Cooking with sustainable ingredients has become a lot easier
cooking with sustainable ingredients has become a lot easier! It has taken a while but mealworms are the first insects to be approved for food in all EU countries as of 14 January 2021. In the Netherlands we have been at the forefront for a while when it comes to insects as food. For years, various types of mealworms, grasshoppers and crickets have been available here that you can incorporate into food. During the insect cooking workshop you can work with the insects extensively. This gives you an idea of how to use them in your daily dinner. There are still many applications for the approval of other products that will soon become the food of the future. Maybe in 20 years we’ll eat a sandwich with a black soldier fly spread, who’s to say.
What is sustainable food?
Those who want to eat sustainably start by buying food from that season. For example, we are now used to buying strawberries all year round. Not really sustainable and are they also hot all year round tasty? Especially when you buy the strawberries in season they taste like they should taste. If you buy them in the winter months, they are usually not ripe and too hard. On the internet you can find different season calendars. This way you immediately have an idea which product to buy at that time.
Eating insects
Eating insects is not something we should think about. But abroad, that’s a very different story. For example, a speciality from Cambodia is fried bird pin and in many countries they love pileworms. The most special thing we ate was in Australia. In the Kakadu National Park we spent a week with a bushranger. He still managed to find a local specialty and that turned out to be a lemon ant. A small critter completely filled with a mix of very sweet lemonade. Very tasty, so if you are in the area a try!
Cooking with seaweed
Gradually, eating seaweed is accepted for most people. Think, for example, of the black exterior of sushi. This nori leaf is an edible seaweed that is dried. So you can use it for the preparation of sushi. Making sushi is not difficult and very fun to do. We’d love to teach you how to make sushi during a sushi & sashimi cooking workshop.
But seaweed is of course much more than just nori that you use for sushi. There are more than 100 types of seaweed that you can use as a food. For example, during the cooking of the sushi rice kombu is added. That is also a basic ingredient for dashi. And how about wakame salad, also a seaweed. That’s a green salad with sesame seeds that you often get with sushi.
Seaweed is versatile, you can make all kinds of tasty dishes with it or you can use seaweed to bring dishes to taste. For example, you could mash the nori leaf that you normally use for sushi into a mortar. This seaweed powder can be used as a seasoning in your dish instead of salt. Or try sabayon of watercress and algae. A nice basic sauce for many dishes with fish and tasty as dip for seafood. Samphire powder is a new product that we only came across as a substitute for salt. For example, there are other options to cook with less salt. Otherwise, read our blog about cooking with less salt!
Seaweed information
A very good and informative website is the“seaweedhand”. Here you can find everything on the subject of seaweed. From the nutritional value of seaweed to any side effects that eating seaweed might cause.
Sustainable recipes
On the site www.keukenvuur.nl you can find delicious sustainable recipes. Use as many seasonal ingredients as possible and buy locally. Or experiment with insects? Check out the recipe of wax moth larvae white chocolate pineapple caramel and apple
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