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Forager Chef

Foraging and Cooking Mushrooms, Wild and Obscure Food

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Charcuterie

Smoked Venison Shanks

Smoked venison shank recipe

Do you grind up your venison shanks? Feed them to the dog? Wonder what could ever make them taste good? No more. Smoked venison shanks (and lots of other smoked deer parts) are a great thing to keep around. Cure, Smoke, and Freeze for later  The basic idea is this: right after I butcher an…

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Smoked Rocky Mountain Oysters

Smoked rocky mountain oyster or testicle recipe

Fries, rocky mountain oysters, eggs, cowboy oysters, balls, or gonads, whatever you call them, the technical name is testicles, and if you’re here, you’re probably looking for a way to eat them. Congratulations, because this is hands-down the best recipe for rocky mountain oysters I’ve ever had–and I’ve eaten plenty. The first ones I had…

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Venison Pancetta

Aged venison pancetta recipe

Say the words venison bacon or venison pancetta to a hunter and they’re likely to tell you how much they like it. Unfortunately, the venison bacon so many people like is a mocked-up, sort of salty meatloaf injected with liquid smoke and pork fat to make it palatable. Like I talked about in my basic…

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Wild Rice Blood Sausage

Wild rice lamb blood sausage recipe

Black pudding, mutura, kaszanka, boudin rouge, zungenwurst, blutvurst, biroldo, morcilla, sanguinaccio. Across cultures, historical preparations for blood sausage will be found just about anywhere animals are harvested. And those are just sausage, don’t even get me started on the legion of other sanguine-devoted cultural specialties. Like most meat eaters, I love homemade sausage, and, once…

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Fried Blood Sausage and Potatoes

Fried blood sausage and potato hash

I’m proud of the fact that I make my own blood sausage from lambs on the farm I harvest myself. It’s a process that’s pretty intimate, and not available to everyone, and from there, people that harvest their own animals probably don’t harvest the blood, so it’s a special sort of circumstances that have to…

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Beef Neck Terrine

Beef neck bone terrine en gelee with black trumpet mushroom inlay

I’ve created more versions of pates and terrines than I can count, and some of them blur together, but one sticks out above the rest: the beef neck terrine. It was a crowd favorite, but also burned in my mind as one server repeatedly asked me to show her where the fruit was. She was…

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Venison Jerky with Serviceberries

Ground venison or deer jerky with serviceberries recipe

I loved eating beef jerky as a kid, and I always liked the Pemmican brand, it was simple, and good. But, when I found out years later that pemmican was actually a sort of mashed up paste of dried meat and lard, I was a little confused as to why people would have eaten it….

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Spring Sochan and Watercress with Venison Ham

venison ham, watercress, sochan

When spring arrives, greens are on my mind, and there are tons for cooking: nettles, waterleaf, violets, wood nettles, but sometimes I want some raw. Two of the best wild greens for eating raw are sochan and watercress. Watercress is widely known as an edible, but sochan, or Rudbeckia laciniata, the Cherokee rite of spring,…

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How to Make Venison Bacon

Cooked maple sugar cured venison bacon

Venison bacon is a thing, a smoky, delicious thing. But I don’t see many people making it. Do a google search for how to make venison or deer bacon and what you’ll find is definitely not bacon, they’re basically recipes for a sort of spiced meat loaf made with pork. Calling something like that bacon,…

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Chicken Blood Sausage

Chicken blood sausage recipe

I love cooking with blood. It’s hard to come by though, so that usually means it’s a once-a-year thing when I might help someone butcher a few lamb. I typically get enough for about 15 pounds of sausage out of that, which is plenty for me, and leaves enough so that I can donate some…

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Meat Garum

garum made from meat, noma guide to fermentation garum recipe,

Meat garum (just think soy sauce made from meat) was the first thing I planned to make after flipping through copy of the Noma Guide to Fermentation, by Rene Redzepi, a book I know plenty of my friends have been experimenting with. It is some seriously mind bending, technical restaurant ideas and experiments, and not for…

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Puffball Mushroom Bratwurst

https://foragerchef.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Lamb-and-puffball-brats-3.jpg

Here’s a fun way to use meat, and dried mushroom powder, specifically puffballs. In charcuterie and sausage making, milk powder is often used, especially in finely ground emulsions like bologna and hot dogs to achieve a nice, bouncy texture. Here, instead of using milk powder in the sausages, I use toasted, dried puffball powder, which…

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Smoked Heart Sausage

Smoked lamb heart sausages

A while ago I was planning the menu for a dinner revolving around lamb, which was going to take the shape of 3 separate courses dedicated to the animal. The first course in a menu like that I usually like to include offal, to convey the importance of whole animal butchery and how creative you…

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Some nice wild enoki clones from @unkle_fungus Can Some nice wild enoki clones from @unkle_fungus Cant wait until these start popping up when the snow melts. The difference between the coloration of wild ones (pic 1) and cultivated that are white from the lack of sun (pic 2) is always interesting to compare. (The cultivated ones are a different species of Flammulina too). 

