Bright Green Japanese Seaweed Salad
For those of you who are wondering why your seaweed salad doesn't look like the one you get at the japanese restaurant... here's why.
Just as there are plethora types of land vegetables, there are many, MANY types of SEA vegetables - aka, seaweed. After many tries making delicious seaweed salads, I wondered why I wasn't getting the bright green type I was longing for - you know, that delicious, vinegar-y, sweet stringy salad you can typically order at a Japanese restaurant. Granted, there are many variations. But for that bright green type, you need a special seaweed: green "tosaka ao". In New York City, this can be found at Katagiri - which also has a very basic, if somewhat amusing, online ordering capability. Thanks to this helpful recipe on The Splendid Table by David Rosengarten, the mystery has been solved...
Seaweed is one of the most nutritious foods on the planet: it contains more vitamins and bio-available minerals than any other class of food. It is an extraordinary source of chelated, colloidal minerals and trace elements. The large brown seaweeds known as "kelp" are also rich sources of alginic acids (sodium alginates), which remove heavy metals and radioactive isotopes from the body and the bones. Seaweed is also a good source of protein and enzymes for people on vegan, vegetarian, macrobiotic, and raw food diets.
Yum! so ... make it an adventure, check out your local japanese market, and get cooking...
For more seaweed sources and recipes, check out Maine Coast Sea Vegetables, whose products are often found at local health food stores in the US.