PicoBlog

i’ve been obsessed with the idea of kelp for awhile because i’ve been on an umami quest to find funky, non-animal-based flavors.

what can we do with kelp?

i’m philosophically allergic to substitutions that are trying to approximate something else (e.g. coconut aminos for soy sauce or cashew cream for cow cream). i’m not the first to come up with this but basically, i despise the food uncanny valley. i wrote my grad thesis about where impossible and beyond meat fall on the spectrum (spoiler, it’s closer to prosthetic hand than we want to believe).

you don’t have to read the uncanny valley essay to understand that most humans are cool with the stuff that’s above the x-axis and pretty grossed out by the stuff below.

instead of substitution as an approximation of the “real thing”, i’m all about using ingredients that fulfill the same base function (umami, salt, sweet, texture, etc.) while being inherently awesome in their own right. an example of this might be that you’re really excited to make pesto and cooking for a dairy-free, garlic-intolerant, nut-intolerant audience. you could get some cashew parmesan, omit the garlic, and use sunflower seeds…OR you could ask yourself: what is pleasurable about pesto? freshness from the basil, umami and a little sharpness from the garlic, umami and fat from parmesan, and a sweetness, nuttiness, and crunch from the toasted pine nuts.

ways i’ve made pesto work in the past for this eater profile include:

• sundried tomato pesto with green onion stems and starter cracker crumbs

• cilantro, mint, green onion pesto with miso and toasted sesame oil [inspired by this recipe]

• basil pesto with roasted fennel and toasted corn snacks (yes, corn nuts)

i have a crush on kelp. she’s everything i want to be — tasty, sustainable, healthy. she’s the base of all japanese cuisine and stands on her own (e.g. kombu dashi).

seaweed in general has also been having a *moment* since it was featured in Project Drawdown. there are numerous potential benefits from farming algae (carbon sequestration) and more controversially, using it as an alternative feedstock for cows (emissions mitigation). plus, it’s healthy (whatever that means to you).

and she’s cool. she was even featured heavily in Snaxshot #19 in April. 👀

when i first started thinking about food products, i thought it would be great to get to know kelp better. there are so many different kinds and i bet each one has its own unique properties that can unlock something new. lea agreed so we decided to try some kelp. luckily i had impulse bought all the samples from maine coast sea vegetables a few weeks before.

what inspires me about kelp is all about flavor and texture potential. as you’ll read on below, all kelps will have a baseline oceany, briny flavor but each one will have different highlights — kombu tastes like concentrated mussel shells, laver tastes like oolong tea, and wakame tastes like really fresh sea urchin. this got me thinking about riffs on these flavors. what would it be like to steep, ferment, pickle, or caramelize them? this also impacts the texture. what’s our tolerance for slimy vs. silky? do we like jello or just the concept?

basically every time lea and i go on a hike we brainstorm our next food company which is a combination of aesop + japanese breakfast (not musician) + skincare. we narrowed a few of these ideas down to kelp-specific things to try including:

• kelp comparisons: what if we just do a little flavor profiling to get the juices flowing and see what might inspire us from there

• hot breakfast broths: there’s no hot version of a breakfast smoothie afaik (tell me if you think i’m wrong) — what if there was a very nutritious, super tasty, hearty broth you could sip on the way to work?

• seaweed salads, compotes, jams, dips: inspired lea’s love of hijiki salad and by this kelp salsa (thanks again, Snaxshot). what would kelp coleslaw look like? pickled kelp?

so we didn’t get through much more than the kelp comparisons. but we reallllyyy tasted some kelps and some kelp juices.

some conclusions:

• not all kelps are for eating. rockwood whole leaf is better for baths and skincare apparently. irish moss leaf is used medicinally.

• kombu is kween. some of the other seaweeds produced interesting flavors ranging from green tea to oolong to barley-esque, but kombu came out on top for overall flavor and potential.

• cooking kombu in soy sauce and vinegar made for a very nice texture. i’d like to continue exploring different variations of this. also what if we tempura’d it?

• laver had the nicest mild flavor and could be fun to explore as a beverage base.

• dulse was really good dry and i’d love to experiment cooking with it anywhere you’d use bacon bits (“vaygan baycan”).

• hijiki has an almost rice like texture. it may not be financially viable, but high-protein rice substitute for our paleo/keto friends?

some other random ideas that lea wrote down:

• what if we did a tea that looks like a bouquet (like they do at Saison)

• kelp bath bombs

• kelp room scents/diffusers

• vaygan baycan (vegan bacon) with dulse

• kelp popcorn toppings

process notes: these sessions will probably feel more productive with more constraints. we were probably doing random things (like instant potting the kelps for 4 min at a time but with no real plan) for four hours. my hypothesis of what will make the next session more fun and rewarding is to have more structure in less time and a deliverable we can feed to an audience of taste testers.

breakfast broths!

@susha for being the first to read and reply to my newsletter
@mert for turning me on to Snaxshot
@gordy for putting a vocabulary to food pleasures

• what “substitute” do you love? what “substitute” do you hate?

• tell me about your breakfast routine. what do you eat / drink? why? what do you like about it? what do you wish were different?

• what separates breakfast foods/drinks from other meals?

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