How do you tell sea spaghetti from bootlace weed?

By the buttons. Sea spaghetti straps grow in tufts from small mushroom-shaped button discs on rock; they are slightly flattened and olive-green. Bootlace weed (Chorda filum) is perfectly round, thinner, browner and grows singly from pools with no button. Neither is dangerous, but only one belongs on a plate.

When is sea spaghetti in season in Scotland?

Late spring to early summer is its tender best. When the straps mottle with brown spots the plant is setting spores; it still eats well into mid-summer, then coarsens.

Can you eat sea spaghetti raw?

Yes — young straps are pleasantly crunchy, mildly sweet and faintly nutty in a salad. Most people blanch it briefly first, which brightens the colour and softens it just enough to take a sauce like the pasta it resembles.

Sea Spaghetti — Identification, Season & How to Cook It

By Jayson Byles, forager & chef · Updated August 2026

Sea spaghetti (Himanthalia elongata, sometimes called thongweed) is a brown seaweed of the lower shore whose long, narrow straps look exactly like its name. It is one of the easiest seaweeds to identify, one of the most generous in season, and the most natural gluten-free stand-in for pasta the shore offers — which is why it is a fixture of our beach cook-ups.

How do you identify sea spaghetti?

Start at the bottom: each tuft of straps grows from a small, mushroom-like button disc fixed to the rock — the buttons are the plant’s perennial base, and no lookalike has them. The straps themselves are olive-green, slightly flattened, up to a metre long and around a centimetre wide, forking as they go. Bootlace weed (Chorda filum) is the only plant it is mistaken for: rounder, thinner, browner, button-less, and usually swaying in a pool rather than draped on rock.

Hand-drawn identification plate for sea spaghetti: long smooth straps growing from button-shaped discs on the lower shore — *Sea spaghetti* — straps up to a metre long, each tuft from a button-shaped disc.

Where and when to find it

It lives on the lowest part of the shore, uncovered only around the good spring-tide lows — which on the East Neuk means the windows our workshop calendar is built around. Late spring to early summer is its tender peak; brown mottling on the straps means spores are setting, and by late summer the straps coarsen.

How to harvest it without harming it

Cut straps, never buttons. The buttons are the plant’s living base and will send up next season’s growth; take a few straps from each tuft with scissors, leave every button untouched, and move along the shore rather than stripping a patch — the take-a-third rule, as ever.

How do you cook sea spaghetti?

Blanch it for a minute and it behaves remarkably like its namesake: toss it through a sauce, fold it into a seafood pasta, or dress it warm with butter and our pepper dulse. Raw and young it is crunchy, sweet and nutty in salads; pickled it keeps for months; and dropped straight into the steaming pot on the beach it is exactly what our visiting French chefs did on sight. It also dries well — soak to bring it back.

The fastest way to learn a seaweed is to meet it on the rocks with someone who harvests it weekly. Join a workshop on the East Neuk shore — dates and booking here — or take home Jayson’s 52-page e-book Thriving in the Intertidal.

Sea Spaghetti

How do you identify sea spaghetti?

Where and when to find it

How to harvest it without harming it

How do you cook sea spaghetti?

Notes from the shore