Seaweed salad with panko, and cherry blossom flavored rice vinegar dressing

Travel to the Land of the Rising Sun with the different flavors and textures this salad features. Enjoy as a side, or make this your light dinner.

Serves: 6 (as a side dish)

Preparation: 25 minutes (including 20 minutes or rehydrating the dried seaweed)

The salad, ready to serve - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

I like to cook Japanese noodles and (more difficult in my opinion) rice. Although these usually make one-bowl-dishes, there are times I look for sides to delight my guests, or to indulge myself a fancier lunch — or a sophisticated pique-nique, as I did in the past months. Beside edamame pods, tsukemono like sliced takuan (from daikon radish), I enjoy seaweed salads. It brings a fresh counterpart to the hot main dish, and a different texture to broaden the experience during the meal. I’ve tested several original dressings to build light and savory flavors, so the seaweed salad can also be appreciated on its own.

This recipe makes an unconvential use of panko. It fixes the dressing, and brings a soft texture which contrasts with the sponginess of the seaweed.

About panko

Panko on top of seaweed - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Panko is a type of bread crumb which is popular in Japanese cuisine. It has a crisper and airer texture compared to bread crumbs used in Western cuisines. Panko is generally used to coat ingredients before deep-frying them. As weird as it can sound, panko is produced by grinding a bread baked with with electricity — as in “applying an electrical current to the bread”, not “electricity to power an oven”.

Ingredients

All ingredients for this recipe - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

• 28 g dried seaweed (my package advertises them as fueru wakame / ふえるわかめ)

• 15 g of Japanese breadcrumbs (panko / パン粉)¹

• 5 soup spoons of cherry blossom (sakura / さくら) flavored rice vinegar

• 3 soup spoons of soy sauce²

• 3 soup spoons of oil (sunflower, canola, or any oil which doesn’t feature a strong flavor)

Preparation

This is a salad, with little actual cooking. As a consequence, all necessary steps are listed below — there’s no Cooking section further down.

1. In a large bowl, put the dried seaweed with enough water so it will still be covered when it grows

2. Let the dried seaweed rehydrate for 20 minutes; add more water if they grow enough to no longer be covered — hence the large bowl at step 1

3. Drain water with a sieve, rinse, press gently the seaweed to purge it from superfluous water

4. In the bowl, combine cherry blossom flavored vinegar, soy sauce, and oil

5. Add panko and mix with the seaweed

All few ingredients combined and mixed in a large bowl; its good to use a large bowl, so mixing ingredients together is an easier operation - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

You can serve right away, however the panko will be crispy. I prefer to let the salad sit in the fridge for at least a couple of hours, and have the panko become soft. Once prepared, store in an airtight container in your fridge, and consume within 2-3 days.

A (well-lighted) close-up on a serving of the seaweed salad - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Enjoy!

If you’ve tried the recipe, and would like to comment - whether you loved it, or hated it - please do so. I’m welcoming ideas, even if these are non-vegan recipes I’ll have the challenge to “veganize”.

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Here’s a tip before you go

Cherry blossom flavored rice vinegar is not the easiest ingredient to find… so I suggest this alternative dressing:

• 8 soup spoons of vegan ponzu / ポン酢 sauce

• 3 soup spoons of sunflower or canola oil

Or:

• 7 soup spoons of soy sauce

• 4 soup spoons of hemp oil

Whatever you choose, I recommend to have only one ingredient with a strong flavor: either the vinegar (which you can skip), the soy sauce, or the oil.

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1. Beware panko are bread crumbs, made (as their name suggests) from bread, which contains wheat, a know allergen

2. Beware that soy sauce is made from soy and wheat; both are known allergens