About Seaweed: Storage & Preparation

To begin, recipes involve dry materials or not. Eventually, one way or another, your body (made up mostly of water) needs to hydrate food in order to transact with it, so why not give it a break? Unless you really want a salty condiment, use recipes that involve water, hydration. Then the choice is to heat or not to heat, to cook or not to cook.

All of the seaweeds that I offer have been air-dried at temperatures below 80° F to bone dry perfection within 48 hours of being harvested. Thus, the original enzymes are unchanged.

If you are a raw foodist, you will discover you can chew "soft dulse" from the catalog listings. Soft dulse is bone-dry dulse that has been alllowed to reabsorb some humidity from the air. This kicks off an enzyme process that softens the cell walls of the dulse, much like making fermented foods.

The shelflife of soft dulse, kept cool, is a year. The shelf life of all other seaweeds, including crisp dulse, is more than two years, provided the seaweeds are kept sealed up at room temperature or cooler and out of direct sunlight. Glass jars will give the best results for long term storage.

Seaweeds like kelp and alaria and dulse can be softened in a marinade that includes vinegar or lemon juice (to help release minerals into solution) together with other liquids and sweeteners like tamari, ginger juice, honey, etc. The longer the seaweeds marinate, the softer they become. Keep refrigerated.

I do not want to debate raw vs. cooked. There are good reasons to eat raw seaweed, and I have honored that lifestyle path by not heating seaweeds above 80° F during the process of drying. There are also good reasons to cook seaweeds. Sodium alginate, the chelating agent in brown algae, is a long polysaccharide chain molecule that needs to be broken down by heat so that it can reach deeper into the body, beyond the intestinal wall, into the blood and bones. If I were on a detox diet, I would be using digitata kelp because of its high sodium alginate content, and I would be making soup. Think of cooking as a form of predigestion and parasite/pathogen control that has co-arisen with evolving humans since the discovery of fire. Used wisely, it can be very beneficial.

The recipes will help you get started, and from there, you will be able to integrate them into your daily life.