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Sea Greens

Nutritious seaweed surfaces as the new veggie on American dinner plates
By Bill Daley | Tribune food and wine critic

The way Americans are going gaga for sushi rolls, seaweed may one day be as American as apple pie or corn on the cob. Nori is the seaweed star, derived from a marine algae called porphyra. Processed into paperlike sheets, nori may be too stylized for most people to think of it as seaweed. Certainly, nori doesn't look or smell like the stuff you steer clear of on the beach. But more and more Americans are eating the stuff, whether they know it's seaweed or not. And some more adventurous eaters are exploring other types of seaweeds, whose flavors range from bland to briny to smoky.

"People do get [seaweed]," said Shelley Young, founder of The Chopping Block Cooking Schools in Chicago, who uses seaweed in her cooking. "People are more open to those flavors."

Funny thing is, seaweed has always been there, hiding in plain sight. Commercially made ice creams often contain carrageenan, a thickener made from dried carrageen, or Irish moss seaweed. Agar agar, a dried tasteless seaweed, often is used instead of gelatin by vegetarians.

Seaweed can be found sprinkled on salads, floating in soups and even rolled in oats and fried in hot bacon fat.

Kombu, a dried seaweed, is an essential element of dashi, a stock used in most Japanese recipes. There are even regional favorites. In Hawaii, a signature dish is called poke and it's made with sushi-grade tuna and wakame, a seaweed colored a deep green. In Maine, there's dulse, a slightly chewy and pungent red seaweed often used in soups.

Larch Hanson of Maine Seaweed Co. of Steuben, Maine, has been hand-harvesting seaweed for 35 years. He has seen an uptick of orders as "more and more people are starting to feel the benefits of eating seaweed."

While Hanson does have some Chicago and Midwest customers, most of the orders come from people living along the coasts.

"It's more difficult to sell to someone from Wisconsin raised on Cheddar cheese," he quipped.

Hanson got into the business out of a love for the ocean and a desire to be physically active.

"It's a happy combination of fitness and play," he said of the harvesting, much of which takes place from mid-May to the end of June. He dries the wet seaweed by setting up lines at the high tide mark and hanging the harvest up like clothing.

Hanson harvests and sells all sorts of seaweed, from kelp to bladderwrack to alaria (also known as "winged kelp") to nori.

Across the nation, though, nori rules, thanks to the upsurge in sushi consumption. So commonplace has nori become that chef Cat Cora, the "Iron Chef America" celebrity, uses it as a tool for family solidarity. Her new book, "Cooking from the Hip" (Houghton Mifflin, $30), encourages families to throw a monthly roll-your-own sushi party.

"First off, praise the sushi rolls your kids make, no matter how lumpy," she writes. That the kids would willingly put down the Cheez Doodles and chips to pick up seaweed is naturally assumed -- a far cry from the days of yore when the warning, "eat your vegetables," was every mother's battle cry.

Still, there are some obstacles to full acceptance. Take the word "seaweed." Many aficionados prefer "sea vegetable" or "sea greens."

Carol Wallack, chef-owner of Chicago's Sola restaurant, labeled her signature dish of water chestnuts, macadamia nuts, hoisin sauce and hijiki, a black Japanese seaweed, as a "sea greens" salad. She thought it would be hard to introduce seaweed onto the menu at first, even though the restaurant has pronounced Hawaiian and Asian accents, and felt that "sea greens" was a way to ease people in.

"You can't put too many foreign items on the menu that people won't understand," Wallack said.

While Young sees people "getting" seaweed, Wallack said that seaweed is still an acquired taste. "It has an ocean-y flavor and scent as well. It's that aroma, the smell of it, which tends to send people away," she said.

Not Wallack. She loves it.