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Forager Chef

Foraging and Cooking Mushrooms, Wild and Obscure Food

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Stalks and Shoots

Bread and Butter Fiddlehead Pickles

Bread and Butter Pickled Fiddleheads

A couple years ago I shared my basic method for pickled fiddleheads- a savory pickle using salt as opposed to sugar. I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t share some variations though, so here’s another favorite of mine: bread and butters. It’s pretty much as easy as it sounds. All I did was…

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Spring Vegetables With Spruce Tips and Lemon Agrumato

Fiddlehead, Asparagus Salad with Spruce Tips, Lavender Radish and Fresh Herbs

Out of all the dishes I created for Slow Food MN’s “Where the Wild Things Are” farm dinner, this was probably the crowd favorite. The evolution of it was a little interesting. The hosts of the event looked at my original menu and suggested we add a vegetable side of some kind to appease vegetarians…

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Knotweed Mousse Cake With Maple Buttercream and Wildflowers

Wild rice cake and knotweed mousse roulade

When I was planning my spring hunt with Chris Bohnhoff last year, we made a dinner to be part of the video. As luck would have it though, the day was rainy and the lighting inside wasn’t up to scratch, so our dinner didn’t make the footage. We had a risotto of fresh morels, spruce cured…

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Japanese Knotweed Sorbet

I’ve had a lot of fun playing with Japanese knotweed, but there’s was one recipe that’s trumped all the others. Last year I took a vacation in San Francisco to enjoy the sights and eat at some amazing restaurants, three in particular: Coi, Saison, and Bouchon. All of them were great (Coi and Saison were…

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Knotweed Custard Tart, With Goat Cheese Mousse

Knotweed-custard tart

Knotweed season has passed, but here’s a great way to use the sweetened puree of the shoots I mentioned a while ago. The puree is just a blank slate for whatever you want, eggs can be added like in the recipe here, but there’s really infinite possibilities, for example the knotweed leather (recipe here) as…

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Chicken Smothered With Chicken Of The Woods

Chicken smothered with chicken of the woods, with milkweed shoots

Summer mushroom season has started here in Minnesota, and the chicken of the woods / sulphur shelves have started to appear. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again though, you need to find them young, as in as young as possible. If you find some growing and leave them, hoping to come back…

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Fiddlehead Salad With Spruce Tips, Peppermint, And Pecorino

Fiddlehead-Fava Bean Salad With Pecorino, Peppermint and Spruce

Here’s what I made with the last of my fiddleheads this year, it’s a great little spring salad. The origins are Italian. In the Spring, it’s an Italian tradition to have fresh fava beans with hunks of pecorino cheese, a great example of less is more-just beans and cheese, that’s it. A colleague of mine,…

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Knotweed Fruit Leather

japanese knotweed and apple leather

Here’s a fun twist on classic fruit leather using a basic puree of knotweed I mentioned here. It has a nice, slightly tight apple flavor. Lately my pastry chef has been cutting these into strips, tying them in knots, and serving them on the complimentary petit fours plate we serve at The Salt Cellar to…

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Japanese Knotweed

Giant Japanese knotweed

Knotweed. This stuff is chic in foraging communities, but I didn’t find out about it through a wild food book or online group. I read about it in one of my favorite cookbooks: Provence Harvest by Jacques Chibois. Chibois’s restaurant, La Bastide St. Antoine has a garden where Chibois is said to have hundreds of…

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Hop Shoots

Wild edible hop shoots or Humulus lupulus

<a class=”more-link” href=” https://foragerchef.com/tag/hop-shoots/More Hops</a> Meet the most expensive vegetable in the world. Hop shoots are the young, tender shoots of hop vines, and they taste a bit like beer meets asparagus. I haven’t done experiments with different varieties, so for the purposes in this post I’m referring to common hops or Humulus lupulus that…

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Bison Tenderloin with Wintercress Buds and Anchovy-Ramp Sauce

Bison Tenderloin with wintercress buds and anchovy sauce

There are some recipes that make an impression, and really stick with you. This is based on one of those. About 6 years ago I was working at the now closed Il Vesco Vino in St. Paul. It was an Italian joint, with plenty of pasta and everything you’d expect. One of the first dishes…

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Burdock Mashed Potatoes

burdock root mashed potaotes

When I tell people I like to use burdock root, the first response I usually get is: “Oh yeah, that stuff that’s in sushi, right?” Yes, and no. When I dug my first burdock and cooked it (I source them for the Salt Cellar since I don’t have an army of foragers at my disposal,…

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Milkweed Bud Fettuccine

Milkweed bud fettuccine

  My dad told me about milkweed buds, and said that he used to eat them on the farm. Over the past couple years I’ve heard similar stories from people, mostly people involved in boyscouts or those interested in survival foraging. Thinking of survival food is definitely not what comes to mind when I think…

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Consider the salad, here, a little mix of ephemera Consider the salad, here, a little mix of ephemerals, and other tender young plants and herbs. 

The instinctual knowledge involved in choosing different plants at their peak to serve together raw, with thought put into how the textures and flavors will work on someone’s palette, to me, is one of the highest forms of culinary artistry. Something most people will never taste in their life. 

A little oil, salt, pepper, acid, a touch of sweetness from maple, maybe few fresh herbs are all you need. Bottled dressing of any kind would be like putting Axe Body spray on food. 

