Few things are more evocative than the smell of seaweed. It instantly conjures images of rock pools and beaches, an olfactory accompaniment to the crash of waves and cry of seagulls. What it isn’t generally associated with, unless it is to spark the memory of fish and chips on a windswept seafront, is food.
'When it comes to seaweed, we’re still playing catch-up with the Japanese,’ Gus Heath says, plucking a handful of dripping weed from the sea and dropping it into the boat behind him. As the founder of the Belfast-based Dolphin Sea Vegetable Company, he makes his living hand-harvesting edible marine plants. Some 500 species of seaweed grow around Ireland’s 2,000 miles of coastline, and there is evidence that the Irish have gathered some of them for food since the Middle Ages – long before sushi restaurants made their way to these shores. 'Here, taste this,’ Heath says, tearing off a small strip from a glistening mass of dark-red leaves. Crunchy and fresh, with a delicate saline flavour, it is surprisingly good. 'That’s dulse. It’s a traditional snack. We dry it and eat it like crisps.’
It is a common misconception that seaweeds always have a strong, 'fishy’ taste. Rich in minerals and vitamins, they can be used in salads, stocks and soups, or as garnishes for poultry or fish. And many of us will have eaten them without even realising it. Carrageen, or Irish moss as it is sometimes known, is a natural setting agent that is used commercially as an alternative to gelatine. Although fresh carrageen has a strong flavour, once it has been bleached – which Heath achieves naturally, by simply leaving it out in the sun and rain – it becomes completely flavourless, making it ideal for thickening sauces and stews.
While Dolphin also produces a range of seaweed-based cosmetic and pharmaceutical products (reputedly good for the digestive and the immune systems), the bulk of its business comes from the edible sea vegetables. It harvests seven species in all: carrageen, kelp (or kombu), sweet kelp (kombu royale), Irish wakame, sea lettuce, sea spaghetti and dulse. Of these, it is dulse (also known as dillisk) that makes up most of its market. 'Dulse is our bread and butter,’ says Heath, who sells his sea vegetables primarily through the Dolphin website, as well as supplying two of Northern Ireland’s major fruit and vegetable wholesalers, and local food producers. 'Demand is incredible, and growing all the time.’
A compactly built man in his late-fifties, Heath founded the company in 1990, after collecting sacks of dulse as a favour for a nephew who was a greengrocer. When the loose seaweed didn’t sell, Heath took it off his nephew’s hands, packaged it in his spare bedroom, and sold the more conveniently sized packs himself. 'It went like hot cakes,’ he recalls.
Over the next few years Heath expanded from spare room to garage, and then to the small factory on the outskirts of Belfast where the company is now based. At first he bought the seaweed from a network of independent harvesters scattered around Northern Ireland and the west coast. But most of them were elderly, and as they retired he took up harvesting himself.
Now Dolphin has two full-time employees – one of whom is Heath’s daughter, Jenny – and several part-timers. Seaweed-picking begins on St Patrick’s Day, March 17, and ends in late October or November, when the boats are taken out of the water for the winter. Harvesting takes place along the shores of Strangford Lough, about 20 miles east of Belfast. A shallow sea lough, its clean waters have been declared a marine nature reserve as well as a European Special Area of Conservation. They are also subject to strong tidal currents, which means that the windows for harvesting are extremely tight.
Seaweed can be hand-gathered only at low tide, when the submerged plants come within easy reach. But the tide times vary widely from day to day, and there are also other factors to consider. 'We harvest whenever we can, but we’re dependent on the tides and the weather – wind, not rain,’ Heath says. 'If the weather’s bad at low tide, then we can’t go out.’
Heath is working with marine biologists at Queen’s University Belfast to develop Europe’s first commercial seaweed farm at another part of Strangford Lough, which will eventually allow him to harvest throughout the year, regardless of seasons or weather. At the moment this is still in its infancy, but he plans to harvest up to a third of a ton of seaweed from the farm in the next few months, and hopes to increase in the future. Until then, he is at the climate’s mercy.
