“To look into such a pool is to behold a dark forest,” I remark to the stranger sitting next to me on the plane. I am actually reading aloud from Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea. But it seems a reasonable response to his question about why I’m flying across the country, to California, to forage for seaweed. Plus, the other reasons are mostly boring. An old friend, Iso Rabins, runs a San Francisco–based company called ForageSF, and he has repeatedly invited me to seaweed hunt with him. And Maine, where you can also get good seaweed, is frigid. In Sonoma, on the other hand, it is never truly cold. It is only ever rakishly brisk.
Less boring are the innumerable arguments to stop what you’re doing right now and at very least go buy some seaweed. I will try to enumerate: (1) I recoil at the use of the word superfood, but if any food were to qualify, it would be seaweed. With an extraordinary amount of calcium, vitamins A, C, K, and B₁₂, and iodine, potassium, and iron at ten times the levels in land vegetables, protein content to rival soy, and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids comparable to those in fish oil, seaweed is the ne plus ultra of nutritiousness. For all of its “saltiness,” seaweed is surprisingly low in sodium. Such virtue often aligns with unpleasant qualities, like toughness or astringency (read: kale), but (2) seaweed is delicious! It is truffle delicious, MSG delicious, meaning it produces that fifth taste—also in mushrooms and soy sauce, Parmesan cheese and anchovies—known as umami.
A third argument comes from the World Bank in a 2016 report. (3) “To maintain current consumption trends, the world will also need to produce 50–70 percent more food by 2050, increasingly under drought conditions and on poor soils.” Seaweed farms can produce seventeen times the protein of a livestock farm with no fuel, no fertilizer, no freshwater, and no land. Seaweed sequesters nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon, meaning seaweed farms are carbon negative. They improve the environment. (4) Did I mention that British chef Jamie Oliver claims to have lost 28 pounds thanks to seaweed?
The question is: What to do with it? Yes, seaweed has been central to Asian cooking since the start of time, and over the last decade, restaurants in the West have caught on, motivated by the inquiry-based cooking championed by El Bulli’s Ferran Adrià and then Noma’s René Redzepi. Nashville’s Rolf and Daughters braises mushrooms in kelp stock. New York City’s Houseman steams fish with seaweed butter. At Chicago’s Smyth, chef John Shields’s menu includes a Turkish-towel gelée, a sea-lettuce pastry that smells like white truffles and tastes like matcha, a seaweed caramel tart, and a kombu ice cream Shields insists could pass for a Wendy’s Frosty. At Los Angeles’s Providence, chef Michael Cimarusti keeps a hairy-looking seaweed called Red Ogo in a lobster tank and spritzes it with lemon juice to accompany fish crudo. At her San Francisco Atelier Crenn and Petit Crenn, chef Dominique Crenn makes seaweed broth, seaweed chips, and powdered seaweed and cooks fish wrapped in seaweed. Seaweed is a very Breton ingredient, she informs me. In French, seaweed is les algues and has none of the negative connotations of the English word. “Americans think everything is garbage,” she says, sighing.
