Kombu: Japanese kelp

n Russian, it is called "sea cabbage" or laminaria and is normally the base ingredient for an uninspired pickled salad. When Yeltsin and his cronies were busy plundering Soviet assets, canned laminaria salad was one of the few items always available in food shops. This seaweed's taste would have forever associated for me with Yeltin's hunger winters, had I not rediscovered it upon moving to Japan. The Japanese know a myriad highly delectably uses for it and it is in Japan that I grew to love this multifarious kelp.

For hundreds of years in Buddhist Japan a ban on meat consumption ban was in force, so people had to come up with something else than veal or chicken stock for cooking. Kombu, as it is known in Japan, is one of the three main soup bases (dashi). It is of gentler flavour than the other two, which are made of dried flakes of skipper mackerel (katsuo) and shiitake.

When it is sold dry it comes in two ways: shredded (on the picture) or in sheets. It is always covered with sharp-tasting residual sea salt and hence is high in iodine. When consumed over a long period of time, kombu is known to reduce grey hair and darken your natural hair hue. Thanks to it, through the years I have gone from light brown to dark brown with not a silver hair in sight.

I use it to make stock for miso-shiru, to make congee or o-kayu for breakfast, to prepare delicious beer snack tsukudani.