We’re saying goodbye to our Maine Winter Tomato Sandwich. This was many of your first time trying dulse, but a lot of you were going crazy for it. Dulse is a red wild seaweed that is native to Maine, Spain, Ireland, England, and Novia Scotia. It was so popular in England and Scotland in the 1800’s that Charles Dickens wrote about it as a delicacy, saying people would choose dulse over fruit. There were Dulse Wives who would sell it on the shoreline in Aberdeen, Scotland. When folks immigrated to the US they found dulse and continued to eat it in parts of Maine and Canada.

My friend Matt started Ironbound Island Seaweed 10 years or so ago. Now Andrea dives for seaweed or collects it on the rocky shorelines, dries it, and sends it to us. We fry it and serve it as a crispy salty deep element for an otherwise very simple sandwich (just Sriracha mayo and a thick slice of winter tomato). It isn’t just a garnish though. Dulse has a lot of potassium and a fair amount of protein, and the protein content is actually higher in the winter than in the summer.

We are bidding goodbye to the Maine Winter Tomato to make room for Michael Docter’s spring dug parsnip sandwich which launches today. We’ll have the sandwich again next winter. If you fell in love with dulse while we ran this sandwich, we are selling a few bags of it at CloverHFI, or you can order it online from Ironbound Island.