#spring #ephemerals #toothwort #troutlily #springbeauty #foraging
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Last entry. I’ve saved t 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Last entry. I’ve saved the smallest, fern gulliest plant for last. 

False Mermaid Weed (Floerkea proserpinacoides) is a good little plant Sam Thayer showed me. It’s tiny, as in all the photos are from me on my belly, in a wet ditch. It’s so small it’s hard to get the camera to even focus on it (see pic with my finger for scale). 

Mermaid weed likes wet areas, like ditches and spots that hold a bit of water (perfect mosquito habitat😁). 

Like chickweed, Floerkia greens are like nature’s Microgreens. They’re in the Limnanthaceae, (a new-ish group of brassicas) and like the Toothwort form earlier this week, you’ll taste a strong mustard-family flavor in a mouthful of their tender stems. 

They’re literally wild mustard sprouts, and, unlike other wild sprouts (garlic mustard 🤬) they stay sprouts, and, they actually taste good. 

It has a wide range over much of the eastern and western U.S., and is listed as secure globally, but is endangered in some states and shouldn’t be disturbed in those places. 

I’m lucky enough to have some large colonies near me so I do clip a few handfuls each year-my annual reward for removing some of the garlic mustard nearby, that, along with atvs, dirt bikes, and contamination from local water pollution, is one of the biggest threats to this tiny green. 

#floerkiaproserpinacoides 
#wildsprouts #mustardsprouts #ferngully #tiny #foraging #mermaid #🧜‍♀️
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Virginia Bluebells (Merten 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica) are one of the most beautiful harbingers of spring I know, as well as one of the most delicious. 

They’re in the Borage family, along with the namesake plant, Comfrey (which I only eat a few flowers of occasionally) and Honeywort. 

The flavor of the greens, like borage, has a rich flavor some people might describe as mushroomy or fishy, but after a just a few moments of cooking (30-60 seconds) they get mild and delicious, with a subtle bitterness. It’s a good bitter though-nothing like dandelions or garlic mustard that aren’t fit to be in the same basket, let alone on the same plate. 

The shoots are sweet and delicious, much more mild than the greens. As they can grow to be over a foot long, they’re almost more of a vegetable than a leafy green, depending on when you harvest them. 

Bluebells love moist, rich soil, but you don’t have to go to the woods to get them. Many people know Virginia Bluebells as a garden plant, and they can make a great edible addition to your landscape.

#virginiabluebells #foraging #ephemerals #springwildflowers #wildfoodlove #mertensiavirginica
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Narrow-leaved Wild Leek / 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Narrow-leaved Wild Leek / White Ramp (Allium burdickii) 

If you’re in a ramp patch you might occasionally see some with white stems (pic 1,2). These are a cousin to the more common variety with much larger leaves and red stems (pic 3,4,5)

Allium burdickii is not as common as the red-stemmed variety, and in every ramp patch I’ve been in, the white ramp is heavily outnumbered. 

Where I harvest, I like to leave them alone, and mark the areas where they grow with sticks or middens on the ground so I can go back in the fall and help them spread their seeds. I also try and remove garlic mustard when I see it-a much more imminent threat in my mind to ramps than foragers out to gather some leaves. 

2020 was a banner year for ramp seeds, and you can still help the plants right now (pic 7) as some seed heads are still full and would love for you to give them a shake as you walk by. 

#alliumburdickii #ramps #ephemerals #foraging #spring
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 #4: Erythronium leaves E 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

#4: Erythronium leaves 

Erythronium (Trout Lily) are another ephemeral that I see widespread in my ramp patches, there’s at least 32 species world-wide, with at least one endangered species in MN (Dwarf Trout Lily). 

They’re a beautiful, delicious plant I eat every year, but I can’t recommend serving them to the general public. Plenty of people say these are edible, but also emetic if eaten in “quantity”. 

I can tell you, at least with E. albidum and E. americanum I’ve eaten, that some people are much more sensitive than others, so if you want to make a salad to serve people, make sure they’re comfortable eating it, and use a few leaves as a garnish. 

Funny enough, I didn’t learn about these from a foraging book. Like knotweed, I learned about them from one of my favorite chefs: Michel Bras, one of the most influential chefs of the turn of the 21 century. 

Any chef that works with wild plants owes a debt to Bras. His book, although a little dated now, still teaches me new things all the time. While flipping through the book I also caught a recipe using tansy flowers 😳 that I’d probably pass on. 

The whitefish crusted with sunflower seeds is a dish of mine from 2012, and an example of how I eat the leaves: a few at a time, as a garnish. 

#troutlily #erythronium #michelbras #ephemerals #foraging
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Plant #3: Cutleaf Toothwor 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Plant #3: Cutleaf Toothwort (Cardamine concatenata) is another beautiful spring wildflower that loves to grow in the same habitat you’ll see ramps and spring beauty. 

Its small at first, but grows to a worthy size for eating as it flowers. It’s related to cabbage and mustard greens (Brassicaceae) and eating just a few leaves will give you a potent, spicy pop of mustard-family flavor reminiscent of horseradish. 

Eaten in combination with other things, like in a salad, the flavor becomes submissive and you’ll barely know it’s there. 

Some people eat the spicy roots shaped like canine teeth, but for the work I hardly think they’re worth it. 

A great wild spring green for the salad bowl-eat them leaves, tender stem, flowers and all🤤. 

#cutleaftoothwort #cadamineconcatenata #ephemeral #springedibles #foraging #wildfoodlove
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