Seaweed & Nettle Salt + Pesteda recipe

~ Seaweed & Nettle Salt + Pesteda ~

A really versatile way to include Seaweed & Nettles in your diet on a daily basis, is to grind them into salt.

Both Seaweed & Nettles are superfoods, full of vitamins & minerals which are just SO good for you. Apparently seaweeds contain 20 x more nutrition than foods grown on land, that is just amazing & makes me want to eat it everyday.

I use this salt daily, adding a pinch anywhere I would normally use salt, on top of a meal, whilst cooking, in water with lemon in the mornings, I even added it to our buckwheat pancakes last week. If you just use a pinch you don't taste the seaweed flavor.

Making a herb salt is easy as, and you don't need a recipe. Just blend a good quality rock salt with your (very well dried) herb material. In this case I blended about 50% salt with 25% dried karengo & 25% dried wild nettles.

I was inspired by the traditional 'pesteda' from my days living in the Italian Alps, & also made a variation with Salt + Seaweed + fresh Thyme. (Let's keep this one on the downlow, if anyone back in the traditional village where I lived learnt that I'd bastardised pesteda with seaweed, I would probably be shot on sight!).

Pesteda is a blend of late Summer herbs & salt, used to season meats for bbq, fish, cheese, & sprinkled onto many dishes including Pizzocheri. It's a very typically local recipe - I believe that it doesn't exist in all of Italy (I lived in the Valtellina, the Alps bordering Italy/Switzerland & Austria, in a tiny village named Bianzone, surrounded by vineyards with snowcapped alpine views).

Every household keeps their own secret pesteda recipe, & each family's pesteda is their pride & joy, something you show off to guests but never tell them exactly what your secret ingredient is!

A basic Pesteda recipe is: 120 g rock salt, 120 g pepper, 2 cloves of garlic, 25 juniper berries, 20 g pink wild yarrow e 20 g wild thyme. Whether you add Rosemary or not is a debatable point. Then of course you add your own special variations, in my case I've married the Italian Alps with Coastal NZ for a Seaweed Pesteda! Oh, & one key point with Pesteda, the herbs are ground into the salt fresh, not dried.

Enjoy!