Seaweed with Peanuts, Ningbo-Style is a delicious recipe that can be served as an appetizer, snack, or side dish with a meal of pao fan (rice porridge).  If you’ve ever had packaged seaweed peanuts, you know the combination is irresistible! The peanuts and green sea moss both have a delicious umami and are a match made in heaven.  An Important Recipe to Document This classic Ningbo (宁波) dish is slowly disappearing from restaurant menus in China, but home-cooks like myself are not willing to let it go.  I knew that we absolutely needed to document it on The Woks of Life.After a recent visit to China, we decided that now is the time to put it out there!   Ningbo is not far from Shanghai, where I grew up, and I have many memories of enjoying this seaweed with peanuts.It has a special hold on me, not to mention that it tastes great.

Sarah doesn’t always like seaweed, but she chomps on these sea moss peanuts like no one’s business.Tai Tiao, a Special Type of Seaweed The correct type of seaweed to use in this dish is known as 苔条 (tái tiáo) in Chinese.We have seen it translated into English as sea moss and “branched string lettuce,” a type of seaweed algae that can be found around the world.  It is a coastal specialty in the coastal city of Ningbo, in Zhejiang Province.

It is often manually harvested in the winter and spring, by hand-picking them off of ocean stones along the shoreline.The seaweed resembles mats of fine hair.  Once harvested, it is

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