Part of the fun of foraging for me is coming home with a wonderful choice of unusual ingredients to cook and create with, or drying them to use another day. In my kitchen pretty much anything goes, of course there have been disasters along the way, though I’ve also had some pretty successful surprises.

Foraging also gives me the benefits of broadening my nutrition through a wide range of foods. It’s impossible for me to know everything that my body needs (or would take a lot of expensive analysis), though I do know that by including different seasonal plants and seaweeds I’m more likely to be feeding myself micro-nutrients that would be easy to miss.

For example, we all know that life provides a myriad of stresses and that good nutrition helps to counter the effects of and helps to reduce stress. Though did you know that in particular, seaweed provides up to 56 different essential minerals and trace elements for the human body. Wow.

I first came across sargassum seaweed (also known as wireweed and used to be known as japweed) in Sonia Surey-Gent and Gordon Morris’ book: Seaweed A User’s Guide; an unassuming and valuable book. Here, sargassum muticum is given high acclaim;

‘Sargassum… eaten as a powder with a drink of water, provides all the nutrients needed by the body, with hardly any calories.’

Hmm, all the nutrients needed by the body… sometimes I need a strong reminder to use seaweed. Feeling in the mood to make bread I decided to grab some dried gorse flowers, and the dried and ground sargassum that had been hanging around the kitchen waiting (too long) to be used.

This is what I came up with, complete with a sprinkling of nutrients, made with love and enjoyed with organic chicken soup after a cold and beautiful evening round the fire with friends.

Gorse Flower and Sargassum Seaweed Focaccia

A slightly sweet and nutty bread, with all the lovely texture that focaccia normally has, perfect with cheese and salad, with soup, or drizzle with gorse flower syrup if you fancy something even sweeter.

Ingredients

300ml warm water

100ml gorse flower syrup

1 dessert spoon dried yeast

500g organic strong white bread flour

handful of dried gorse flowers (2x handful of fresh is fine)

1 tsp dried and ground sargassum seaweed

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil (plus extra for drizzling)

1 heaped tsp sea salt

Pour the water and syrup into a jug and stir in the dried yeast. In a large mixing bowl, add the flour, flowers, seaweed, oil and salt, mix in half the water and with clean hands, combine and knead for 5 minutes, gradually adding the rest of the water. Now for the fun part – stretch and pull the dough for at least another 5 minutes before placing on an oiled surface and kneading for a further 5 minutes. Your dough is now ready to rest (and maybe you too), so pop it back in the mixing bowl, cover and leave to rise in a warm place for an hour or until it has doubled in size. Preheat the oven the 220°C and flatten the dough into a large, oiled tin and leave to rise for another 1/2 an hour, and prod your fingers into the dough at evenly spaced intervals to give the traditional focaccia topping effect.

Scatter the top with extra gorse flowers (if you have), a little olive oil and bake for 20 minutes or until golden onto and hollow sounding when tapped. Remove from the oven and leave to stand for 10 minutes before using a fish slice, or similar to remove from the tin and leave to cool on a cooling rack. Slice into squares and eat fresh. Lasts well for 2 or 3 days.

References

Rachel’s Seaweed book talks you through identification, sustainable processing and drying of sargassum muticum seaweed.

www.verywellmind.com

www.stress.org.uk