Algae
Sea vegetables
Nori · Wakamé · Dulse · Kombu
The salty garden of the oceans — the most mineral-rich food alive, brimming with the iodine and trace elements the sea keeps intact.
Traditional use
Japan made an art of seaweed: kombu and shiitake build the dashi, the foundation of the whole cuisine; nori wraps the rice. On the coasts of Brittany, Ireland and the Basque Country, harvesters have for centuries gathered these 'sea vegetables' — dulse, wakame, sea lettuce, sea spaghetti — that our tables are rediscovering today. Wherever land meets ocean, coastal peoples have known that the sea nourishes as much as it connects.
What science observes
Sea vegetables are the most mineral-rich plants on the planet. Where our cultivated soils have grown poorer, the ocean keeps a whole constellation of minerals intact, in a remarkably assimilable marine form — calcium, iron, magnesium, potassium — and above all iodine, which nourishes the thyroid, that quiet conductor of our energy and metabolism. They are also among the most complete plant sources of protein, and carry phyco-nutrients unique to aquatic plants, such as fucoidans. A small handful is enough to remineralise an entire meal.
In the kitchen
We choose them fresh, kept in their sea salt: simply rinse and soak them for a few minutes to restore their suppleness. Raw and finely chopped, they become a lively tartare or a mineral salad; dried, we keep a piece of kombu for soaking and cooking legumes, nori as a snack, dulse or wakame as flakes over bowls. With the most iodine-rich seaweeds like kombu, rightness rather than abundance: their richness is such that a little goes a long way.
Resonance
Seaweeds are the salty garden of the ocean, the first link of almost all marine life. To receive a mouthful is to taste the mineral memory of the sea — the one we all come from. A fresh, deep vibration that remineralises and connects us to the original blue.