Samphire substitutes

The best all-round swap because the shape, the colour and the snap are all right, and thin asparagus in particular looks almost identical on the plate. What changes is the flavour: both are sweet and vegetal where samphire is salty and mineral, so a fillet of sea bass with beans tastes noticeably softer and less bracing.

Best for

serving alongside white fish and salmon, seafood pasta and linguine, warm salads, as a green side with butter

Blanch 90 seconds in boiling salted water and refresh in cold water to keep the colour. Then add more salt than feels comfortable, plus lemon, plus a pinch of crumbled nori if you have it. Snap the woody ends off asparagus and use only the top two-thirds.

The genuinely closest substitutes, because they are also saltmarsh and coastal plants and carry real salinity of their own. Sea purslane is softer and slightly slippery rather than crunchy, sea kale is crisper and mildly cabbagey, and oyster leaf tastes startlingly of oysters. All three read as coastal in a way nothing from a supermarket does.

Best for

fish and shellfish, restaurant-style plating, foraged summer cooking

Hard to buy unless you have a good fishmonger, a specialist greengrocer or a saltmarsh nearby. Only forage if you can identify the plant with certainty and the ground is clean, and rinse very thoroughly.

The right idea for the salinity and they give a satisfying salty pop, but they are pickled, so the flavour arrives sour and sharp rather than clean and marine. Caperberries have more of a crunch than small capers and look better scattered over a fillet.

Best for

pan-fried fish with brown butter, seafood pasta, potato and fish salads, scattering over a finished dish

Rinse well and pat dry, or the vinegar will dominate. Use much less than you would samphire, since a tablespoon of capers is as salty as a large handful of samphire. Salt-packed capers taste cleaner than brined ones and are closer to what you want.

This is the option that gets the flavour right and the texture completely wrong. Wakame and dulse deliver exactly the saline, iodine, seaside note samphire has, but they are soft and slithery rather than crisp, so they work stirred into a sauce or a broth and not as a vegetable on the plate.

Best for

fish broths and chowders, butter sauces, seafood risotto, dressings, stirring through pasta

Soak in cold water, then squeeze out and chop finely. Taste before you salt the dish, as dried seaweed is very salty. Use dulse rather than kombu, which is much tougher and meant for stock only.

Both are succulents with the same fleshy, juicy crunch samphire has, which makes them the closest textural match in the vegetable world. Purslane is faintly lemony and ice plant is watery-fresh with a slight saline hint, so with enough flaky salt on top the illusion is decent.

Best for

raw or barely wilted alongside fish, salads, plating, summer cooking

Use raw or wilted for no more than 30 seconds, since both collapse to nothing with real cooking. Ice plant in particular is often sold with the salt crystals visible on its leaves and is the better of the two here.

Purely a texture substitute, and an honest one. You get bright green and a good snap, but they are distinctly sweet, so a plate of grilled mackerel with sugar snaps tastes like a different dish rather than a variation on the same one. Salt heavily and add lemon.

Best for

when the fishmonger has nothing else, family cooking, cold seafood salads

Slice them lengthways on the diagonal so they look less like peas and more like a scattered green. 60 to 90 seconds in boiling water is enough.