Autumnal Equinox Foraging
Marie Power, author of the first seaweed book I bought, leads foraging classes on the Copper Coast in the south of Ireland. We made a weekend out of it and stayed at the Waterford Castle lodges, which were fabulous.
The class took place on the weekend closest to the autumn equinox. There are 2 equinoxes per year, named as such because the hours of daylight match the hours of darkness. This is because the equator of the earth is aligned with the sun and the gravitational pull of the sun creates higher and therefore lower tides. Low tides are ideal for seaweed foraging because the lower the tide, the easier it is to walk out along the tide pools and get the seaweed that’s normally covered by water. Seaweeds grow at different tidal zones because some seaweeds need more water coverage and some survive just fine bathing in the sun for a couple of hours at a time.
The Foraging Class
There were 10 of us in Marie’s seaweed foraging class and it was a beautiful sunny day. Marie started out by explaining her interest in seaweed and its long history with her family. She was served seaweed by her relatives as a child but did not really like it until she learned how to prepare it better herself later. Now she has a cookbook and a line of seaweed products available for sale on her website, The Sea Gardener.
Marie explained that we should be careful not to forage too much from any one plant, and to cut above the holdfast rather than ripping out the whole plant so that the taken section can easily regrow. She showed us how to spot various species and identify the freshest ones. We found: carrageen, sea lettuce, dillisk, pepper dillisk, sea spaghetti, kelp, sweet kelp, bladderwrack, serrated wrack and an invasive species from Japan I don’t remember the name of.
Tasting the Seaweed
The sea lettuce was thin, fresh and vegetal, like land lettuce. The dillisk (aka dulse) was a little thicker but still thin, purple, and fresh but more seaweedy. The Japanese seaweed was crunchy and nice. The pepper dillisk was the most interesting one - it tasted like a truffle! I didn’t taste the kelps but they were definitely thicker and sturdier.
After foraging, Marie treated us to some seaweed snacks. She brought granola bars, blaa sandwiches with seaweed butter and semi-dried dillisk, and seaweed green tea. The blaa sandwiches are a local traditional food in Waterford. Blaa is a bread roll commonly eaten with butter or potato crisps.
She also showed us how to make a seaweed bath by pouring hot water for us over some serrated wrack. The wrack turned bright green and made the water slimey.
