Award-winning chef, author and forager Alan Bergo. Food is all around you.
My first book is now available to order. The first in a three-part series, Flora is the vegetable portion of my life, covering wild plants, herbs, spices, garden vegetables, nuts and starches. It will be followed in time by Fungi (mushrooms) and Fauna (meat). Is the book only for North American Plants? No. I wrote…
Ramp leaf garum is a fermented, plant-based substitute for fish sauce made from ramp leaves, salt, water, and time. A few of my chef friends have been trying to make vegetarian fish sauce recipes using different things to replicate the umami flavor. Most of the techniques include lots of ingredients like coconut aminos, shiitake or…
Spring is here and with it comes elm samaras: a tree seed you can eat that tastes like fresh green peas, and one of the most unique wild edibles available to foragers in the spring. Today I’ll share with you what I’ve learned about these over the past few years of gathering. I’ll go over…
Preboggion, also known as prebuggiun, or prebugiun, is a traditional mix of edible wild plants (piante spontanee or erbe selvatiche if you’re Italian) harvested in Liguria and the Italian Riviera in the Spring, and a foraging tradition I think it’s worth taking a page from. As I researched different uses of wild plants around the…
Stinging nettle salad sounds like something you’d feed to someone as a punishment. The reality is that it’s a common, traditional nettle recipe from Turkey called Isirgan Salatasi. Last year I shared my new favorite way to cook every forager’s favorite burning weed by steaming them. I don’t think this salad will takes its place,…
Cheremsha, also known as Tjeremsha and Черемша are a wild allium used to make one of the most interesting traditional foods I’ve tasted to date. Essentially, you can think of them as lacto-fermented ramp leaves, although the traditional plant used to make the ferment is Allium victorialis-the victory onion, reputed to have been brought to…
