, how many kinds of seaweed have you eaten?  Depending on your cultural heritage, most of us might only eat nori wrapped around sushi.  BC has 600+ species of seaweed, many of which are edible and delicious and come in a rainbow of colours and flavours.  If you haven't tasted them, you are missing out.  Bull kelp blade has an intense salty umami rich anise like flavour, sea lettuce is paper thin and tastes like very green like salty spinach,  baked popweed (Fucus spp.) has a distinctive meaty flavour like jerky; that's just three! You can eat them raw, dried, smoked, roasted and deep fried. As a chef I make spice mixes, add them to salads (shredded carrot/peanut/cilantro/sugar kelp salad is my latest favourite), crisps or even sprinkling them over popcorn. There are many more seaweeds and all have their own set of nutrients; some are rich in protein, fiber, vitamins, anti-oxidants and those hard to find minerals that are missing from our diets. Sea lettuce, as an example, is packed with magnesium and calcium for our bone health, fiber acting as a prebiotic for building good gut resilience, iodine for thyroid health and containing anti-oxidants and anti-inflammatory components.  Mic drop!  I feel like a preacher for Poseidon:)  Chef William Lew recently made an amazing dish with baby pickled bullkelp bulb from Moon Bay Ocean Farms, crunchy red sea straw and green seaweed wrapped around a salmon cake (Motoyaki pocket).  Wow.

We need to make sure to sustainably harvest seaweed from unpolluted waters if we're going to collect it ourselves, of course,  or buy it from local BC/WA seaweed farms.  If you are going the harvesting route, remember that seaweed is essential to marine life, only harvest from areas with plentiful kelp in clean water. It provides food and shelter for many organisms and is a vital component of a healthy oceans.  The more we eat seaweed, the more demand for BC seaweed farms, hopefully, which act as nurseries for baby fish and other organisms.  Imagine a seaweed farm as an underwater forest absorbing carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus helping climate change and providing us with tasty food too.   I encourage everyone to spend some time learning about these coastal foods that surround us, come out on a sea foraging class with me this weekend or join me for my seaweed harvesting class in August. Or have some fun in your kitchen with seaweed, you can get local varieties from sources like Skipper Otto or North Pacific Kelp or Dakini Tidal Wilds.

I'll step off my podium now:)

Upcoming Classes...

• Sea Foraging Vancouver this Sat/Sun (5 tickets left)
• Seaweed Harvesting Class on Galiano Island August 9th

Crab Feast with Chef Tushar Tondvalkar

Secret Supper in Mount Pleasant Vancouver featuring red rock and Dungeness crab.

Saturday June 21 SOLD OUT

Sunday June 22 - 10 tickets left