What if we all ate seaweed?
A bumper edition: Vegan sushi, miso soup, spirulina truffles and green juice
Vegan sushi with juniper marinated vegetables
Serving: Makes 8 rolls of sushi.
Cooking time: 20 minutes preparation time at least 1 hour ahead, to marinate the vegetables and cook sushi rice; 20 minutes prep time before you eat. Alternatively, put out the ingredients so people can make their own sushi.
Ingredients
2 carrots (I used one white, one orange)
1 chioggia beet
440 g sushi rice
640 ml water for cooking sushi rice
8 sheets nori
small handful dried red dulse (optional)
cider or rice vinegar
2 t mirin
2 T olive oil
2 t juniper berries
1 long red capsicum
1/2 t smoked paprika
1 t white sugar
soya sauce
salt and pepper
1/2 block firm tofu (the rest goes in the miso)
1 avocado
wasabi paste and pickled ginger to serve (optional)
Method
Peel carrots, then cut the ends off carrots and beetroot. Steam them in around 200 ml water for 8 minutes (I did this in a pressure cooker but it will also work in a saucepan).
Once cool enough to handle, cut the vegetables into strips. Lay out on a plate. Grind three teaspoons of dried juniper berries in a mortar and pestle, add a small handful of seaweed like red dulse, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, 2 tablespoons of cider or rice vinegar, 1 teaspoon of mirin, 1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika, grind of pepper, sea salt to taste, a dash of soya sauce. Mix well with pestle. Pour over the vegetables, mixing thoroughly. Leave to marinate for at least half an hour.
Cook sushi rice in a rice cooker or pressure cooker. If using pressure cooker, cook for five minutes then leave it to steam for a further 10 minutes. Once cooked, add 40 ml cider vinegar (3 T) or up to 80 ml rice vinegar (which has a subtler flavour), 1 teaspoon mirin, 1 teaspoon white sugar, sprinkle of sea salt. Work the rice till well coated. Then spread it out on a bamboo mat to cool down before using.
Prepare other sushi ingredients: chop the tofu into long, thin slices and fry in a pan with a little oil until browned on each side. This will take around 5 minutes. Spread a little miso paste on each slice of tofu to give it some flavour. Once cool enough to handle, chop slices into long strips.
Chop the capsicum into long, thin strips. Slice the avocado. You can also use other vegetables like cucumber or fresh herbs.
Roll the sushi. (This video from 3m50s onwards has a useful demonstration of different techniques). You could keep it very simple with one vegetable in each sushi, or mix and match. Place the nori shiny-side down on the bamboo mat. Wet your hands. Flatten a large palmful of the sushi rice over the nori. Spread out the vegetables in one line about 1/3 of the way up, and roll tightly. It may help to wet the end of the nori sheet to seal it. I trim the ends to keep it neat. Then slice roll into sushi. If you are feeling adventurous: try with black sesame seeds on the outside and nori in the inside.
Serve with chopsticks, wasabi, soya sauce and pickled ginger.
Miso soup with dulse and wakame
This is a quick and simple recipe. Served with udon noodles, it will make a delicious lunch; or have it as a side or starter for the sushi. The quantities given here make 3-4 small bowls.
Boil 800 ml water. Soak a handful of fresh wakame seaweed in fresh water for five minutes to remove saltiness, or use a dried seaweed like dulse, or just ripped nori sheets if that’s all you have. Add 3-4 tablespoons of miso paste to the pot of boiling water. Add some chopped spring onions or spinach or greens if you like, and half a tofu block, chopped into cubes. Cook on a low heat for 5-10 minutes. Serve with sliced spring onions, or coriander, or red shiso microgreens, or a drizzle of chilli oil or flakes, or a grating of fresh horseradish or even ginger. Stir before eating. Enjoy.
Spirulina chocolate truffles
Chocolate truffles, of the butter, cocoa, icing sugar variety, are a family tradition passed down from my grandmother. This is a delicious new take on an old classic.
Blend or smash in a mortar and pestle: 30 g raw pistachios, leaving some texture (you do not want a fine powder). Pour into a mixing bowl with 30 g of raw, hulled hemp seeds and 1 t of spirulina powder.
Melt: 50 g (vegan) dark chocolate (I used 70%) with 50 g coconut oil.
Blend: 100g pitted medjool dates (soaked in boiling water for at least 20 minutes, discard water), chocolate and coconut oil. Add this mix to the dry ingredients. Don’t be worried if the mixture is still oily.