We’re really lucky to have such a vibrant community of small, local mushroom growers and related makers. Feel free to tag your favorite you like or one I should know about in the comments. 

#enokimushroom #mushroomgrowers #flammulinavelutipes #blanche #allthemushroomtags #wintermushrooms
Celebrated my birthday last night with a few stiff Celebrated my birthday last night with a few stiff spruce’n’sodas. The spruce tip liquor I collaborated on with @ida_graves_distillery drinks like a mildly piney gin. Dangerously easy to drink. #sprucetips #craftliquor #drinkatree #itsmybirthdaybitches #im25again
Social media can be a wall-to-wall, endless string Social media can be a wall-to-wall, endless string of triumphs. We all know reality isn’t like that, so with the snow melting here, I thought I’d share a funny maple season fail with you (at the time it was not funny).

I was making maple soda out of sap, sweetfern and syrup that I like. I’d kept the glass bottle of soda in the fridge for a couple weeks, waiting for a good time to get to it. I’d started the mother batch with a pinch of commercial champagne yeast, which is vigorous stuff. 

One night I got up and poured myself a glass of water, and sleepily forgot to close the fridge all the way, which increased the temp. A few hours later I woke up to what sounded like a grenade going off. 

The bottle exploded and the inside of the fridge, all its contents, and the floor were covered with sticky maple juice, and I spent the next two hours mopping and picking out shards of glass that had embedded themselves like shrapnel in the walls of the fridge. 

Now, I use plastic restaurant cambros to make carbonated drinks. 💫

#fermentationfails #fail #soda #fermentation #explosions #dontrythisathome
My chief editorial assistant about to do backflips My chief editorial assistant about to do backflips for smoked goat kidneys. 

If you would have asked me a few years ago if I would see myself writing recipes (and filming videos) on making dog treats I would have laughed. 

But, working with @shepherdsongfarm, trying to figure out creative, economical methods for butchery and whole carcass utilization for lamb and goat has pushed my creativity into new places. Grateful for that. 💫

If you get down on kidneys, I have a good version for humans on my site too. A good piece of charcuterie to know. 

Hand model @pgerasimo 

#grassfed #goat #eatmoregoat #kidneys #offal #dogtreats #rescuepitbull #editorialassistant
7pm ET tonight on @the_outdoor_channel I take @dan 7pm ET tonight on @the_outdoor_channel I take @danielvitalis hunting for mushrooms and pigeons in WI, then I cook dinner on the farm for @wild.fed, his outdoors series that shows that wild food is much more than just meat. 

If you don’t have the outdoor channel, you could use the free trial of @frndlytv that will let you watch it live. 

Finished dishes I did were pigeon brochettes with rams bacon, sunflower roulades and wild cherry sauce and pigeon, sweet corn and wild mushroom stew. 

#mushroomhunting #wildfed #foragerchef #outdoorchannel #pigeon #foraging
After watching an old episode of Munchies (see You After watching an old episode of Munchies (see YouTube/Vice) I scribbled down a prep for yellow foot chanterelles a Swedish food truck was making. They took flatbread (tonnebrod, but I use lefse, because 🇳🇴💪) piled high with hot yellowfeet and fresh kraut, mayo, Västerbotten cheese (fontina or Hushållsost are ok subs). 

It’s one of the best ways I’ve had yellowfeet, like a funky, cheese, Nordic burrito. Just killer. 

I even forgot my lefse and served some to family in a couple BS flour tortillas Grandma had (heresy, IK) —still didn’t suck. 

Props to @ingebretsens in Mpls for making their own lefse since my Norwegian Grandma wasn’t  around. I channeled her though. 

#midwestwinter #lefse #lefseforlife #youbetcha #oleandlenawouldbeproud #yellowfootchanterelles #wildmushrooms
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