Striving4Zen

Languishing in cardboard boxes near the mushroom sections in local Fairway stores these next few weeks are Sea Beans, mysterious short stalks of a dark green vegetable, looking like something you might find washed up on the beach, but maybe a bit more edible.
According to Elizabeth Schneider’s Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini, Sea Beans (aka Salicornia) grow wild in warmer months all over- in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. “Salicornia is not seaweed, as it is often described,” she writes, “nor is it a cactus, which it slightly resembles.”
Eaten raw or cooked, its flavor can best be described as sea salty intense, with a sort of grassy asparagus aftertaste. When fresh, Sea Beans are crunchy like snap peas. At the tail end of their one-week refrigerator shelf life, older sea beans can be revived with a five-minute soak in ice water. In addition to their current availability at Fairway (a pricey $8.99 per ½ pound), farm-raised boxes of the vegetable show up every June at NY greenmarkets, often leaving perplexed customers headed for more conventional items like pretty garlic scapes, or local strawberries.

Labels: health food, new product, sea beans