Turns Out that Sea Beans are Gourmet Cuisine

Peterson recommends eating slender glasswort in salads, pickled, or pureed. On a lark, I did an online search last night and found that slender glasswort, which goes by other names including sea beans, salicorne, sea asparagus, and samphire, to name a few, is in fact a popular vegetable in Western Europe and currently enjoys a growing popularity in fine dining restaurants here in the U.S. as well. Organic food growers cultivate the coastal plant and offer it for sale to restaurants and speciality food stores.

Tee hee. Who knew my interest in foraging wild edible plants would result in fine dining at my own humble dinner table?

I gleaned some interesting information and tips about sea beans from these sites. According to specialty food producer Misty Mountain, the plant was used as a food source in the Middle Ages by fishermen's families living near the coast. According to another food supplier, The Berry Man, sea beans or salicorne should be stored in a paper, since plastic can cause the tender tips to become slimy. "Sea beans do lose their culinary charm if kept more than a few days," advises Specialty Produce, confirming my own observation. The Specialty Produce site also contains good information about the nutritional value of the plant, food preparation ideas, and a listing of restaurants that serve it. Blogger dragonlife at Shizuoka Gourmet has an entry that includes instructions for preparing vinegared salicorne cream with smoked herring. I love Shizuoka Gourmet's tagline: "Not the galloping one, but the cycling one!" (That's some good Engrish, unless I'm missing something :) At Chowhound I found some informative reponses to a post about what to do with sea beans, including the following description that supposedly came from Hormel, although the link itself was broken: "The crisp textured bean stems and leaves can be eaten raw, steamed, boiled, sautéed, or stir-fried to add a unique presentation for fish and seafood dishes. They are often served fresh in salads or can be boiled and served with melted butter for dipping."

As far as my own experimentation, I made a yummy breakfast of scrambled eggs with slender glasswort and parmesan cheese this morning. I fried the glasswort lightly in olive oil before adding the eggs, and it tasted great. I also put some glasswort in a jar with sliced carrots and a conconction of white vinegar, white wine, and rice vinegar in the hopes of pickling it, although I am a total neophyte when it comes to pickling (other than sweet pickling) and I didn't look up any instructions, so we'll see how it turns out. After these two trials I still have a little bit left, so I am going to try some with butter and use the rest with a bastardized seaweed salad recipe (adding rice vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, and ginger) to see how it comes out.

I'd also like to note that my dad seems much more receptive to eating slender glasswort aka sea beans or salicorne, even though it is a wild edible plant, now that he knows it is one that is cultivated too. I guess the real test will be if he actually eats more than a small bite of it.