Seaweed Pasta #1

I've been wanting to try adding seaweed to my fresh pasta for a while -- I hoped it would give it a flavor of the ocean and be an interesting color, even if not as intense as my squid ink pasta. This wasn't a big success, and I'll explain why, but I'll try again with a variation.

Seaweed pasta, reduced fish/cream sauce, caviar

The beautiful Mercat de Sant Antoni is a short walk from our place, and vendor Giro sells exotic fruits and vegetables including fresh seaweed. We got a package of mixed seaweeds in light and dark green and an attractive burgundy color.

I soaked it for a bit to remove the salt, then squeezed out all the moisture I could, and blotted with a dish towel (just like you would for spinach), giving me about 125 g of damp seaweed. This wouldn't mix into the pasta as is, so I blended it; it needed some liquid for the blender, so I added the eggs from my normal pasta dough recipe and blended as best as I could.  Then I made the pasta as normal, but had to incorporate a lot more flour to accommodate the additional mass and liquid of the seaweed -- it was a bit of a fuss, actually, to get it to come together. 

125 g Seaweed that's been rinsed and squeezed dried

125 g Eggs (2 XL eggs out of their shells)

100 g Flour

100 g Semolina

 25 g Flour to knead in for consistency

Blend the Seaweed with the Eggs until it's as smooth as possible; I feared that large chunks will break the structure of the pasta so wanted to break it down.

Put the 100 g Flour and Semolina in a bowl and add the blended Seaweed.

Stir and combine with a spatula, then move to a floured counter to knead; I had to add the additional 25 g Flour because the dough was too wet. Knead until fairly smooth, then cover in plastic wrap and let hydrate in the fridge for a few hours. 

This much pasta was enough for two 2-person servings so I cut it in half for our dinner.

Roll and cut into fettuccini with a pasta roller. I usually go down to a size 7 for fettuccini, but stopped at 6 for this because I was concerned about the seaweed breaking the structure of the pasta.

Bring salted water to boil and cook until barely done.

We made a sauce with Irene's fish stock, reduced down to concentrate, then added cream, and reduced further. This didn't thicken quite as much as we wanted, but it tasted great -- rich and full of fishy flavor. We plated the pasta, drizzled the sauce, then topped with a bit of caviar.

The sauce was tasty but the pasta didn't have the flavor of the sea we hoped to get from the seaweed; it certainly wasn't as dramatic -- or rewarding -- as my squid ink pasta.

I froze half the pasta for another night, as I usually do, and this damaged the texture of the pasta when rolling and cooking. I think the freezing broke the cells of the seaweed and caused it to break down, so my pasta turned out ragged. Many vegetables break down when their internal moisture freezes, expands, and explodes the cell walls, so this isn't too surprising -- just disappointing. I've made pasta with chlorophyll and it did not have this structural problem, but that's a lot more difficult to make.

Working with the fresh seaweed was difficult, but I'd try this again with dried seaweed. The only post I found that incorporated seaweed into pasta used dried wakame, kombu, and sea palm, and cautioned that "nori is not the right color and texture". I really like wakame but know that it expands greatly when hydrated, so I'm concerned it might break the pasta.  I plan to pulverize the dried seaweeds in a blender and mix with the flours and eggs. I'm hoping this won't require the addition of so much extra flour, and provide a more intense flavor.