How To Cook Fish With Seaweed | A fish recipe with Chef Völundur Snær Völundarson

When we talk about sustainability, seaweed is a key item because you don't need soil, you don't need fresh water. It grows really by itself if you string it on a line and you cultivate it. It's a very easy self-sustained food that you can grow in so many areas in the world. Seaweed is basically an algae or sea vegetables. It can grow in the ocean, it can grow in rivers, and it can grow in lakes. It's a sea plant, basically. It's a red algae like this, which is dulse, or brown algae, this would be sweet kelp. Hunt harvesting is, I think, the best way to do it. When you cut the seaweed, you can carefully cut so you don't make the stem too short and you know the seaweed will grow back. In my opinion, that's the way you should hunt harvest seaweed as much as possible. Our seafood plate is a European place. It's whole, on the bone, with skin on. I'm going to slice gently into the skin and season it with dulse and fry it in the pan with butter so the skin gets nice and crispy. I like pickled vegetables, so I'm going to pickle red onion and some celery. I'm going to make my own pickling liquid, and I'll show you that in a bit. When that liquid cools down, I'm going to brush that onto my dulse and have some crispy dulse as part of the garnish. Then we have sweet kelp, which is a very nice Icelandic kelp as well. What I've done here is that I've fried it, basically deep fried it, and just put some sesame seed on it for some extra flavor. That's going to be a part of the garnish. Then we have some potatoes and broccoli. I'm just going to get into it and show you how I make the pickled vegetable. I slice red onion just into wedges like this. I like the shape and the texture that it becomes. I slice thinly because the pickling liquid, I pour it over hot and I let it cool down. I slice the celery thinly so it cooks in the liquid. For my pickling liquid, I like to use star anise, mustard seed, fennel, cardamoms, and different types of pepper. Put it in the pot like this. I heat it up because the oil inside the spices gets out all the fragrance and the flavors, so I always let it heat up before I pour in the vinegar. Now when the vinegar is in, I pour in the sugar. It's about 50-50 sugar and vinegar that makes it sweet and sour and has this beautiful spiciness from all the spices that are inside the liquid. Next, I'm going to just put the celery and the onion. I'm going to loosen up the wedges so it's all loose like this. Just put it in here. Then I strain the liquid over. When that cools down, it kind of semi-cooks the onion and the celery. That same liquid, I will use later to brush a little bit on the ducks to give it an extra flavor. My experience is if you pickle ducks, you need to have a cold liquid. If you put it in a hot liquid, it kind of gets mushy and doesn't really taste that great. Now the pickling liquid is ready, so I just strain it over the onion and the celery. And just let it cool down while we prepare the fish. I like to season this with my sweet kelp sea salt, which is a blend that I just give a touch of flavor. Once again, it gives a little bit of this umami flavor back into it, like an undertone that just lays right there. Here we go. Nice and roasted and a little bit more sweet kelp salt. I pre-cooked the potatoes. I just pressed them down and then I fried them in butter. Now the garnish is ready. I just put it on the side and I'm going to get started on the fish. To get the flavor of the dulse inside the flesh of the fish, I'm going to make some slices into the skin. That's important to get the flavors deep inside the meat. Just continue to make them on both sides and I do it on the other side. Just season it a little with the dulse flakes, which is just regular dulse that has been dried and then actually ground it down so it makes these like nice little flakes. When we get into the pan and they melt in with the butter, they will bring out the flavor and that flavor will also get inside the flesh. Now it's ready for the pan. I'm going to cook it slow in the pan, but I'm going to cook it with a lot of butter. I do a slow heat so the butter doesn't burn and I need to cook it slow too because it's on the bone and it takes a while to cook all the way through. Now it's just patience not to move the fish around in the pan too much because I want the skin to cook. Otherwise it can get stuck in the pan and you can rip it. You can see how it starts to cook when I paste it with the hot butter in the pan. It's just my personal preference to use butter, but you could always use olive oil if you like. I'm a big butter fan so that's why I use it and I'm very generous with it too. It's the moment of truth to see if I did it correctly. Oh boy, this looks good. I have to give it a little more season into the butter. Be generous with that and then the sweet kale salt blend that I put on top. Continue to baste it so all the flavors, you should be able to smell it now. I'm going to turn the pan off, get a plate, put the garnish around and serve it. It looks beautiful. Now the pickled vegetables are ready so I'm just going to strain them. Strain the liquid off like this. Put the garnish here around and we place the European place on top. Celery. I like the acid that comes from the liquid and the sweetness from the sugar. What I like to do at the end is to use dulse and just put them a little bit in the pickling liquid and just have them here on the side as a garnish on the plate. What I showed you earlier was my fried sweet kale with some sesame seed on top. We just have them here so it's nice and crispy. Whole sautéed European place has to be one of my favorites. I love it also because I'm using all the flavors from seaweed, the dulse and the butter that goes inside the flesh. It's beautiful. Not only that, we pickled some of the dulse as well and we use it as a garnish combined with the crispy sweet kale with some sesame on top. It's a beautiful plate. I love it. I'm going to encourage everybody to play around with seaweed because I think it's the future and I love it. Thank you.