What is wakame? Get to know this common edible seaweed

Wakame is one of the plants belonging to the seaweed category. The reason it has the name wakame is that the shape of this vegetable looks like a large, tattered fan palm leaf, and also very much like a skirt ribbon, so it got this name.

Wakame belongs to the seaweed category of plants, annual, yellow-brown in color, 1—2m tall, 50—100cm wide, with green leaves in pinnately lobed segments, the blades thinner than kelp, shaped like a large tattered fan palm leaf, and also like a skirt ribbon, hence its name. It is divided into two types: lightly dried and salt-dried. Wakame is a seaweed of the brown algae family Laminariaceae, hailed as a vegetable of the sea.

The sporophyte of wakame is yellow-brown, shaped very much like a tattered banana leaf fan, 1—2m tall, 50-100mm wide, clearly differentiated into three parts: the holdfast, the stipe and the blade. The holdfast is composed of forked branching rhizoids, the ends of the rhizoids slightly enlarged to attach to rocks, the stipe somewhat long, flat and round, slightly raised in the middle, the middle of the blade has a midrib extending from the stipe, with pinnately lobed segments formed on both sides. There are many small black spots on the leaf surface, which are the openings of mucilage gland cells toward the surface layer.