“Firstly, use the correct type of rice,” she says. It’s easier than you’d expect to make sushi rolls (maki), Na Wang explains. But if you’ve never tried making sushi before, it’s a really fun and easy way to try nori. Nori is a delicious topping for dishes like okonomiyaki, a pancake-esque Japanese street food classic.

There are plenty of delicious ways to use each type of seaweed. Dulse can be used to flavour Irish soda bread and you can find dulse butter to serve alongside seafood dishes. DulseĪ rich and flavourful purple plant, dulse grows along British coastlines and, particularly when fried, can have almost a bacon-y taste – perhaps why it has been used to make a vegan take on a BLT. It’s so delicious it’s even been used to flavour Irish whiskey casks. Kombu is a dark, thick, leathery type of kelp, and when boiled with bonito flakes or dried anchovies it creates a rich and flavourful base for miso soup, udon noodle dishes and more.

You can’t make authentic Japanese dashi (a type of stock) without kombu, and you can’t make most Japanese dishes without good dashi. You can buy it fresh, frozen and dried – the latter might be labelled ‘fueru’, meaning ‘expanding’. Like all seaweeds it has a briny, savoury flavour, and it’s a little bit sweet. WakameĪnother East Asian import, wakame is a silky seaweed usually served whole in soups (especially miso soup) and salads. She estimates that during the COVID-19 pandemic, Yutaka sold double the quantity of nori year on year as more people gave sushi a try at home (and its sushi rice tutorial has now been watched nearly a quarter of a million times).

Na Wang works at Yutaka, a leading Japanese food business in the UK that supplies nori to all the major supermarkets, as well as online shops like Sous Chef. It's commonly sold as sheets which can be served whole, cut or crumbled, but you can also find it sold as flakes or crisps. Nori tastes rich and salty, and it might also have smoky and sweet notes. The UK’s favourite edible seaweed has to be nori – a dark green, deliciously savoury seaweed.

Cooking fever sushi seaweed