Whether you want to go gluten-free or just to add a fantastic source of iodine, vitamins and minerals to your diet, seaweed pasta is a great alternative to durum wheat pasta. There is even a seaweed I’ve already mentioned called sea spaghetti. Here I want to talk about the possibilities of oarweed (Laminaria digitata). Also called tangle in Scotland, oarweed is one of the kelps in the order Fucales. Forest kelp (L. hyperborea) and sugar kelp (Saccharina latissima) can also be used but tangle is the most common.
You can use oarweed to replace pasta sheets in lasagne.
Prepare some cooked mince in a tomato sauce and also make a . white bechamel sauce as usual. Bog myrtle leaves infused in the milk give an extra dimension to the sauce.
Find young oarweed around a metre long.
Using scissors, cut one side off (leaving part of the thallus to carry on growing and reproducing), and make your lasagne sheets by trimming them into strips around 6 cm wide and 20 cm long.
Rinse in clean sea or fresh water to remove any sand. The sheets can be dried and reconstituted for later use but fresh is best!
Parboil the sheets for 10-12 minutes before layering in the dish with your mince and cream sauce in alternate layers.
Sprinkle with grated cheese and some toasted nuts and seeds.
Then bake for half an hour.
If the oarweed is very young you can skip the parboiling and layer the fresh seaweed in. This may need 40 minutes in the oven.
With young oarweed you can also put it through a hand cranked pasta machine to make thin strips of tagliatelle.