Gelidium amansii
(Lamour.) Lamour.
Japanese isinglass
no rights reserved, uploaded by 葉子
no rights reserved, uploaded by 葉子
(c) Khadija El bouchikhi, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)
What to Eat
Edible parts: Seaweed, Algae, Frond
The fronds are boiled and dried to make quick-setting agar and jelly, available as bundled strips, cakes, or powder. It can be eaten with soy sauce and vinegar, or used to make noodles.
Where to Find It
A tropical and subtropical plant. It grows in the intertidal zone. It occurs along Pacific coasts.
Asia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Russia, SE Asia,
How to Identify
A seaweed. It is red and keeps growing from year to year. It forms tufts. The fronds are branched and rigid. The fronds have thread-like segments.
How to Grow
It is grown from spores that spread naturally.
Medicinal Uses
G. amansii is an important food source in East Asian countries and has been shown to have medicinal effects on dieting. Hence, in folklore medicine G. amansii is used to treat constipation. In Japan, it was historically used to make tokoroten. This algae is used to make agar, whose components are the polysaccharide agarose and agaropectin, from the large amount of algin which is located in the algae's cell wall, as well it is sometimes served as part of a salad, puddings, jams, and other culinary dishes in producing regions. Agar is a gelatinous substance that is commercially used both as an ingredient in gelatinous desserts and as an incubation matrix for microbes and other products that require an ecologically friendly gelatinous matrix. G. amansii is being studied as a cheap biofuel.
Wikipedia
Source ↗Gelidium amansii, also known as by its Korean name umutgasari, is an economically important species of red algae commonly found and harvested in the shallow coast (3 to 10 m or 10 to 33 ft of depth below the water) of many East Asian countries including North and South Korea, China, Japan, Singapore, and northeast Taiwan.
Notes
There are about 20 Gelidium species. It is claimed to prevent obesity.
Names & Synonyms
Agar-agar, Shie-hua-ts'ai, Tengusa
References (13)
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- Hu, Shiu-ying, 2005, Food Plants of China. The Chinese University Press. p 261
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- Subba Rao, G.N., 1965, Uses of seaweed directly as human food. Indo-Pacific Fisheries Council Regional Studies 2:1-32
- Tanaka,
- Xia, B., and Abbott, I.A., 1987, Edible seaweeds of China and their place in the Chinese diet. Economic Botany 41:341-53
- Zemke-White, W. L. & Ohno, M., 1999, World seaweed utilisation: An end-of-century summary. Journal of Applied Phycology 11: 369-376
