in many other forms. Seaweed is and always has been huge in Japanese cuisine.
Seaweed is one of those incredibly delicious items[1] that for some strange reason isn't more popular. I'd love it if it became more common, and more cuisines (outside Japan) incorporated it into their existing dishes.
I'm imagining like an Indian curry with seaweed mixed in, or an Italian pasta with seaweed mixed in (in addition to existing ingredients).....
My mostly-uninformed hypothesis is that seaweed’s relative lack of popularity outside of East Asia stems from the industrialization timeline of Asia vs eg Europe. People in Europe could and did farm seaweed, but with the technology of the mid 19th century it was not possible to do so in a mechanized way, while they did have the technology to produce grains, get wild fish, and farm animals in a mechanized way. The double whammy is that as populations grew and the amount of available foraged/small-scale-farmed seaweed per person decreased, seaweed culturally lost relevance and importance in people’s diets.
Because Asia industrialized later, they had access to eg plastics and efficient diesel engine boats to make farming seaweed easier. So they could avoid or reduce going through a period where seaweed lost relevance.
You're probably mostly right. There was a different type poverty back then.
These days owning your own home is a dream, but you can walk into a supermarket and buy things that my father wouldn't have dreamt of as a child. Cooked chickens? Every type of fresh fruit and vegetable from all parts of the globe? A frozen food section? Jesus. Remember that video of Yeltsin in the US supermarket?
My father is 96. He grew up in rural Ireland, and his family's lifestyle probably didn't differ much from that of his great grandparents. No cars, electricity, running water, tv, phones. That was "normal". Even the poor families in our part of the world owned their own house and a plot of land. Daily bread was the big issue! Even wealthy locals wouldn't be wasteful with food, and nobody had heard of an avocado. On a daily basis they collected water from a well, chopped wood and collected kindling from around the local woods to keep the stove constantly lit. They milked their own cows, churned butter and cream. He remembers walking the beach with a bucket, collecting periwinkles, and wandering the fields looking for mushrooms when they were in season. He collecting hazelnuts, sloes, damsons and berries from the hedgerow. They kept chickens. They bartered eggs and butter for pork, flour and oats. And yes, they would also go to the local shop to buy tea, sugar, cloth, shoes, materials to repair everything, coal etc. Pots and pans were handed down through generations or given as wedding gifts. Perhaps only a bunch of times every year would they make a trip into the big town to buy clothes and shoes, or replace work out necessities. But even his clothes were sparse, and worn until they practically fell off him. Everything was repaired over and over. I'd say practically none of his calories were imported, pre-cooked or packaged. Today, almost all of it is. Nobody needs to forage to survive any more.
When he told me how hard life was back in the first half of the 1900s, he said "We weren't even poor by local standards! My mother was a cook for a wealthy household and knew how to make the most of whatever was available, and she could sew. My father had a good job on the railway, and had an interest in growing vegetables. Plus his extra uniforms (which came with the job as a railway guard) provided good quality material for children's clothes! Other children in my school though we were well off!"
Seaweed has been quite extensively used as animal feed in at least Norway, to the point where some of the most known local species have names like kutare (cow kelp), sauetang (sheep seaweed) and grisetang (pigs seaweed), since that's what you used to feed your cows, sheeps and pigs.
It's an acquired taste - in other words, you acquire it by exposure. For me, seaweed was something I just accepted but didn't particularly care about when I was first exposed to Japanese food (I will eat everything edible served to me, out of principle), but after all this time I've come to love it and it's now delicious when we use various kinds of seaweed and kelp in soups and lots of other dishes.
There's a lot of unknown food which doesn't taste particularly good at first, or it even tastes bad - but people learn to like just about everything, just give it time. It's not a yes / no forever issue.
In Portugal, you can get fish soups and açorda variations (a kind of breadcrumbs soaked in broth and seasoned with olive oil and garlic) based dishes, with seaweeds.
Just watch survival shows like Alone or Life Below Zero, the fact that people ate things in their environment to survive, and that the things that didn't kill them and helped them survive were continued...is not news, it should actually be considered more an ongoing assumption that they did versus astonishment that they did. Nevertheless, aside from that slight rant, it is good to see scientific techniques and analysis used and those practices honed and more knowledge built about how humans have existed and lived.
Yes...living off of just seaweeds seems...like a pretty bad idea and incomplete nutrition. In Alone participants are constrained to a specific plot of land -- I'll assume if Igor could go to other locations he could have augmented his diet and improved his living situation (not kept to that boggy area) like a good hunter-gatherer.
My understanding is that there are very few foods that are fine to live off of exclusively, especially vegetarian ones. Potatoes are the most famous example where it is possible, but even there it only works if you eat both white potatoes and sweet potatoes, which come from quite different plants from different taxonomic families.
We have a small specialty cut flower farm and also grow plants for fun. I like to take people around and just start eating all the herbs and leaves and berries and bits, off of all sorts of plants. "That's edible?" "How hungry are you?"
