#5 Seaweed Salad

Seaweed, for me, has always been that stringy, slimy muck that gets stuck in your hair at the beach and clumps in piles on the beach reeking of the sea and its inhabitants. Surprise, surprise….seaweed is also edible. In fact, it is not only edible, it is a great source of nutrients that can be ingested for nutritional or medicinal value. Asian and European civilizations have used seaweed for food, nutrition, medicine, and prayer for centuries.

One type of seaweed, in particular, functions as a lettuce of the sea – wakame. Garnished with some sesame seeds, it makes for a great salad appetizer common nowadays in American Japanese restaurants but eaten in Asian countries for centuries. Wakame is grown en masse in Japan, Korea, and surprisingly France, with smaller producers in Australia.

Our seaweed came through a dish titled the “Chuka Salad”, which entailed a sprinkling of sesame seeds and aga-aga powder, a gelatinous powder made from algae. The salad had a salty yet sweet kick to it: the saltiness of the plant mixed with a lemon-like sweet & sour taste that may have also been part of a dressing. The texture required a lot of chewing, as the thin rubbery strands were not easily broken down. Sesame seeds added a nice nuttier aspect to the salad and tempered the sugars and salts.

Sources:

http://vegetarian.about.com/od/glossary/g/Wakame.htm

http://www.tradekorea.com/products/Seaweed.html?pageNum=2&linkFlag=2&outMax=20