How to Forage Seaweed and Make A Delicious Seasoning! (Hands On with Milkwood Permaculture)

Hi, I'm Kirsten from Milkwood (Permaculture) and I'm going to show you how to

make

forage

seaweed

Gomasio. Like this! HOW TO MAKE GOMASIO FROM FORAGE SEAWEED This is ulva, it is a sea lettuce. It is a really delicate algae. It is great to dry and cook in many different ways. It is also very good for salads. It grows in rocky areas at the end of beaches, but it naturally uproots and ends up everywhere, as you can see. It's a really

delicious

seaweed

to

forage

for if you can find some of it. We also have some algae.

This is a golden algae. From where we live. But all seaweed around the world is edible, which is great, and it's pretty easy to figure out what seaweed is where you live. If you ever have trouble with that, ask your local fisheries authorities, they will be able to tell you and this is really

delicious

. If it's a little old, we can use it in our garden, but we'll still dry it and use it in our kitchen, for sure. It's delicious. So today we are going to collect some of this beautiful sea. STEP 1: PICK A MIX OF SEA LETTUCE AND KELP LETTUCE and we'll probably leave the seagrasses here I think.

Sea lettuce and seaweed and we are going to gather enough to

make

a seaweed gomasio. It's a really delicious salt, sesame and seaweed sprinkle that we use with almost everything in our cooking. We use it in scrambled eggs. We use it in soups. We use it in salads. They are the most delicious sprinkles in the world that anyone can make at home. When we look for algae, it is very, very important to be very aware of what we are doing. It is a wild resource, it is part of the ecosystem and there are many aspects that we must be aware of.

We have some personal principles and the first is to never take the first one you see. Anything, be it hawthorn berries, wild plums or seaweed, because there is a small chance it will be the only one on the beach. They may be the only part and we prefer to harvest when there is abundance rather than taking the small parts we find. Seaweed is a really important part of the marine ecosystem, even after it has been removed from its place and washed up on the beach. It's a really crucial food source for a lot of the microbiology that lives on beaches as it ferments and decomposes.

It provides all kinds of food for seabirds and lots of sea insects and all kinds of things. When we go looking for algae it is very important to find a clean place to do it. I have seen that some inland urban places near cities or at the head of estuaries that have heavy industry are practically a no-go zone for searching for seaweed because they absorb heavy metals and nutrients from the water and the inlets to their around. Some places have different regulations on whether seaweed can be harvested just from the beach, called beach dumped seaweed, so technically it's dead at that point, but it's still good to eat and for your garden and in Some places, it is not allowed to harvest any seaweed even if you are on the beach.

It's a good idea to be aware of what is allowed where you are so you can do the right thing. And if you can't do it where you live, there's probably somewhere nearby where it's completely okay to do it. STEP 2: WASH THE SEAWEED TO GET RID OF THE SAND So, once you have the seaweed at home, you will probably need to wash it. We simply fill a bucket with some clean rainwater and this is mainly to remove the sand. More than anything, you don't need to remove the salt. From foraged seaweed, especially if you use it for cooking, the salt is fantastic and even if you use it for your garden, you can still leave the salt there.

It's actually pretty good because it has a lot of different minerals and all sorts of interesting things besides salt and apparently the salt content in seaweed is surprisingly very small, so it doesn't really affect your garden soil, which it's good. . STEP 3: HANG THE SEAWEED TO DRY So we simply hung our seaweed. Simple as that. And you want to dry the seaweed until it's crispy and dry. So it comes off or maybe it doesn't need to be broken in, but you can feel that it's no longer damp and then you know it's ready to go. And we will also hang some sea lettuce.

The other way we dry sea lettuce in particular is simply on baskets or trays. Very good, in the greenhouse. So, the first thing we do with the sea lettuce, STEP 4: CRUSH THE SEA LETTUCE INTO SMALL PIECES so that it is already very dry, we shred it. This is dried in the sun. You can also, if you don't have sun, use the oven on super low or on the pilot light position, or you can place it on top of the heater overnight, on a rack. or whatever gives off a little heat. You can even dry it on top of your refrigerator, in the back of your refrigerator, because your refrigerator generates a little bit of heat and you can dry the seaweed that way, which is a way to do it without wasting energy.

So we are going to cut the sea lettuce into as small pieces as possible. And then we also have our seaweed, which is all dried. Obviously, it's a little tougher than seaweed, so we cut it... STEP 5: CUT THE SEAWEED SHEETS INTO SMALL CUPS ...the blades, cut the side pieces. Now, seaweed, since it is a much more robust seaweed, what you can do is cut the leaves into small pieces and then give them a little push in the oven in just five minutes. STEP 6: DY KELP FOR 5 MINUTES IN THE OVEN Just super dry them which means they will crumble really well.

Simply cut them up and then put them in our oven, so they crumble easily in our Gomasio. In algae, when it dries, you will often see this white material and fear not, this is a very good sign that it is not mold. It's Mannit. It is a combination of sugars and salts that seaweed and many different algae exude when they dry. It is very similar to monosodium glutamate, but it is the natural version and it is something super tasty. This is what umami is made of. So if you have something white that feels powdery on the seaweed when it dries, you're on the right track.

This is a good thing. We have our sea lettuce and our seaweed. So this will be 50% of our mixture and the other 50% will be sesame seeds, but we're going to toast the first one, so we'll do that. STEP 7: TOAST THE SESAME SEEDS UNTIL BROWN (NO OIL REQUIRED) Now we're going to grind roughly equal parts of these two delicious things together. You can be scientific about it, you can get down to the ground if you want, or you can just follow the proverbial pinch STEP 8: ADD A MIXTURE OF 50% SEAWEED AND 50% SESAME SEEDS TO A MOTART AND A PESTLE A pinch of that, Oh, that's hot.

A pinch of that. It goes for about 50/50. If you like things saltier, you can also add some good quality salt to this mixture, but we prefer just seaweed and sesame. And it smells amazing once you start grinding. You can also do this final stage in a kitchen processor, that's totally fine. STEP 9: GRIND IT ALL TOGETHER Now let's grind it all together OPTIONAL: GRIND THE MIXTURE IN A FOOD PROCESSOR Okay, now that you have everything looking nice and together, if you want to add a little more whole sesame seeds OPTIONAL: ADD SESAME SEEDS ADDITIONAL WHOLES Encourage him.

Just mix them together. Seriously, this recipe is one of the best smells in the world. Very good, and (STEP 10; PUT GOASIO IN A JAR WITH AN AIR-TIGHT LID) then we put it in the jar and then we eat it. That's all. So this will stay... it will stay for quite some time. We usually make it in small batches and use it for about a week. Because the smell, but when it's fresh, it's so good that, yeah, we can't get enough of it. Just store it in an airtight place, it doesn't need to be cold just to keep it on your table so your kids can eat it with every meal and yes, it's a really, really easy way to pack in a lot of nutrition. and wild components that would not otherwise be on your kitchen table or in your family's daily diet to your home from the wild and close to where you live.

That's how you make foraged seaweed Gomasio like this, with foraged sea lettuce and whatever seaweed you have nearby, and it becomes a delicious, nutritious pinch that your whole family, your neighbors, and the rest of your community can enjoy.