Around Baltic sea there are lots of "cup-stones" ie large stones with lots of tiny cups painstakingly drilled in.
Historians all agree that these are for "religious" purposes collecting blood from sacrificed beings. I say they they are fools, because most valuable commodity thousands of years ago was salt.
Another purpose was drying seaweed, because you can mildly high, probably from nicotine, because drying seaweed smells like fermenting snuff at Swedish Tobacco.
It's the consequence of the food industry becoming hyperindustrialized in which uncommon ingredients and "off-cuts" no longer fit with the goal of pursuing economy of scale. Ultraprocessed food is efficient to produce and distribute and formulated to specifically target innate human cravings (high sugar/sodium/carb/fat) in ways that were not possible before.
This is a trend that started in the U.S. and gradually spread out across industrialized nations in the post-WWII world as globalization accelerated. However even for Americans, offal used to be a common ingredient before and during WWII: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gidc5a/when_...
Not sure what countries or places you mean, but I lived in Spain for 13 years near Valencia and have never seen this at a meal. Maybe in sushi, doesn't count imo.
Here in Maine, there is at least one company pushing seaweed really hard. They are getting all of our lobster fishers to invest into it as a diversification since global warming is going to kill the lobster business. I have a friend who used to work for them even, and you can see them on Youtube talking about their business and products https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhpGNuWRQTE
Even if you don't buy some of the marketing wankery that CEO spouts, ground up seaweed and kelp are just straight up a better version of salt. It's salty, a little umami, and utterly delicious.
They are growing millions of pounds of the stuff and I think they are the biggest distributor in the US right now. Really awesome seeing locals do good things with our local businesses. I have a lot of connections to lobster fishers, and I want them to have a bright future.
I expect it to be a really cheap and plentiful food additive at some point, maybe a good source of MSG or something.
Readit News
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180522-the-renaissance-...
It's tricky to find it fresh, you usually only get it in small greengrocers or at the Auld Lammas fair. Used to be quite cheap for a bag. Very salty but quite edible and said to be nutrient-dense.
I didn't know seaweed wasn't a common food until I moved to the Netherlands and started enquiring about the local seaweed, only to be met with blank looks or people pointing me to the sushi nori at Albert Heijn.
I've been here for years and I still don't understand how such a seafaring nation with such an intimate connection with the coast line could lack a seaweed culture.
Until I saw this article I was starting to think seaweed was unique to rockier island coastlines, but I guess it just comes down to taste/fashion?
After all, you can sail the seven seas as pillage the world of all its spices, but nothing compares to a broodje kaas! Have heard the theory that it's part of Calvinistic protestantism to avoid strong flavours, but then I'd expect to see more seaweed etc in the South.
It tastes a LOT nicer fresh. But that's not saying a lot, I mean it still tastes like salty rubber.
As for the content below, that it tastes like bacon?? I mean, yeeeeeaaaaaahhh? In the same way that a used condom might taste of bacon?
If you're interested you might want to look for hiking/walking tours into the dunes with some nature-freak and/or chef. Or do some internet searching. I recall going on walks with guides as a kid with the family and they would point out tons of stuff that was edible, but somehow ceased to be popular food.
This reminds me of some other losses of Dutch identity/tradition: Dutch folkloric dances (almost no Dutch person will be able to tell you what they where) or the fact that only Japanese seem to know what "Dutch coffee" is.
That's very believable. Puritan protestants banned all kinds of things that produce "pleasure". How do you think westerners got so prudish about intercourse?
> but then I'd expect to see more seaweed etc in the South.
Warmer waters carry less oxygen(I think that's the gist of it), so less seaweed grows.
Just think about a perfect beach, with clear blue waters and seeing all the way down to the sand on the seafloor... you know it's somewhere very warm and there's no seaweed.
Apparently when prepared right it tastes like bacon.
Given potatoes are part of the post-Columbian exchange, dulse might be more Irish than potatoes.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180522-the-renaissance-...
Actually an export product, too. https://www.dal.ca/news/2017/08/03/nova-scotia-s-best-kept-s...
https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/carrageen-moss-pudding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrageenan#Food_and_other_dom...
From Old Irish duilesc (compare Scottish Gaelic duileasg), from Proto-Celtic doliskos, duliskos (compare Welsh delysg), from Proto-Indo-European dʰelh₁- (“to bloom, be green”) (compare duille (“leaf”)).
Whereas Latin 'dulcis' comes from PIE dl̥kús ("sweet")
Actually probably cognate with Latin 'folium' (Italian foglia, French 'feuille'). EDIT: Actually no. Not sure there's a Latin cognate at all; the dʰelh₁ PIE doesn't seem to have evolved to "Leaf" in Latin and the Greek word for "bloom" was borrowed instead? Something like that.
Not uncommon in Canada, especially eastern coast.
You can find it in grocery stores sometimes. Price has nearly doubled in the last few years.
https://www.amazon.ca/stores/page/6A642280-AC30-4571-9ECB-08...
