Wakame Salad recipes- Japanese Cucumber Seaweed salad!

Recipe for a Simple Seaweed Salad - Soak 15g/2 tbsp dried wakame in warm water for 5 minutes. Drain well and squeeze out excess liquid. Chop finely. Tranfser to a bowl and add 1 tbsp toasted sesame seeds, 1 tbsp sesame oil, 2 tbsp rice vinegar, 1 tbsp soy sauce or tamari and a little chilli to flavour. Toss well and serve.

Recipe for a classic Japanese Cucumber Seaweed Salad - Soak 15g/2 tbsp dried wakame in water for 10 minutes. Drain, squeeze and roughly chop wakame. water and squeeze excess water. Slice 1 large cucumber or 2-3 small cucumbers thinly. Stir in a dash of salt, and let sit for 5 minutes. Pat excess water off cucumbers. In a small bowl, mix 3 tbsp rice vinegar, 1 tbsp sugar, 1/4 tsp soy sauce and 1/2 tsp sesame oil together until the sugar dissolves. Add vinegar mixture and 1 tsp toasted sesame seeds to prepared cucumbers and wakame and mix well.

Wakame is the seaweed customarily added to miso soup - just add a pinch of dried wakame into your cup of hot miso soup and it will rehydrate in minutes.

“Wakame is best preserved in its dry state, so only rehydrate the leaves or fronds you need. To rehydrate wakame, soak it in water for 3-5 minutes (it will expand 6-10 times its dried size). Since the soaking water is sweet and full of nutrients, don’t throw it out!  Drink the water yourself, use it as a base for stocks, and soups, or give it to your pets and house plants.

Wakame offers a plant-based source of umami taste - the white powdery substance you may see on a wild harvested wakame leaf is glutamine, an amino acid that naturally occurs in Wakame and will rise to the surface of the leaf as it dries in the air. Some mistake this for mould, but it is, in fact the source of the fantastic umami flavour, and when you use this seaweed in your meal preparation, it will impart a wonderful depth of flavour as well as dense nutrients and minerals."

Recipes and info sourced from Mai Kai seaweed suppliers www.pacificharvest.co