Is it safe to eat hijiki and how to cook it?
Japanese have been eating hijiki – a kind of seaweed – for centuries, as one of the most nutritious ingredients. It contains minerals such as potassium, calcium, magnesium, iodine, plus good amount of fiber. When I casually Googled hijiki, I was expecting positive reviews. However, to my surprise, most information I found was about the arsenic content, and a question of “is it safe to eat hijiki?”
So is it safe to eat hijiki? As I am not a scientist, I cannot provide a scientific answer. But as a regular consumer, my answer would be yes, for three reasons.
Number one, I have never met someone who fell ill because he/she ate hijiki. And it’s probably due to how often Japanese eat it. It’s important to know that hijiki is not something you would eat everyday. Average Japanese would eat it only a couple of times per month or per year. Plus, hijiki is not something you can eat a lot at once. (You will know it if you tried it.) People usually eat it as one of the small side dish. I would guess that it’s highly unlikely that the amount of arsenic included in a small side dish you eat only a several times per year to cause health problems.
Number two, hijiki mainly contains inorganic arsenic, which dissolves in water. If you prepare hijiki with water, and then discard the water used for the process, most arsenic will be removed. According the Japanese FDA, the safest way to first prepare hijiki is to soak dried hijiki in water, then discard water. Then you boil hijiki, and then discard water. Finally, you rinse it with water. It will reduce the amount of arsenic by 90%.
To be honest with you, hijiki is not a very popular food. Ask kids, and they will say it tastes bad. Japanese elementary schools provide lunch, and if students find a hijiki dish in menu, they would be really disappointed. (But schools want to serve it every now and then because it’s nutritious and hijiki is usually inexpensive.)
Now that I am grown, I eat hijiki once in a while. But as it contains lots of minerals, it tastes like minerals (that’s why you cannot eat a lot). Easiest way to try it will be hijiki salad.
