Wild plums (Prunus americana) are in season, and they’re a puzzle. The flesh is rich and sweet, the perfume so deeply floral it will make your toes curl, but the skins, the skins are tough, and tannic enough to make you feel like you drank a few cups of chianti straight. The two aforementioned reasons are…
Pickles, Preserves, Etc
Dried Black Trumpet-Ramp Butter
I’ve never met a wild mushroom butter I didn’t like, and the few variations on the simple theme (especially the fresh porcini butter) are some of the most trusty and popular recipes on this website. For the most part, you can substitute different mushrooms in the basic recipe, but this one I developed especially to…
Salted Wild Mushrooms in Brine
Once I started reading about traditional ways to preserve mushrooms around the world, one of the first ones I came across was salted wild mushrooms, an old stand-by used in plenty of places, but most notably Eastern Europe. It’s not that popular in America, but one trip to a market with an Eastern European ownership…
Fermented Grape Leaves
Have you ever had commercially pickled grape leaves? If you haven’t, don’t bother, I’m pretty sure they’re the reason some people claim not to like grape leaves, or things made with them like dolmades. Like plenty of commercial pickled things, I usually find grape leaves from a store shelf overly acidic, like the processor is…
Pheasant Back Fermented Soy Sauce
Prime pheasant back season is usually about over after the spring chicken of the woods pop, but just because they’re big and tough as nails doesn’t mean you can’t do anything with them, and pheasant back shoyu is a great example, especially if you like edible science projects. Shoyu and it’s cousin tamari (soy sauces…
Burdock Yamagobo
Yamagobo is one of the tried and true recipes for cooking with burdock root that comes from Asian cuisine. It’s a simple recipe: burdock roots peeled and mixed with a pickle solution typically colored orange with..carrot powder, or more commonly orange food coloring–no thanks. After a reader tipped me off to the preparation, I had…
Lacto Fiddlehead Pickles
I love pickled ostrich fern fiddleheads, and my recipe for crisp vinegar fiddlehead pickles is one of the most popular recipes on this site (if you’re not a fermenter, try those first). I love the old pickles too, and by old I mean naturally fermented pickles–kosher dills, if you will. I’d tried fermenting ostrich fiddleheads…
Pickled Angelica
Pickled, tender Angelica stems are a good introduction to working with the plant, and I’m surprised I didn’t try it sooner after all the years I’ve worked with it. Angelica (my local species should be A. atropurpurea) is fascinating, and delicious in the right place, but was frustrating as it doesn’t obey some of the…
Classic Spruce Tip Syrup
I have to preface this by apologizing. I’m sorry for not getting this up sooner. I’ve been writing this website for years, and although I have a spruce tip syrup that tastes like spruce, it’s not the most powerful one you can make–it’s a hybrid, a shortcut. That older recipe of mine was back from…
Lacto Knotweed Pickles
One of the best parts about this site I never would’ve imagined as it was hatched when I lived in my friends basement years ago was that I’d be able to talk to people outside of the Midwest. In hindsight, the Internet being, well, the Internet, I should’ve known, but it came as a real…
Sweet and Sour Wild Cherry, Berry or Grape Syrup
Sweet and sour syrup, or gastrique as it’s known among chefs, is a little-known cousin to your typical wild fruit preserves that is one of my favorite to keep on hand all year round. It’s a simple, easy way to put up your wild fruit, and i’ve especially designed this one to work for fruits…
Liver Ketchup
Liver ketchup is another piece of history I came across doing research on lamb and goat in an old Scottish book by An Comunn Gaidhealach (a seriously legit Scottish name) first published in 1907 under the title of The Feill Cookery Book. Like most of the old books I have, a lot of the recipes…
Homegrown Horseradish Cream
Nasal-clearing, bracingly hot, creamy and delicious. Fresh grated horseradish cream sauce lives in the Valhalla of ultimate condiments, and is one thing that everyone should have in their culinary toolkit. It’s a snap to make, keeps for a very long time even though it’s dairy based, has tons of fun variations–two of which I’ll share…