The Spirit of spirulina has at last descended upon us. We (or rather Gnome the neophile) has been trying for some time to grow spirulina. Spirulina is a cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) that is edible and used as a dietary supplement or source of food. Spirulina has a very high protein content (about 50%) and was once used as a food by the Aztecs in the 16th Century. Furthermore, it has been documented that spirulina was once harvested from lake Chad and made into protein blocks for soups and stews.

For our purposes, we wanted to grow this algae because it had such a high protein content: first of all, I wanted to put it into our food and secondly, it is an excellent food source for our domesticated animals. Here are some pictures to show you what we have been doing with the algae:

Gnome initially started growing it in plastic tanks and once it had expanded, he used a Kiddie’s swimming pool.

When you look close up at spirulina, it is actually made of spiral filaments. I tried to capture this in a picture:

This is harvested spirulina:

It actually smells and tastes like very fresh eggs:

This is what we have done with it so far…

It turns pasta a nice green colour and as it ages, the pasta actually becomes blue-green. It does not have a strong taste so it does not impart any significant smell or flavour to the pasta.

We also made spirulina ice-cream; it was okay but the blue colour made it “feel” less palatable!

We will be doing more experiments and will keep you posted!