Spicy Pickled Kelp Yum Yum

Spicy Pickled Kelp

In Diane Sanfilippo’s excellent new book, Practical Paleo, she lists sea vegetables such as kelp as “super foods.” I know, I know. The term gets used laughably often and for all sorts of foodstuffs of questionable nutritive value. However, I wanted to add some seaweed into my diet for a number of reasons.

The first is for nutrition, of course. I’ve read about the much touted traditional Inuit diet, healthy but high in fats and almost completely devoid of vegetable matter, still contains seaweed.

The second reason is economy. A package of kelp at HMart, the Asian Supermarket, cost me two dollars. The single package revealed massive rolls of seaweed once re-hydrated. I am still eating my first batch kelp pickles, and I eat them every day.

The third reason is efficiency. Most nights, when I’m not injured (as I am now, stupid back), I get home late from training. After working an eight plus hour shift, then commuting 30 minutes to an hour to Mass BJJ, then commuting another 30 minutes or so back to Lowell, I sometimes get home as late as ten o’ clock at night. And I have to cook. I’m on a tight budget and I’m pretty strict with my paleo diet so it’s only on rare occasions now when I’ll eat out. If I could get my veggies ready for dinner with almost no prep time, then that would give me plenty of time to throw some beef kidneys into the oven at low temp, crack open a Graham Greene novel, and relax. This makes my dog happy as well.

Here’s the problem. I don’t particularly like the taste of seaweed. I’ve tried cooking it before and find it difficult to get an even bake throughout. It tends to be overcooked at the edges or undercooked in the middle. Even when I’ve gotten it right, I haven’t been pleased with the results. Yes, I love nori in miso soup or wrapped around sushi. And the precooked sheets, like those at Trader Joe’s, are delicious but contain some non-paleo ingredients.

So I decided to try pickling my kelp. I did it in two ways, one which you’ll find impossible to reproduce, but might enjoy reading about, and one which you’ll find effortless to make and enjoy.

This summer, I bought some ume plums at HMart on the recommendation of my friend Cole. I tried some. They were extremely bitter. At work the next day, I read about them and found out that they can are both seasonal and highly toxic if not prepared properly. So I stopped eating them, put them in a container with a brick on top, and set about pickling them according to a modified traditional method. Well, the pickled turned out way too salty, but they did produce, as I was told they would, an excellent vinegar with a nice, bright, citrus note. I put this vinegar in a mason jar and forgot about it.

Later in the summer, I was mentioning them to my friend Charlie, a professor at Fitchburg State and the baker of the only bread in the world for which I will break my diet.

I told him the taste profile and he came up with the inspired idea of pickling hot peppers in the vinegar. There was already enough salt, too much, so I diluted the vinegar, added some strips of fresh cut turmeric root, a few peppercorns, and some sliced serrano peppers. I still have some. They were so delicious that I limited myself to one or two a day. Plus, with the reputed health effects of ume plums, I wanted to savor and enjoy these pickles for as long as possible. Combined with the turmeric and peppercorns, I was hoping that the food would be somewhat anti-inflammatory, a big issue for me when I’m training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu on a regular basis and dealing with orthopedic injuries.

So, when I got home with my kelp from HMart, I still had a giant quart mason jar of my leftover vinegar with some of the serranos still inside.

I decided I would try putting the kelp in the brine with some of the remaining hot peppers.

I soaked the sheets for twenty minutes, draining once at the ten minute mark -- perhaps overkill but I’ve made the mistake of using overly salty seaweed before -- then cut them into 2”x2” squares. I simply put the squares in the quart mason jar with the other ingredients, along with a few thai bird peppers I had lying around, and waited three days. They are very easy to cut. The process is only somewhat time consuming because of there are so many sheets to work with.

The results were fantastic. I eat them every night and haven’t tired of them yet. Sometimes I pull out big clumps of the seaweed because it has a refreshing quality after training. They are crisp and light tasting -- the spice comes mostly from being soaked along with the hot peppers and the burn is mild and pleasant.

But there was a problem.

There was so much seaweed from my little two dollar package that I couldn’t fit it all into the jar. In fact, I couldn’t even fit half of them in. So I drove off to Market Basket, picked up the best looking jars of different hot peppers I could find, and returned. I redistributed them into small mason jars and topped the seaweed with commercially made hot pickled peppers. The results were all different, but all good. I put some added chillis and turmeric root in some. As the jars got low, I combined them to come up with new flavor notes.

So that’s it -- if you wanted to try a simplified version of the same recipe, start with some kelp, soak and strain it, cut it into squares, and top it off with hot pickled peppers of your own choice in a mason jar. Perhaps the simplest pickling experiment you can think of even if it does mean using a commercial brine. In the future, I’ll experiment with adding fresh herbs like dill, as well as using different types of peppers.

Additionally, if you want to add a foraging element to the mixture, go out and find some wild grape leaves -- very easy to find in my beloved home state of Massachusetts.