For two food-filled days, visitors to Ballymaloe Food Festival in Co. Cork were given a taste of delicious Irish produce. Alongside samples of honey, chocolate, whiskey and cider were more unusual products: chunks of cheese shot through with flakes of seaweed, and scoops of surprisingly tasty ice cream flavoured with the salty tang of dulse, the deep red seaweed with long leathery fronds often avoided by beachcombers on Scottish shorelines.
There was kimchi that fused vibrant Korean flavours with the crisp crunch of local seaweed, and vegan chorizo-style sausages, black puddings and ‘sea burgers’ conjured up from long, thin and wispy Irish Atlantic Wakame seaweed. Bladder wrack seaweed, commonly found on Scottish shores, is among the most nutritious seaweeds (Image: Contribute: Seaweed Enterprises) And there were more familiar products: seaweed-based toiletries such as bath salts, soaps and oils, even a bag of dried seaweed in a linen bag for popping in the bath – a snip at €25. As Rhianna Rees of the Scottish Seaweed Industry Association (SSIA) browsed the stalls, Scotland’s handful of seaweed farmers were in the midst of their annual harvest.
For a brief window in late Spring, just as the water temperature rises when the seaweed is tender and sweet, they were hauling in long lines of rope to see what months of waiting might yield. Once a staple of Scottish diets, seaweed – nutrient-rich, high protein-low calorie and packed with fibre, iodine and polyphenols link.