Brown Crab with Pickled Red Dulse Seaweed, Cucumber with Summer Peas and Coriander Oil

WE’VE gone crazy for seaweed in recent times; I’ve woken up to phenomenal variety of sea vegetables around our coast.

We were always big fans (and still are) of carrageen moss and dilisk, but that was pretty much the limit of my knowledge up to relatively recently. Dr Prannie Rhatigan whetted my appetite when she wrote Irish Seaweed Kitchen in 2009. Occasionally, I would meet Oliver Beaujoran on his market stall in Kenmare or at food festivals around the country — Oliver from France had an innate knowledge of seaweed and was permanently perplexed as to why we Irish didn’t seem to be excited or knowledgeable about the wealth of free and delicious food along our coast lines. Since 1999 he has been selling seaweed tapenade and sea spaghetti at farmers markets to his devotees and chefs.

More recently several companies, including Algaran Seaweed Products in Donegal and Wild Irish Sea Veg in Clare have developed very successful seaweed processing companies and there’s lots more in the pipeline.