Day 3: Dulse

 


Dulse, Palmaria palmata

In my early 20s I always had a bag of dried dulse in my pocket, and I would dig out a bit to chew on when I needed a snack; my Grandfather had told me that his relatives in Ireland always had bundles of dulse in their pockets and I happily followed on the tradition.  Mo Wilde in her book 'Free Food', mentions that 'Charles Dickens records that as a boy on holiday in Edinburgh, he'd spend his penny on dried Dulse to chew on, rather than sweets, preferring its smoky, almost bacon-like taste'.  Dulse has been eaten, used on gardens, used as a medicine as well as a fabric dye for a long time in Scotland and Ireland - and was highly valued for all those reasons.

It is a red seaweed, found in the subtidal zone, so you need a really good low tide to find it, and it is best picked in spring to early summer.  The dulse I used in this chocolate came from Colonsay, one of the inner Hebridean islands - so from lovely clean Atlantic water.

So a delicious and versatile food, but does it go with chocolate?  My first attempts to use sea weed in chocolate were not promising; I tried to make a ganache using some dried seaweed, infusing the dried plant into cream.  The resulting ganache became the answer to the much asked 'what is the worst thing you hvae tried in chocolate?'.  The smell and taste brought to mind mucky fishing harbours at low tide - not very welcome in a chocolate!  I was put off for a while, but then I started to explore different origin chocolates, and I came across a gorgeous Vietnam origin chocolate, made by Marou, that I thought would support something salty, and I turned to a dried and ground dulse, and sprinkled it on thin shards of the Ben Tre chocolate.  This was delicious - no longer muchy harbours - but the fresh flavours of a fine west coast beach walk.

I have since experimented with a number of seaweeds - laver, Dumonts Tubular weed, sea lettuce, gut weed, Pepper Dulse and Wrack syphon weed, and I have explored these flavours with both white and plain origin chocolates.  

For this particular chocolate in the Advent, I have used Pump Street Chocolate's 74% plain Haiti origin;  this is really chocolatey, robust flavoured chocolate and I really feel it can support the salty umami flavours of the sea weed.





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