All posts tagged: seaweed

Kelp help? How Scotland’s seaweed growers are aiming to revolutionise what we buy | Environment

Kelp help? How Scotland’s seaweed growers are aiming to revolutionise what we buy | Environment

Think sun, sea, Skye – and seaweed. It’s early summer off the west coast of Scotland, and Alex Glasgow is landing a long string of orangey-black seaweed on to the barge of his water farm. It emerges on what looks like a washing line heavy with dirty rags, hoicked up from the depths. And yet, this slippery, shiny, salty substance might, just might, be going to save the planet. When it comes to sustainability, seaweed is about as shipshape as it gets. Minimal damage to the environment, check. No use of pesticides, check. Diversifies ocean life, check. Uses no land, check. And, in the case of Skye’s seaweed farm, spoils no one’s view, check. Indeed, a few minutes earlier, as we sped across the Inner Sound between Skye’s second-biggest settlement, Broadford, reputedly the birthplace of Drambuie, and the tiny island of Pabay, it was hard to work out the seaweed farm’s location. Eventually the boat slows as we near a few floats bobbing around on the water. They are the only visible sign that anything …

Oyster mayonnaise with deep-fried seaweed recipe

Oyster mayonnaise with deep-fried seaweed recipe

We might live on an island surrounded by sea but as a nation we’re still a bit hesitant to eat seaweed. All in-shore seaweeds, such as dulse, bladderwrack, kelp, laver and sea lettuce, are good to eat, and are surprisingly tasty when turned into these little deep-fried snacks. If you don’t live by the sea to forage your own, a friendly fishmonger might part with the fresh seaweed that oysters come packed in. Or look out for dried kelp from Asian supermarkets or online. Timings Prep time: 10 minutes Cook time: 5 minutes Serves 4 Ingredients 4 oysters, shucked and juices reserved 120g good-quality mayonnaise 1 tbsp finely chopped chervil Vegetable or corn oil for deep frying 150g fresh seaweed, washed well, or 75g dried seaweed, soaked in water overnight 100g gluten-free self raising flour Method Put the oysters and their juices in a small pan, bring to the boil and simmer for 30 seconds then remove from the heat.  Blend the oysters and juice in a food processor or liquidiser with a third of …

What the heck is seaweed mining?

What the heck is seaweed mining?

This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com. Seaweed is versatile; it provides habitat for marine life, shelters coastlines, and absorbs carbon dioxide. But in the United States, scientists are setting out to see whether seaweed has another particularly valuable trick hidden up its proverbial sleeve: to act as a salty, slimy source of precious minerals. Within the US Department of Energy is the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a scientific branch devoted to tackling challenging, high-risk projects on energy technologies. ARPA-E takes big swings and looks for big rewards. And so far, the agency has awarded US $5-million to three ventures investigating whether seaweed can serve as a practical source of critical materials, such as platinum and rhodium, as well as rare earth elements, including neodymium, lanthanum, yttrium, and dysprosium. These valuable elements, which can be captured and concentrated by seaweed, are essential to the green energy transition—and to technology more broadly. Seaweed could represent an alternative to conventional mining …

Scientists Are Trying to Mine Seaweed

Scientists Are Trying to Mine Seaweed

This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine. Seaweed is versatile; it provides a habitat for marine life, shelters coastlines, and absorbs carbon dioxide. But in the United States, scientists are setting out to see whether seaweed has another particularly valuable trick hidden up its proverbial sleeve: to act as a salty, slimy source of precious minerals. Within the U.S. Department of Energy is the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a scientific branch devoted to tackling challenging, high-potential projects on energy technologies. ARPA-E takes big swings and looks for big rewards. And so far, the agency has awarded $5 million to three ventures investigating whether seaweed can serve as a practical source of crucial materials, such as platinum and rhodium, as well as rare-earth elements, including neodymium, lanthanum, yttrium, and dysprosium. These valuable elements, which can be captured and concentrated by seaweed, are essential to the green-energy transition—and to technology more broadly. Seaweed could represent an alternative to conventional mining and other prospects, such as deep-sea mining. “There are a lot of complexities in the …

Poseidona is removing invasive algae from oceans and turning it into food

Poseidona is removing invasive algae from oceans and turning it into food

Invasive algae is a problem all over the world. Different species of seaweed pose a threat to the oceanic environment by smothering and killing coral, which has an impact on fish and other marine life. Living near the sea in Spain, Sònia Hurtado saw the effect that the large amounts of seaweed, known as Rugulopteryx okamurae, was having on the Mediterranean. It started in 2015 when a contamination happened in the south of France and spread all over the coastline. After meeting María Cermeño, an expert in protein extraction from circular food materials, the pair decided to rid the ocean of this pest and turn it into protein ingredients for food. They founded Poseidona, a Barcelona-based developer of sustainable food technology, which uses that invasive seaweed and algal side-streams — the waste that agricultural producers generate — to make proteins. In this case, it’s a soy protein alternative. The company utilizes enzymatic hydrolysis, a molecular isolation process often used to recycle plastic and produce ethanol, and combines that with other technologies. Its secret sauce is the …

Edible art made from Japanese rice and seaweed – in pictures | Art and design

Edible art made from Japanese rice and seaweed – in pictures | Art and design

The distinction between art and food can be a fine one. Tokyo-based illustrator Takayo Kiyota, AKA Tama-chan, has been crafting miniature masterpieces out of rice and seaweed for 15 years. “I thought, if you could draw freely using the sushi roll technique handed down as a traditional local dish,” she says, “wouldn’t it be possible to create a new form of edible art?” Her creations take many forms, including depictions of famous paintings by Van Gogh, Picasso and Frida Kahlo. “For Japanese people, rice is something familiar and important. People from other countries can draw on paper or canvas, but drawing on rice is an expression unique to Japanese people.” Source link

Whiskey & Seaweed bar review: Scotch, three-star snacks and under £100? I’m in

Whiskey & Seaweed bar review: Scotch, three-star snacks and under £100? I’m in

No more so is all this apparent than at Whiskey & Seaweed, its adjacent new bar. It is dimly lit and green, shards of frosted glass as dividers, with an enormous whiskey cabinet celebrating distillers from the British Isles. This might just be another high-end cocktail bar, somewhere to further dent a Saltburnesque money pile before seven courses for £215. But there is a true purpose to the place and, more to the point, it may be treated as a bar alone. The dining room feels far away. Customers walking past to the loo won’t look right but left, to the kitchen, where chefs work behind a wall of glass. Do not call it dancing. Source link

People in Europe ate seaweed for thousands of years before it largely disappeared from our diets – new research

People in Europe ate seaweed for thousands of years before it largely disappeared from our diets – new research

Seaweed isn’t something that generally features today in European recipe books, even though it is widely eaten in Asia. But our team has discovered molecular evidence that shows this wasn’t always the case. People in Europe ate seaweed and freshwater aquatic plants from the Stone Age right up until the Middle Ages before it disappeared from our plates. Our evidence came from skeletal remains, namely the calculus (hardened dental plaque) that built up around the teeth of these people when they were alive. Many centuries later, this calculus still contains molecules that record the food that people ingested. We analysed the calculus from 74 skeletal remains from 28 archaeological sites across Europe. The sites span a period of several thousand years starting in the Mesolithic, when people hunted and gathered their food, through to the earliest farming societies (a stage called the Neolithic) all the way up to the Middle Ages. Our results suggest that seaweed was a habitual part of the diet for the time periods we studied, and became a marginal food only …