At 9am, a mist throws this morning’s harvest into doubt, but it clears by the time the boat is ready. Accompanying Heath is Dolphin’s other full-time employee, Paddy Rogan. The small boat’s outboard motor takes us slowly across the water towards today’s site, a tiny island that is little more than a low huddle of seaweed-covered rocks on which stands the white tower of an automated lighthouse.
When we arrive, the kelp beds around it are just breaking through the surface of the water. Heath and Rogan each take one of the two small rowing boats they have towed out here and push themselves towards the rocks. Watched by inquisitive seals that occasionally surface nearby, they roll up their sleeves before reaching into the water to drag up handfuls of shiny dulse that is growing among the thick beds of kelp.
Other seaweed-harvesting companies have been known to use mechanical dredges, but Heath has little time for such things. He harvests only by hand, which, while slower, is sustainable and doesn’t damage the beds. 'If you’re dredging the seabed, you’re doing damage,’ he says. 'And we don’t strip the plant naked. That’s bad management. There’s research to show that doing it this way encourages growth. We did this area five weeks ago, and it’s already grown back. That’s very encouraging.’
On a reasonably good day each harvester can expect to collect perhaps 150kg of seaweed, which is reduced to about 30kg after it has been sorted and dried. The finished product is sold in 17g or 25g packets, of which Dulse sells some 300,000 each year. While dulse is the main crop for today, Heath also gathers a smaller amount of Himanthalia elongata – sea spaghetti. It is appropriately named: thin, light-brown strands that can grow up to 10ft in length, forming dense mats of vegetation that float like hair just under the water’s surface. Boiled for 10 to 15 minutes, it can be eaten just like actual spaghetti or chopped up and added to pasta dishes.
'You should soak seaweeds for five or 10 minutes before you cook them, to get rid of the saltiness,’ Heath’s daughter, Jenny, says. 'And the secret to cooking with dulse is to cut it up before you wet it. It’s much easier. Just chop it then put it in a sieve, and put the sieve in water.’
Dried dulse tastes completely different from fresh. Darkened to an almost aubergine colour, it is chewy and salty, like a distillation of the way seaweed smells. As well as a snack, it can be grilled, then ground up and used as a garnish or seasoning. 'The taste becomes stronger when it’s cooked – more fishy,’ Jenny says.
If you find the flavour too strong, then cooking the seaweed slowly, at a lower temperature, gives a more subtle flavour. Dulse broth, which sounds as if it should taste like a storm-racked beach, in fact has quite a delicate flavour. Thickened with mashed potatoes ('We like our soups thick,’ Jenny says), it most closely resembles a cream of mushroom soup. The dulse bread it is served with is moist and yellow, sweetened with grated carrot and sugar, so it is more like a cake or muffin.
The dulse is more evident in the quiche Jenny prepares, but only as a faintly savoury flavour that doesn’t overpower the other ingredients. While the quiche can be made with dulse alone, finely chopped peppers, tomatoes and other vegetables can also be added.
But the biggest surprise is the dessert. 'Seaweed’, 'chocolate’ and 'jelly’ are words that don’t really belong in the same sentence, let alone a recipe. Yet the carrageen jelly is delicious, without so much as a whiff of seaweed about it. 'It’s really simple. You can make it with raspberries, strawberries or any citrus fruit instead of chocolate. Kids love it,’ Jenny says. 'We bleach the carrageen by leaving it in the sun and rain to take the colour and fish taste out of it. We have tried it unbleached, but it’s not nice.’ She pulls a face. 'Like herring.’
Out on the lough, once the tide turns, the day’s harvest of what Heath calls 'the wet stuff’ is taken back to Dolphin’s factory to be air-dried, sorted and packaged. 'Seaweed’s like Cinderella,’ he says. 'It’s looked on as the lowest of the low. But it’s got the same nutrients, vitamins and minerals as land crops. And they’re more easily absorbed. It’s only now that more knowledge is coming from the Far East that people are starting to give different seaweeds a try.’
- Dolphin Sea Vegetable Company: 028-9061 7512; dolphinseaveg.com
