Bacon Flavoured Seaweed

Superfoods like kale are efficient and nutritious foodstuffs, scientifically proven to be beneficial in dozens of ways. Unfortunately, we never want to eat them.

 

Some happy news out of Oregon State University this week promises to help with the issue. Researchers at the university’s Hatfield Marine Science Centre have developed a new strain of seaweed that has twice the nutritional value of kale, but tastes like bacon.

 

The marine algae known as dulse grows in the wild in North America along both the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines, and it’s been used as a food in northern Europe for centuries. In its seaweed form, it’s harvested on a small scale and sold as a cooking ingredient or dried as a nutritional supplement.

 

Researcher Chris Langdon and his colleagues are aware of dulse’s nutritional value. They were originally researching ways to optimize a dulse-based super food for abalone. The team developed various different strains of dulse, growing it in vats of cold seawater. When they started working with a particular strain of the seaweed at the Food Innovation Centre in Portland, things got interesting.

 

“There hasn’t been a lot of interest in using (dulse) in a fresh form,” Landon said to the media. “But this stuff is pretty amazing. When you fry it, which I have done, it tastes like bacon, not seaweed. And it’s a pretty strong bacon flavour.”

The OSU researchers have since patented their strain of dulse, which looks like a bunching of translucent red lettuce. The new strain grows faster than wild dulse while still retaining the bacon flavour and the exceptional nutritional value. According to lab tests, the seaweed is packed with minerals, vitamins and antioxidants, and contains up to 16 percent protein by dry weight.

 

Langson now has two large tanks of the bacon-flavoured dulse growing outside his office, which produce about 20-30 pounds of the seaweed each week. The marine science department is working with the business school to explore developing a line of specialty foods, and possibly even an entire new aquaculture industry.