Sea purslane doesn’t look like much when you first spot it growing in the salt marsh.
I used to think all coastal foraging was about seaweed and mussels, the obvious stuff you see at low tide, but then I watched a local picker in Northern California crouch down near a tidal creek and start harvesting these small, fleshy-leaved plants that honestly looked more like succulent houseplants than dinner. Turns out, sea purslane—Sesuvium portulacastrum if you’re being formal about it—has been eaten for thousands of years, maybe longer, across coastlines from the Mediterranean to the Pacific Islands, and it’s one of those vegetables that makes you reconsider what “coastal cuisine” actually means. The leaves are thick and almost rubbery, designed to store water in saline environments where most plants would just shrivel up and die, and that adaptation is exactly what makes them interesting to eat. They’re salty without any seasoning, slightly crunchy, with this mineral-forward taste that chefs describe as “briny” but I’d call it more like licking a clean ocean rock—in a good way, I guess. Some varieties have a peppery kick, others are milder, and the flavor shifts depending on the soil salinity and time of year. You pick them in the morning, apparently, when the leaves are most turgid.
Here’s the thing: harvesting sea purslane isn’t like picking lettuce from a garden. The plants grow in intertidal zones, mudflats, and salt marshes—places where your boots sink into anaerobic muck that smells like sulfur and decay, where you’re racing against the tide schedule, and where one wrong step can mean you’re waist-deep in cold brine. I’ve seen pickers use small knives or scissors to snip just the top growth, leaving the root system intact so the plant regenerates, which is ecologically sound but also slower than you’d think.
Why Coastal Communities Have Always Known About This Stuff and We’re Just Catching Up Now
Indigenous and traditional coastal communities from Hawaii to Greece have been eating sea purslane for generations, though they call it different names—akulikuli in Hawaiian, beldroega-da-praia in Portuguese. It wasn’t considered exotic or trendy, just a free vegetable that grew abundantly in places where conventional agriculture struggled. Modern foragers and chefs started paying attention maybe a decade ago, driven by the local food movement and a desire for hyperlocal ingredients that didn’t require shipping or refrigeration. The nutritional profile is genuinely impressive—high in omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin C, and minerals like magnesium and calcium—which makes sense when you think about the harsh environment these plants thrive in. But here’s where I get a little skeptical: the whole “superfood” label gets slapped on sea purslane now, and while it’s nutritious, it’s not going to cure anything or replace a balanced diet, despite what some wellness blogs claim.
The Actual Physical Reality of Picking This Plant in a Salt Marsh at 6 AM
You wake up before dawn because the tide chart says low tide is at 6:47 AM.
You drive to the marsh access point, pull on waders that always leak a little, and walk out onto mud that squelches and releases tiny methane bubbles with each step. The sea purslane grows in patches—dense clusters of jade-green leaves that catch the early light—and you kneel down, which is when you realize your knees are now soaked because the ground is never truly dry here. You start snipping stems, filling a mesh bag, and your hands get coated in salt residue and plant sap that dries sticky. Seagulls scream overhead, annoyed that you’re in their feeding territory. The smell is intense: brine, decomposing algae, mudflat bacteria doing their thing. It’s not unpleasant, exactly, but it’s definately not Instagram-ready. After an hour, you’ve collected maybe three pounds of sea purslane, your back aches, and the tide is starting to turn, which means you need to leave now or risk getting cut off. This is the unglamorous reality that doesn’t make it into the restaurant menu descriptions.
What You Actually Do With It Once You’ve Dragged It Home Covered in Mud
Cleaning sea purslane takes longer than picking it. You rinse it multiple times—salt crystals cling to the leaves, and there’s usually sand embedded in the stem joints—and then you have to decide how to use it before it wilts, which happens faster than you’d expect for such a sturdy-looking plant. Some people blanch it briefly to mellow the saltiness, others use it raw in salads where the brininess replaces the need for dressing. I’ve seen it pickled, stir-fried with garlic, added to fish stews where it dissolves into the broth and adds this umami-ocean depth. Chefs at coastal restaurants charge $18 for a small plate of it, which feels absurd when you know it grows wild and free, but I guess that’s the labor cost of harvesting showing up on the bill. The texture stays firm even when cooked, unlike spinach or chard, which means it works in hot dishes without turning to mush—wait, maybe that’s why it’s popular in Thai and Vietnamese coastal cuisines where you need vegetables that hold up in soups and curries.
Anyway, the whole sea purslane picking scene is growing, slowly, as more people get interested in wild foods and climate-resilient crops. It’s not going to replace kale or become a mass-market vegetable—the harvesting is too location-specific, too tidal, too muddy for industrial agriculture. But for the people who do it, there’s something compelling about eating a plant that thrives in saltwater, that grows without irrigation or fertilizer, that connects you directly to the coast in a way that buying vegetables at a store never will.
