Feb 27 2009
Gathering seaweed for food and a home spa
Harvesting seaweed at low tide
Since we live on the beach, we’ve long eyed up the swaying fronds of bladderwrack, kelp and dulse seaweed — both as free wild food, and as a cheap home spa treatment.
Today we and our cats braved the miserable weather to harvest some seaweed because it’s the spring low tide, meaning that the tide is out further than at almost any other time of the year — perfect for gathering fresh seaweed.
It’s an experiment, since my main exposure to edible seaweed is confined to nori wraps on sushi, but we’ve gotten a hold of two great books: Seaweed: A User’s Guide and Seaweed: Nature’s Secret to Balancing Your Metabolism, Fighting Disease, and Revitalizing Body and Soul that gave us enough information to take the plunge and gather it for ourselves.
How to gather and harvest seaweed
Here’s quick little movie of Malcolm gathering kelp and red seaweed:
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Benefits of seaweed
According to Seaweed: Nature’s Secret, seaweed contains “thirteen vitamins, twenty amino acids, and sixty trace elements, including iodine and sodium”. The health benefits are too long to list, so I’ll pick my favourite ones:
- regulates blood sugar and cholesterol levels
- prevents and kills cancer cells
- protects and improves function of liver and kidneys
- promotes resistance to allergies
- prevents migraines
- combats anxiety and chronic fatigue
I’m hoping it will help me with candida, and provide us with a free, healthy nutritional supplement. I’m all about free food for lazy people — if it takes too much effort, I’ll pass. But even I can manage to wander down a few hundred feet, cut off a few strands and sling them up above the Aga to slowly dry out.
Drying out the seaweed over the Aga
Drying out seaweed on the stove
Seaweed deteriorates quickly, so we dry ours out over our Aga stove. Other suggestions were to put it in your oven at 150 degrees F or let it dry in the sun, if you’ve got that kind of climate.
Just having a cup of tea with a 1/2 teaspoon of kelp, and well, it tastes like seaweed. Will have to try some more recipes…
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I love it! That stuff costs a fortune at the health food store and you have to get it in plastic. Color me jealous. Again!
Darcy, I’ll send you some once we’ve got it all dried out
How does one get a cat out on the water like that to “help” harvest seaweed?
Yeah, it’s a mystery, but Nutmeg’s not a normal cat really. She likes to take us for long walks and loves the water. She’ll be swimming before we know it.
Is the seaweed(bull kelp toxic, before drying?And do you sell a book on kelp in the pacific..for recipes and id?
No, it’s not toxic. None of the seaweeds that you can gather easily are in any way dangerous — unless you live near some kind of chemical or sewage dump. Where I am is perfectly safe. The books I’ve read advise you to contact local water inspector/government types if you want to check on your seawater’s quality.
We don’t sell any books, but in terms of the Pacific, there’s quite a lot of knowledge over in Washington state:
http://www.earthwalknorthwest.com/wildfoods.php