The Climate-Friendly Vegetable You Ought to Eat
'Kelp is delicious and versatile, and farming it is actively good for the ocean. Melissa Clark wants you to just try a bite.
PORTLAND, Me. — It was a sharp, windy March day, but the gray water of Casco Bay glimmered green in the sun. On his lobster boat, the Pull N’ Pray, Justin Papkee scanned the surface of the ocean, searching for his buoys. But he wasn’t looking for lobster traps.
Mr. Papkee was farming, not fishing: His crop, clinging to ropes beneath the cold waves, was seaweed, thousands of pounds of brownish kelp undulating under the surface. Growing at a rate of 4 to 6 inches per day for the past six months, it was nearly ready to be harvested and sent to restaurants like Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Estela, Houseman, Saint Julivert Fisherie and Luke’s Lobster in New York, and Honey Paw, Chaval and the Purple House here in Maine.
He pulled a blade of kelp from his line and handed me a long, translucent strip. I took a bite, and then another, seawater running down my chin.
I’d eaten plenty of seaweed salads at Japanese and vegan restaurants, but this was not that. A variety called skinny kelp, it was lightly salty and profoundly savory, with a flavor like ice-cold oyster liquor, and a crisp, snappy texture somewhere between stewed collard greens and al dente fettuccine. The chef Brooks Headley, who adds it in slippery slivers to the barbecued carrots he serves at Superiority Burger in New York, described it in an email as “insanely delicious and texturally incredible.”
It was as different from the usual sushi bar seaweed salad as cottony, out-of-season peaches are from juicy, ripe ones from the farmers’ market: a wan substitute for what should be delectable. . .
“Kelp is a superhero of seaweed,” said Susie Arnold, a marine scientist at the Island Institute in Rockland, Me. “It de-acidifies the ocean by removing nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon dioxide, which we have too much of.” . .
“Kelp is sustainable on so many levels,” said Briana Warner, the chief executive officer of Atlantic Sea Farms, a Maine kelp company that’s helping local fishermen start kelp farms. “It’s environmentally sustainable, it’s physically sustaining because it’s so good for you, and farming it helps sustain family livelihoods that are in danger of disappearing.” . .
In the United States, though, dried seaweed has not yet left the health-food fringes, relegated to the same category as nutritional yeast and chia seeds.
One reason may be our lack of exposure to the good stuff. The majority of seaweed salads I get with my sushi are cloying and damp, lacking the mineral zing of fresh kelp.
John Magazino, a product development specialist at the Chefs’ Warehouse, a specialty food supplier for restaurants, explained why fresh kelp is so different from the seaweed you find in most seaweed salads: “Most of the seaweed salads we get in the States are imported from Asia, where they add corn syrup and dyes. Seaweed salad shouldn’t be sweet and neon green.” . .
Because kelp develops in constantly changing ocean tides and temperatures, its cell structure won’t break down if you freeze, thaw and refreeze it, which makes it convenient to keep stashed between the frozen edamame and the sorbet. (Dried seaweed, like kombu, dulse and nori, are separate products from frozen fresh kelp, and require different preparations.)
Once the kelp thawed, I used it like any other green vegetable, throwing it into smoothies, salads and my soup pot, and sautéing it with garlic and chile. One night, I roasted it with potatoes and chicken fat until the top got as crisp as the seaweed snacks my 10-year-old daughter can’t get enough of, while the bottom turned silky soft, like creamed spinach with a saline kick.
But my favorite dish was anchovy pasta with a lemony, garlicky, pesto-like kelp sauce that flecked everything emerald and deepened the oceanic flavors in the pan. Even my daughter lapped it up.
Those are just a few of the possibilities. When the harvest comes in and I can restock my freezer, I’ll steam the kelp with fresh corn, stuff it into whole fish and scatter it over pizza.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/dining/kelp-seaweed-recipes.html?
= new reply since forum marked as read
