Irish seaweed explodes with that undefinable savoury flavour the cool kids call umami

Clad in a wool skirt and wellies, Marie Power carefully picks her way out the stony spit at Kilfarrasy Beach on Waterford’s Copper Coast. It is extreme low tide and she moves like a shorebird, quickly but surely stepping from rock pool to rock pool. From time to time, she bends low to get a closer look. Every once in a while, she pulls out what looks like a small pair of sewing scissors and carefully snips a few small leaves of reddish-brown seaweed.

This is pepper dulse, she says, and offers a taste. For such a tiny sample, the flavour is huge – saline, of course, it has lived most of its life in the sea. But there is also something vaguely peppery and a little sweet. Mostly it explodes with that undefinable savoury flavour the cool kids call umami.

These leaves are tucked into a plastic bag filled with seawater. They’re heading for chef Luis Martin of Waterford’s highly praised Old Couch Cafe, now rebranded as Mara, where they’ll be used as garnish on a seafood dish.

Power is one of Ireland’s foremost seaweed evangelists, guiding regular foraging forays, appearing at food festivals across the island, and marketing her own line of Sea Gardener seaweed products, ranging from green tea to protein bars. She has written a handy pocket-sized guidebook with recipes, The Sea Garden.

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Occasionally, she even ventures out on to the rocks as a special favour to Waterford chef friends such as Martin, Stephen McArdle from Union, and Peter Everett from Everett’s, as well as Susan Dean at Dungarvan’s Interlude.

It is a role Power came to almost accidentally. She certainly never anticipated it when she was growing up. Raised on a family farm in the townland of Islandtarsney, near Fenor, not far from the beach at Kilfarrasy, she was fed seaweed by her mother. But because it was strong tasting and treated as folk medicine, she turned her back on it.

[ Seaweed: Ireland’s nutritional gift from winter ]

It was only after a fascination with rocky shore ecology and a volunteer role in the Irish Wildlife Trust rekindled her interest that Power really started following the seaweed way. “As children in the 1960s and 70s we would have had seaweed, but it went out of vogue completely in the 80s,” Power says.

“It was salty, it was fishy, it was all those things Irish people are not crazy about. In fact, Irish people are not crazy about anything that comes from the sea, in general, I would have to say.

“We became more interested in Italian and Chinese and French food and all that and we sort of lost the interest in anything that was associated with an impoverished past.

“But there were always people like my late stepfather [Paddy O’Reilly] who continued the tradition of gathering and eating seaweed. Those habits sort of sustained but it was only with a very small minority of people.”

Leading foraging picnics as part of World Oceans Day persuaded her that maybe it was time to rethink. Combined with a search for nutritional ways to supplement her vegetarian diet, seaweed once again entered her life. “I was trying to find ways to get nutrition without it coming from an animal and seaweed is just packed with protein,” Power says. “I thought oh my God, Paddy was right all along and so were uncle Jackie and aunt Eiley back when they were shovelling this stuff into us.”

Her conversion was not unique. While most Wildlife Trust events were considered successful if 20 people showed up, Power’s first foraging picnic drew a crowd of 70.

“That’s when the penny dropped for me,” she says. “Marie you’ve been trying to get people interested in nature, you’ve been trying to get people interested in the environment and protecting it and here you’ve found a key that just unlocks all of that because people love food. It’s a way of connecting people.”

Power’s first venture into the product world was a protein bar she developed to feed her very active son. “He was doing lots of sports and was eating these protein bars. But when I looked at them, they were just disgraceful! Just a lot of chemicals with a chocolate coating. So I told him I’d make him some. And I’d figured out that if I milled the seaweed really fine and made it really small, my kids wouldn’t notice.”

More products followed. There is a kind of chunky pâte, green tea with seaweed and cinnamon, and six seaweed mixes that Power says “cover every culinary eventuality”. The seaweed in these is chopped fine, so they can be added by the pinch or spoonful, depending on the courage of the cook.

The products have won two Blas na hEireann awards, including a chef’s choice. They’re available from Quish’s SuperValu and Cove Stores in Tramore; Billy Burke Fish and Poultry; Kilbarry SuperValu and Ardkeen Stores in Waterford; Solás na Mara in Helvick and Blasta Wholefoods in Dungarvan.

Though Power is content keeping her own business small and easily manageable, she has little doubt that Irish seaweed is ripe for rediscovery.

“I don’t know if we had to go through that thing of turning our backs on the old stuff before we could go back into it,” Power says. “But I definitely think now we’re ready to come back and say ‘Holy Moly, we’ve been to other countries, we know all about that, and now look what we have on our own doorstep.’”

Marie Power will be leading a forage and beach picnic on May 6th. For more information, see theseagardener.com