Hand-picked from the sea

At 04:00 every morning between May and September, Stephen McAllister peers out the window of his bungalow along Northern Ireland’s craggy Antrim Coast, looks at the sky and decides if he should walk into the ocean. If it’s clear, he’ll slide on his waterproof overalls, grab a plastic bag and follow a boulder-strewn path into the frigid waters at Garron Point that four generations of McAllisters have used before him.

For the next three hours, McAllister plucks fistfuls of wild reddish-purple algae clinging to the rocks that reveal themselves as the sea draws back at low tide. He then stores his harvest deep in a hidden karst cave to keep it moist, before spreading the leathery fronds on a limestone bluff by the beach to dry in the Irish sun the following morning.

Known as dulse, this edible seaweed has been a secret staple of the Irish diet for more than 1,000 years, and helped entire coastal communities survive during the Great Famine.