I had some potatoes from the Island of Jersey when I was working in kitchens in London, they were incredibly good and paired well with seafood dishes: I had to do some research on a dish my Sous had asked me to create with them and I found out why they were so well matched.
Turns out the Isle of Jersey is often covered in seaweed [0], and they use it extensively in the cultivation of it's potatoes. So even indirectly they are eaten even though things like wakame and kombu are not common outside of fine-dining in London they are still a main-stay of the British diet, well if you Jersey Royals at least.
0: https://jerseyroyals.co.uk/about-us/
I've also seen it sold in little bags in pubs in the Republic of Ireland!
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laverbread
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[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laverbread
I also really enjoy most seaweeds I've tried. Great food generally. I'll have to see if we can get something of laverbread locally.
I think one of the reasons for people not liking it is western diets tend not to like rubbery textures in food.
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https://marutaka-nori.co.jp/en/nori1.html#:~:text=The%20hist....
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chondracanthus_chamissoi
Also, wakame as a salad or in miso soup.
'Sea grape', also in (South East) Asia, is quite delicious in salads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caulerpa_lentillifera
Dead Comment
I'm imagining like an Indian curry with seaweed mixed in, or an Italian pasta with seaweed mixed in (in addition to existing ingredients).....
[1] if you buy it from a good brand, so YMMV.
Because Asia industrialized later, they had access to eg plastics and efficient diesel engine boats to make farming seaweed easier. So they could avoid or reduce going through a period where seaweed lost relevance.
These days owning your own home is a dream, but you can walk into a supermarket and buy things that my father wouldn't have dreamt of as a child. Cooked chickens? Every type of fresh fruit and vegetable from all parts of the globe? A frozen food section? Jesus. Remember that video of Yeltsin in the US supermarket?
My father is 96. He grew up in rural Ireland, and his family's lifestyle probably didn't differ much from that of his great grandparents. No cars, electricity, running water, tv, phones. That was "normal". Even the poor families in our part of the world owned their own house and a plot of land. Daily bread was the big issue! Even wealthy locals wouldn't be wasteful with food, and nobody had heard of an avocado. On a daily basis they collected water from a well, chopped wood and collected kindling from around the local woods to keep the stove constantly lit. They milked their own cows, churned butter and cream. He remembers walking the beach with a bucket, collecting periwinkles, and wandering the fields looking for mushrooms when they were in season. He collecting hazelnuts, sloes, damsons and berries from the hedgerow. They kept chickens. They bartered eggs and butter for pork, flour and oats. And yes, they would also go to the local shop to buy tea, sugar, cloth, shoes, materials to repair everything, coal etc. Pots and pans were handed down through generations or given as wedding gifts. Perhaps only a bunch of times every year would they make a trip into the big town to buy clothes and shoes, or replace work out necessities. But even his clothes were sparse, and worn until they practically fell off him. Everything was repaired over and over. I'd say practically none of his calories were imported, pre-cooked or packaged. Today, almost all of it is. Nobody needs to forage to survive any more.
When he told me how hard life was back in the first half of the 1900s, he said "We weren't even poor by local standards! My mother was a cook for a wealthy household and knew how to make the most of whatever was available, and she could sew. My father had a good job on the railway, and had an interest in growing vegetables. Plus his extra uniforms (which came with the job as a railway guard) provided good quality material for children's clothes! Other children in my school though we were well off!"
All the rage at Italian/Japanese fusion joints (and honestly in Japan too - Japan loves pasta)
Im going to take a wild guess and say this is not in Italy.
Seaweed is one of the few foods that will nearly ruin a dish for me. I just really don't like the flavor or the smell.
There's a lot of unknown food which doesn't taste particularly good at first, or it even tastes bad - but people learn to like just about everything, just give it time. It's not a yes / no forever issue.
If you live near the coast, you can easily forage your own too.
Deleted Comment
Including seaweed in one's diet may have worked for people but living exclusively on seaweed seems to have problems.
Historians all agree that these are for "religious" purposes collecting blood from sacrificed beings. I say they they are fools, because most valuable commodity thousands of years ago was salt.
Another purpose was drying seaweed, because you can mildly high, probably from nicotine, because drying seaweed smells like fermenting snuff at Swedish Tobacco.
Is the article supposed to be surprising or just keeping us updated on the oldest findings? It seems it thinks the former.
Only a few peoples stopped consuming traditional foods, as one might expect.
This is a trend that started in the U.S. and gradually spread out across industrialized nations in the post-WWII world as globalization accelerated. However even for Americans, offal used to be a common ingredient before and during WWII: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gidc5a/when_...
Even if you don't buy some of the marketing wankery that CEO spouts, ground up seaweed and kelp are just straight up a better version of salt. It's salty, a little umami, and utterly delicious.
They are growing millions of pounds of the stuff and I think they are the biggest distributor in the US right now. Really awesome seeing locals do good things with our local businesses. I have a lot of connections to lobster fishers, and I want them to have a bright future.
I expect it to be a really cheap and plentiful food additive at some point, maybe a good source of MSG or something.