Waves Of Flavor

Snappy, briny 'sea beans' bring the beach to your table

CALL IT GLASSWORT if you like; others call it pickleweed or poussepierre. Some people call it samphire, but that can be confusing because samphire is also the common name for a completely different seacoast plant in the carrot family. Western Canadians and Alaskans usually call it sea grass or sea asparagus. Washingtonians often say "sea beans."

Whatever you call them, sea beans are the small, fleshy stems and branches of salty seacoast plants in the genus Salicornia, which is in the beet family. When they are young, the plants look like tiny cactus or green, branching coral with reddish tips. They are crisp and tender, and can be eaten raw. As summer waxes on, they grow a little crunchier and they may be briefly blanched. Older, tougher specimens can be steamed along with mussels, clams or crabs where their sea-breeze scent enhances the fresh aroma of the shellfish sharing the pot.

I first encountered the stuff 20 years ago when my sister-in-law who lives in Sitka, a heavily touristed fishing village in southeast Alaska, brought me a jar of it, in pickle form. She called it beach asparagus.

"I blanch them first," she said, "then put them with water and vinegar in a hot pack. But most people just use it like a vegetable. When they're fresh, you can sauté them with onions, olive oil and garlic. I toss them in fish salad, too, for sandwiches and," she added with considerable emphasis, "they go great in an omelette." I tucked this bit of information away and promptly went on with my life. But since then, sea beans have quietly come into vogue as a quintessential Pacific Northwest garnish and sometimes as a vegetable at better restaurants in the region.

John Sundstrom, Lord of the Wild Things, likes to serve them as a garnish on sea foods at his Capitol Hill eatery called Lark. Karen Barnaby, at The Fish House in Vancouver's Stanley Park, plants them, lightly blanched, on her Seafood Sampler platter between claws of Dungeness crab and slices of her house-cured salmon pastrami.

At The Herbfarm in Woodinville, chef Jerry Traunfeld has put "sea beans" on the menu every spring for more than 15 years. Ever the innovator, he has developed more ways of serving them than anyone else I know. One week they might show up sautéed, another week they're used as a pickle.

"This is the best way to preserve them," says Traunfeld, "but they lose all their color and texture." To sauté, "we blanch and shock them twice to get some of the salt out, then toss them in a hot skillet with olive oil, butter or rendered bacon. They're great on top of fish."

Another night, they might appear in a clear soup. "We do a seafood consommé," he says, "flavored with lemon thyme, and float the blanched sea beans in the bowl along with a variety of seafood. But tempura," says Traunfeld, "is my favorite way to eat them. We serve them with a traditional dashi-based dipping sauce."

"Sometimes," says the Herbfarm chef, "you see them in the markets, but they usually look dreadful." So he orders his directly from Brad Carey of West Coast Seaweed in Victoria, B.C.

Owner, harvester and all-around "sea asparagus guy," Carey harvests "a couple of tons a year" from the shores of Vancouver Island.

"I'm basically a diver," says Carey. "I started as a troll salmon fisherman. I went through the whole boom-and-bust thing and then — poof! — the salmon was gone. So I started diving for sea cucumbers, octopus and sea scallops. And after what I saw in the fishing industry, I'm doing what I can to keep that from happening with other resources. When fisheries are maximized, then you see a declination rate," he explains. "And the same is true with any renewable resource. But at the rate I am taking this stuff, it is completely sustainable. It's not an easy job; I'm bent over picking these little plants, but I can count on it. You have to have a license to do this, and nobody else picks my area."

Carey says the season for sea asparagus might run anywhere from early May to late July, and as it gets toward the end of the season, it's always a good idea to pickle some. "I like to imagine that hundreds of years ago people were putting this stuff up in the summer to keep themselves alive and well in the winter. They were probably warding off scurvy without even knowing it. Or maybe they did know it. All I know is that it's very good stuff."

Greg Atkinson is a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine and a culinary consultant. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong is a Seattle-based free-lance photographer. He can be reached at barrywongphoto@earthlink.net.