Mr laver laver: Better late than never to the seaweed-scarfing party

Seaweed-covered rocks at low tide: a slippery trip hazard or a well-stocked larder? | Roger Cox / The Scotsman

Like most surfers, I suspect, I’ve spent much of my life seeing seaweed as a nuisance. Largely this has to do with its potential for generating unwanted slapstick moments when you’re entering and exiting the water. There can be few surfaces on earth more difficult to negotiate than wet, slippery rocks covered in wet, slippery seaweed, particularly at the end of a long surf session when you’re feeling tired and cold and perhaps a little unsteady on your feet after one wipeout too many.

Seaweed cover is rarely uniform, so there are usually a few barnacle-encrusted gaps to be found amongst the chaos, offering much-needed moments of grip underfoot. When you fall though – and sooner or later, you will fall – you can be sure that you’ll end up landing on one of these board-and-body-scraping barnacle-y bits, rather than on a nice soft bed of bladderwrack.

Then there’s the irksome issue of leash-wrap. Most surfers keep themselves attached to their boards via a polyurethane leash, so when they lose their board during a wipeout they don’t have to swim to shore to get it back. It’s a good system in most circumstances, but in heavy kelp it can be a nightmare. Imagine you’ve just seen a large wave starting to darken the horizon – you’re trying to paddle as fast as you can to get safely over the top of it before it lands on your head, but for some reason you don’t seem to be moving as quickly as you should. You glance back over your shoulder and, sure enough, there’s a clump of kelp the size of a small labrador clinging to your leash, acting like a perfect sea anchor at a moment when a sea anchor is the last thing you need.

In these circumstances you have two choices: either keep on paddling and hope you’ll be fast enough even with your unwanted guest in tow, or stop paddling and try to disentangle yourself as quickly as possible. Spoiler alert: whether you decide to go for option A or option B, the outcome will usually be the same – a swift trip to the sea floor.

There are some places in the world – here’s looking at you California – where offshore kelp beds can have a positive effect on the quality of the surf, magically transforming choppy, wind-affected waves into smooth, glassy cylinders via some sort of complex molecular-level process it would take a PhD in physics to understand. In general though, unless you’re lucky enough to live in close proximity to one of these magical places, seaweed is a negative for surfers rather than a positive.

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Over the last few weeks, however, I’ve started to look at seaweed in a whole new light – less as a source of potential pain and inconvenience, more as a source of food. The catalyst behind this change is a 2019 book, recently reprinted, by South Uist-based Fiona Bird, a graduate of the University of St Andrews and a former BBC Masterchef finalist. She’s a keen forager with a special interest in seaweed and her book Seaweed in the Kitchen (Prospect Books) is all about the best ways to harvest and prepare it. I was sceptical at first, but – following a surprisingly positive first experience – I’m now full of the intensely irritating zeal of the recent convert.

Bird’s introduction contains one gem of a fact that hooked me in: there’s only one toxic genus of seaweed in the UK, the brown algae Desmarestia, also known as acid kelp, mermaid’s hair or – brilliantly – landlady’s wig. Helpfully it’s very distinctive looking which means, as Bird puts it, “identify this as one to avoid and the foreshore is clear.”

So, on a drizzly, waveless day a couple of weeks ago, I headed down to one of my regular surfing haunts armed with Bird’s book, a pair of scissors and a plastic bag. My plan was to start as simply as possible, by harvesting a small, experimental amount of Porphyra, better known as laver. In Japan it’s eaten as amanori and in China it’s also a common foodstuff, known as tsuts’ai. In Scotland it’s known as slouk while in Wales it’s boiled, puréed and sold as laverbread. If people are eating this stuff from Swansea to Shanghai to Sapporo, I reasoned, it must taste at least half-decent. Furthermore, being a very lazy cook, Bird’s suggestion that it could simply be chucked into a pan and fried in butter appealed much more than some of the other preparation methods, many of which seemed to involve time-consuming things like drying and pickling, for which I knew I wouldn’t have the patience.

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As I picked my way out across a familiar section of low-tide reef, looking at it through hunter-gatherer eyes for the first time, I was almost thrown off course by the sheer variety of different kinds of seaweed growing there. My kid-in-a-candy-store instinct was to try a bit of everything, but eventually I got a grip and tracked down a healthy colony of laver looking much like Bird’s description: “thin, crinkled black bin liner”. As per her instructions, I was careful to only take a little from several different patches, and to leave in place the holdfasts which anchor the weed to the rock, allowing it to regenerate. Then it was back to the kitchen for the all-important taste test. As directed, I put the laver in a pan with some butter and fried it until it reached a semi-chewy, semi-crispy state. Was it good? Reader, it was better than I could possibly have imagined, and this is just the start of my seaweed-scarfing journey. From a surfing perspective, all the comedy falls are now forgiven, and summer flat spells just took on a whole new complexion.

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