How Chef Jacob Harth Harvests and Cooks Wild Seaweed — Deep Dive

[Music] basically any of the seaweeds are edible uh the only time you want to avoid it is if the water quality is poor anything that could be a potential hazard with the water will be a hazard for sure but the ones that are washed up on the beach um i wouldn't eat that personally [Music] i'm jacob chef at arizona in portland oregon we're here in port orford on the southern oregon coast about to harvest some wild seaweeds [Music] so we're gonna harvest a lot of these things and dry them preserve them for the year and we're just going to take you around here and show you all the different varieties of seaweed what the uses are and then we're going to cook some of it up this is one of the most simple intertidal harvesting processes that exist here basically all that you need is a pair of scissors a basket you need a shellfish permit in some states find a rocky area and a low tide and go out so the first seaweed that we've harvested here this is a type of kelp this is called wakame this is really common in a commercial market you can find this in almost almost any grocery store dried you can tell this one pretty easily because it has all the ribs running through it and the bubbles in the in the fronds this seaweed can kind of become an issue and it can become extremely invasive in areas where it's been introduced by people what happens is that it grows so rapidly in areas where it's not expected to be that it really outcompetes a lot of the other algaes and seaweeds and also you can even smother like creatures after it after the tide goes out and sort of covers everything [Music] this is rockweed really flavorful seaweed has a really tough texture though we actually use this at the restaurant we dry it and then we um we'll grill it until it's super caramelized and we make a like a flavored oil out of it all of this is just one bunch and it's all anchored to the central hold fast here cut down the center here and just cut a couple pieces away from the main branch without you know severing any of it so you're still leaving the entire main branch intact you're just kind of trimming some off the side like you would prune a tree this is called nori um and this is what they use to make the sheets for sushi all that kind of stuff it doesn't it's not used in the state when it's made into sheets it's usually ground and then pressed and dried it's also just completely edible just right off the rocks we're gonna grab a small handful like that and you can just see how beautiful that is really shiny really clean [Music] this is another type of kelp so this is called the feather boa kelp super easy kelp here to identify you can just see this sort of almost like a leather belt running through the middle of it and then all of these fronds come off that's where it gets the name that help it kind of come up to the surface when the tide comes in and we're just going to clip this like 24 inches from the hold faster it's really good this is a really really sweet kelp amazing for drying and using for broth this is a winged kelp really similar um to the feather boa as you can see because it has the rib running down the middle as far as how to identify it and then it's just gonna be a lot more golden and almost translucent that rib that runs through it compared to the feather bow which is a lot more leathery and then the sides here are just really thin and tender and translucent and this is a one of the types of kelp that you can eat really simply just blanched i'm just gonna cut it right here about two feet from there and then this is the harvestable piece most of the ends of them are all beat up and don't worry about that at all it doesn't affect them in any way almost the ends of all of these are tattered and it's just because of the way that the tide comes in here and whips them around so here we have a bullwhip kill it's one of the largest varieties of celts essentially a giant almost like a trunk that grows up from the bottom as you can see out here you have a lot of these little that look kind of look like seals out here but they're actually just heads of these giant bulbs um and then it has all these fronds that grow off of the end and this scalp stays here you know almost the whole year it is an annual but um it's one of the more hearty seaweeds that lasts the longest the reason why this is called bull whip kelp is because of the stem that comes down from the bulbs the bottom kind of resembles a whip so we have our prawns that are attached to the bulb right here we're kind of just giving the kelp a haircut [Music] it's gonna happen like every minute a bigger series of waves for your camera or whatever it's not going to be anything huge it might just be a little swell yeah so these are the uh bull kelp frogs that we harvested off of the bulb that we pulled up this scalp is really delicious it's actually pretty tender as is but um it's kind of off-putting because they're the texture is a little it's a little bit slimy you can just blanch it really quickly anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds depending on the thickness the best way that i think to do is to dry these prawns lay them out individually either over a bar or on a rack and just dry them right in the sun well that's not not every day you get to see that i was yeah that was really stinky that was like a fart i think that was like so cool and so gross at the same time i never experienced anything like that was really stinky we're like oh they're so majestic and then we're like wait is that we'll just walk back up to the port we're going to prepare a broth that's made from some of the fresh seaweeds we've gathered as well as some of the same species that we've also dried here pretty quickly in the sun so first we have some columbia river smelts they've been cured next we have dried squid and then we also have some shiitake mushrooms which we've grilled and then we dry dehydrate those as well and we have some specific surf muscles that we have gathered out here we're going to use these to fortify our broth and we're also going to use a few fresh seaweeds that are you know really fibrous ones so we have these different kelps here including the rock weed and then also some of our bulk kelp frond so it's really important that we keep this off as we add these because we want to bring this up from uh cold fresh water so that basically by the time that the water is really hot they're done steeping we're also going to add some seaweed that we've dried here really quickly in the sun this is uh the winged kelp here i'm just gonna throw that right on top and then we also have the uh kombu you just kind of crush that up and add it right here on top just a nice big sheet and then we also have that um feather boa kelp that was dried with the floats so we left everything included that's just going to go right on top here one of the things you've got to be really careful of when you're making broth with seaweed and these delicate dried ingredients not cooking it too much so we've brought this just up under a boil it's got a beautiful golden color all the seaweed has rehydrated we're going to let this steep for 15 minutes off of the heat okay so now uh our broth has steeped it's cooled off slightly not very much we're gonna go ahead and put it back on the heat take our fresh seaweed the rock weed here and our fresh bull kelp front we're going to add that in as well just kind of right on top and then we're going to take our muscles and just nestle these in you can kind of use your kelp to cover those muscles so they steam so as you can see that kelp just turns bright green as soon as it cooks just for a second our muscles have all opened up the broth is nice and hot it's just under a boil you can see some lazy bubbles coming to the surface we're going to set up another small pot strainer here typically um this is going to be lacking salt uh surprisingly enough even though we are using all seafood here the only thing that really has a significant amount of natural salinity is going to be the seaweed so we actually are going to use our seaweed salt this salt here this is made by us this is a traditional japanese technique where they take sea water reduce it down and pack it filled with seaweed um to sort of infuse into the water and then the salt is dried and finished we have our bulk help those blanched really briefly i'm just gonna julienne that put in our mug we're just gonna finish with a little bit of olive oil here right on top and that's it [Music] [Music] the way that i was introduced to harvesting wild seaweed for culinary use is when i first started uh going out to the oregon coast to explore and try to find new ingredients and meet fishermen and kind of just get more connected to the ingredients that we use we kind of just started picking it and just testing every which way that's the only way that you can learn how to use stuff you just gotta taste it and figure out what works

Channel: Eater

Views: 96,769

Keywords: seaweed, cooking with seaweed, seaweed recipe, wild seaweed, picking seaweed, seaweed broth, seaweed nutrition, benefits of seaweed, seaweed benefits, seaweed soup, seaweed recipes, harvesting seaweed, foraging, best seaweed, harvest, kelp, oregon seaweed, sea, jacob harth, chef jacob harth, portland oregon, eater, eater.com, food, restaurant, dining, dish, foodie, chef, food show

Id: urG-vM6jcYg

Length: 11min 11sec (671 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020