A seasoning for every season!
A few years ago, my daughter Emma and I walked into Morning Glory Farm on Martha’s Vineyard, where we live, and spied a stack of small jars on a shelf near the entrance. They read: “Barnacle Alaskan Everything Kelp Seasoning.” Our eyes lit up. She nodded. I put one in our cart.
Let me back up.
We are a house of bagel people. Everything bagels, to be exact. Our favorite bagel maker is Orwashers in New York City. We will forever be grateful to our friend Ken for introducing us, it was nothing short of a spiritual experience. Love at first bite.
We are also avocado toast people.
Our formula:
A slice of excellent bread, toasted
A generous drizzle of really good olive oil
At least ½ a mashed avocado, sometimes more
A squeeze of ½ of a lemon
A shake or two of Bragg’s nutritional yeast
A shake or two of Eden’s Gomasio (a Japanese sesame salt)
So that day, on our ride home from Morning Glory, we decided we’d swap the gomasio with the Barnacle Alaskan Everything Kelp Seasoning. The result? Amazing! The bass tones of the bread and sesame seeds balanced the brightness of the lemon, the texture of the avocado with the crunch of the poppy seeds and the umami of the kelp took the toast from great to perfect. We tried the seasoning out on a few of Emma’s friends. “Yum” was the word. We added a fried egg to our recipe. One friend ate four avocado toasts with four eggs!
I looked up Barnacle Foods to find out who was making this delicious treat. The story goes that Alaskans Max Stanley and Lia Heifetz began harvesting bull kelp when out fishing. In 2015, Lia brought her seaweed salsa to a local farmer’s market. It was a smash hit. The next year, they founded Barnacle. Today, the couple (and a small team) run a 3,000-square-foot production facility that makes tens of thousands of jars of kelp salsa along with kelp pickles, hot sauces (that my husband loves), BBQ sauce, and their furikake blends.
Even better, Barnacle foods uses certified organic ingredients and Alaskan kelp that is responsibly harvested and farmed. As Barnacle’s website says, “No land, freshwater, or fertilizer is required to grow kelp. Plus, it serves as a carbon sink, buffering the effects of ocean acidification.” And it gets better: kelp is good for you. According to the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, kelp is rich in antioxidants, which have been widely proven to fight oxidative stress, improve cardiovascular health, and prevent cancer.
Barnacle Alaskan Everything Kelp Seasoning checks all the boxes: delicious, healthy, sustainable, locally sourced and made. It’s a perfect recipe.
Learn more and shop at barnaclefoods.com. We like to recommend products we’ve tried ourselves. When you buy through our links, we may earn a commission.
