Tough luck: that wakame salad isn’t nearly as healthy as you think
Did you think you were making a healthy choice by ordering a wakame salad at the Japanese restaurant? Think again. Because that salad is probably packed with food colouring, preservatives and sugar. And it’s not particularly Japanese either.
Giorgia Cannarella of Vice noticed that the salad looks and tastes the same at every restaurant and in every supermarket. The explanation? ‘Many restaurants serve salads that come straight from the shop. Many Asian supermarkets sell ready-made seaweed salads, sometimes frozen.’ And they contain a lot of colouring, sugar, preservatives and thickeners, she says. Not exactly healthy—and packed with calories to boot.
Doesn’t look anything like it
And that bright-green salad with sesame seeds isn’t really served in Japan. There is a seaweed salad, but it doesn’t look like the typical wakame served at all-you-can-eat sushi restaurants. Giorgia shows her favourite salad to a Japanese colleague, who is surprised. She says she may have seen something like it before, but that it isn’t served that way in Japan. Another chef explains that it is actually a Chinese dish.
Make it yourself
Packed with vitamins and minerals and containing just a few calories? If you make the salad as described in the recipes Giorgia finds online, that could well be true. It consists of dried seaweed, which you soak in water and then cut into small pieces. You mix it with a dressing of soy sauce, mirin, sesame and sesame oil, along with some yuzu juice, ginger, rice vinegar, chilli pepper and sugar. But as mentioned, most wakame sold in supermarkets and served in restaurants isn’t prepared this way—it comes from large factories.
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Source: Vice
