A few years ago I shared my now favorite recipe for fermented Japanese Knotweed I got from my friend Jacqui, who lives in France. You take the knotweed, peel it, and ferment it in brine. The fermentation seems to denature the mucilage (slimy quality) a bit, with the natural acid produced from lacto-fermentation bringing a…
Condiments
Balsamic Blue Cheese Sauce for Venison, Game and Vegetables
Chocolatey and thick, shimmering with sugar, fat and funk, Balsamic-Blue Cheese sauce is one of the great sauces in my secret stash I bring out occasionally. I learned the sauce working under chef William Salvadore from Milan, and it was love at first spoonful. The restaurant he owned was an Italian-inspired American steakhouse concept, and…
Dried Mushroom Chili Crisp
Dried mushroom chili crisp has been on near constant rotation in my lineup of favorite condiments for a couple years now, and, also happens to be the only recipe including mushrooms in my book (it was really hard to separate my culinary loves and write a book on plants, vegetables, nuts and starches, but it…
Wild Plum Ketchup
Wild plums are in season right now in the Midwest, and this is one of the best things I’ve made with them to date. Seven years ago, I put up a recipe for ketchup made from wild plums (Prunus americana or nigra will both work, as well as any common plum or stone fruit you…
Ultimate Berry Vinegar
Growing up in the restaurant industry in the Early 2000’s, I was witness to some of the great culinary cliches of our time, many of them born in the 1990’s from what I can gather. Honestly, there’s too many to count, and I’m guilty of a few myself, like stacking food a la Alfred Portale….
Green Walnut Honey
It’s green black walnut season. I don’t know how people figured out you could use unripe walnuts in cooking, but I’m sure glad they did, and after you try making fermented green walnut honey, I think you will be too, even if you don’t like the taste of black walnuts cracked from the shell. Unripe…
Fermented Ramp Leaf Soy Sauce
Soy sauce makes just about everything taste better. One thing many people don’t know is that there are a myriad of options for soy. There’s aged soy sauce, shoyu, tamari, for starters, and then, pertaining to this post, there’s flavored soys. There’s mushroom-infused soy sauce, and that can be good if you get a decent…
White Wine Pheasant Backs
My old chef and I were out morel hunting in a new spot in Wisconsin this week, and, unfortunately, we got skunked. Thankfully there were a few old-timers on the same patch of land who hunt it every year who came up empty handed too, so I didn’t feel too bad. As is pretty common…
Pine Cone-Cider Jam / Varenye
“Ever eat a pine tree?”. That infamous quote from Euell Gibbons during a Grape Nuts commercial (there’s a lot of them on You Tube now and some are hilarious) has some truth to it. Sure, you can make tea (mostly I see it done with the soft needles of Easter White Pine) from needles, bark bread…
Wild Berry-Thíŋpsiŋla Wóžapi
Thíŋpsiŋla Wóžapi, also known as the best wild berry-based condiment you haven’t had yet. Thanksgiving turkey, venison, pheasant, all the meats, and plenty of other things too, sweet and savory, will all be improved with a few spoonfuls of this. Wóžapi is arguably the most famous condiment I know of in many North American Native…
Hosta Shoot Kimchi
It’s hosta shoot season, and besides just throwing them in a hot pan (which is great) the shoots are a bit like rolled-up lettuce, and they take really well to the kimchi treatment. It’s a great recipe to add to your repertoire for this common, delicious garden ornamental. It’s easy. To prepare them for fermentation,…
Homemade Maple Mustard
It’s maple season, so to make room for the new jars in the cellar, I’ve been cooking with some of the old dark syrups from years gone by. Since eating pancakes will only help you use so much, I figured I’d make a few different maple mustards. If you love mustard, but have never made…
Highbush Cranberry Tkemali
The cuisine of Georgia and the Caucasus offers a lot of inspiration for the adventurous cook and forager, and Tkemali sauce (Tee-guh-molly) is one of the crown jewels of their cuisine—a sort of ketchup like condiment rich with garlic, hot chilies and spices like fenugreek and coriander that would make a shoe taste good. It’s…