Seaweed cuisine is enjoying a wave of popularity worldwide.
A few years ago I was fortunate enough to be asked to demonstrate at Savour New Zealand, a food and wine event hosting the hottest Kiwi culinary stars and overseas celebrities.
I had a tiny workstation in the Christchurch Convention Centre to prepare my dishes.
One included baby paua, which
involved wrapping it in hydrated wakame before rolling it through a popcorn dust I had just developed.
As I wielded my Japanese knife, acclaimed Sydney-based Japanese chef Tetsuya Wakuda looked on.
He was fascinated by both the baby paua (which he knew as abalone) and by how a Kiwi lad knew to use seaweed to naturally tenderise the gastropod mollusc.
Later, he described to me how he cooked abalone in his Sydney restaurant Tetsuya's by braising it in soy, ginger, mirin and plenty of kombu seaweed to "relax" it as it cooked.
He then asked if he could share with his own Savour guests his pleasure at discovering a chef in New Zealand who knew the secrets of preparing paua with seaweed - and to make the point of just how lucky we are to have such pristine ingredients in New Zealand. What a thrill - the man is, after all, a god among chefs.
Seaweed has been used for culinary purposes since prehistoric times and today is used extensively in restaurants around the world.
Most of us have heard of nori - made from dried red algae, it wraps your lunchtime roll of sushi filling. But it doesn't stop there.
Experimental chef Heston Blumenthal, from The Fat Duck in England, uses gelatinous seaweed extracts such as carrageenan, agar agar and alginate as vegetarian alternatives to animal gelatines and stabilising agents.
At Quay in Sydney, Peter Gilmore produces jelly balls made from white tea, kombu, nori, wakame and soy to serve with sweet west Australian marron.
Kombu is used extensively in Japanese cuisine as one of the three main ingredients needed to make dashi, a soup stock.
It has a thicker texture than other seaweeds and, although it can be eaten plain, it is best used in an infusion or in a braise.
At Shunju in Tokyo, Takashi Sugimoto preserves and flavours sides of sea bass with sheets of kombu that are sandwiched together, cling-wrapped and chilled for half a day before being thinly sliced.
Here in New Zealand, Pacific Harvest makes seaweeds accessible, retailing wakame, karengo and kelp seasoning. Once hydrated, this finer-eating seaweed yields up to five times its original size.
Wakame is the one most likely to end up in your Japanese salad.
And for something different try samphire (sea asparagus), harvested from tidal areas, or sea grapes which are beginning to make an appearance on menus and are married with delicate shellfish arrangements for a natural salt burst.
