Sugar Kelp

Sugar kelp, also called sea belt or Devil's apron and used in Japanese cooking as a kind of kombu, is Saccharina latissima, a brown alga of the family Laminariaceae. It has a long, narrow, undivided yellowish-brown blade that can reach five meters long and twenty centimeters wide, dimpled toward the center with smoother, wavy margins that help gas exchange, and attaches to rock with a claw-like holdfast and a short flexible stipe. It grows across the North Atlantic, Arctic, and North Pacific oceans, from northern Europe south to Spain, along the North American east coast to Long Island and the west coast to Washington State, and in Asia south to Korea and Japan, and is eaten in soups and stocks for its umami flavor and processed for mannitol used in chewing gum and other products.