seaweed salad 

I love seaweed salad and always wanted to make it myself since the ready-to-eat ones are pretty expensive (over $5 for a small tub).  When I first tried to make this dish a few years back I was faced with 2 problems, 1) I couldn’t find anything recipe on making this dish, 2)I couldn’t find the type of seaweed for making this dish.  Nearly all the seaweed salad recipes I found uses wakame, and that’s the only type of japanese cooking seaweed I could find in a chinese or japanese grocery store.  I gave up trying until one day I found another type of seaweed labelled as seaweed stem while browsing at a korean grocery store…

They are packed in a foil package.  The one I bought is preserved in salt, there are fresh ones too but the salted one worked out cheaper ($3 for 250g).  The salted one needs to be rehydrated by soaking it for several hours before use.  Rinse it twice during the soak to get rid of the salt.  The seaweed will double in size after soaking so only one handful would be enough for two.  For the sauce I come up with my own recipe, inspired by its chinese name and ingredients listed on the ready-to-eat ones.  It has soy sauce, sugar, oyster sauce, white/rice vinegar, red chilli and roasted sesame and sesame oil.  Be generous with the vinegar, the sauce should taste a little sour. The red chilli has to be fresh ones,  I tired using chilli oil once when I ran out of fresh chilli and the oil fail to mask the “fishiness” from the seaweed, not nice.  Marinade the seaweed for at least 2 hours before serving.