Shape into balls ideally making them a bit smaller than shown; they are very rich. Roll each ball in additional hemp seeds. Refrigerate approx 1 hour, or until hard. I also don’t recommend putting spirulina powder on the outside, as I experimented with, unless you want to put off greedy flatmates and keep them all to yourself… (but don’t you want to share the spirulina love?)
Green juice with spirulina
Green juices with local ingredients like cactus and pineapple are all the rage in Mexico. Here’s my Dutch version, with spirulina.
Juice: 3 granny smith apples, one lime (peeled), two sticks celery, 1 small knob of ginger root (half of what is pictured), 1 tumeric (curcuma) root. Blend: the juice you just made, 1 kiwifruit (peeled), a handful of frozen or two handfuls of fresh spinach, 1 teaspoon of spirulina powder. Serve. If you don’t have a juicer, but you do have a blender, try blending spinach with apple juice, a chunk of ginger, hand-squeezed juice of 1 lime and 1 t of spirulina.
The story behind the recipes
Hello! Happy end of Veganuary. I went on a seaweed bender this week. I found four different varieties of seaweed (pictured below) and experimented, taking as my starting point Japanese cuisine, since seaweed has been eaten there for thousands of years.
Clockwise from left: (i) dulse (palmaria palmata, aka vegan bacon), (ii) nori, (iii) fresh wakame, (iv) miyuk or sea mustard (a type of Korean seaweed traditionally used in a birthday soup called miyeokguk, with thanks to the dear friend who translated the packaging for me).
Here’s the thing that I learned this week, which sparked this entire post: seaweed is one of the best vegetarian sources of omega-3s. (It is also a source of protein roughly equivalent to soy). Hat tip: the Dutch future anthropologist Roanne van Voorst, who converts to a vegan diet in the process of writing Once Upon a Time We Ate Animals. She was making a more general point that “animals are extraordinarily inefficient sources of protein”*; and the same holds for fatty acids. Fish get their omega-3s directly from eating seaweed, and so can we. Also, spirulina is so good for you that NASA famously feeds it to its astronauts.
Seaweed is also incredibly good for the planet. Seriously. The New Yorker, in its profile of aquaculture visionary Bren Smith, calls seaweed “the culinary equivalent of an electric car”. That might understate the case, because it actually absorbs carbon dioxide from the ocean, helping to de-acidify it.
The World Bank has projected that if a mere 0.03% of the world’s oceans were used to farm seaweed, we could produce 500 million tons of seaweed per annum, equivalent to 3 trillion cheeseburgers’ worth of protein, and absorb 135 million tons of carbon.
Here’s how Emily Stengel describes the regenerative ocean farming model used to farm seaweed (and bivalves), in All That We Can Save:
“These crops require zero inputs - no freshwater, no animal feed, no fertilizer, no pesticides. They’re also restorative. Seaweeds such as kelp are often called the ‘sequioa of the sea’ because, like sequoia trees, they are heroes of carbon sequestration.”
Seaweed is important to reduce methane emissions from cows, as a potential source of biomethane energy, and growing it reduces nitrogen and phosphorus pollution caused by run-off from fertilizers. Seaweed has so many synergies.
Thank you for reading this week and happy cooking. Let me know if you manage to eat some seaweed! I’d also love to hear your ideas about how we could incorporate more seaweed (and bluegreen algaes like spirulina) into Western diets. Smoked dulse BLTs? Wakame and black bean burgers? Kombu linguine? However you slice it, seaweed is, surely, part of our food future.
Amelia.
[*According to van Voorst: the process from grain to chicken involves a 30% loss of protein, while the proteins consumed by cows involves a staggering 96% loss. In 2018, while meat and dairy provided 37% of human’s protein, these industries were responsible for 83% of all agricultural land, and 60% of all agricultural greenhouse gases.]
PS: if you’re not able to view this well in email format, read it in a browser. Also, if you spot any mistakes, know that I will always try to correct them in the online version.
Loved this Amelia, and I feel inspired to start adding spiralina to some of my food. I hope you spotted the wee typo: 'Hat tip'. Keep up the great work.
YUM!! The Spirulina truffles rolled in hemp seeds are a stroke of pure genius 💚🌿 and I love the kōrero about the sustainability of seaweed. So proud of you my beautiful and talented sister xx