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Chokeberry-Cow Parsnip Seed Ketchup

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Chokecherry-Cow Parsnip Ketchup_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To me, using leftovers or looking in the cooler is how real creations are made and new menus created, not by looking at a fancy/expensive purveyor wish lists. A running behind the scenes joke I have with my cooks is that when we execute a dish creatively using leftovers, scrap, or odds and ends we dub it the “refrigerator special”.

One recent example in my kitchen involved someone making a large batch of jam from the chokeberries we’d been getting. There was a lot of jam, about 3 gallons and that would be perfectly fine, but it was soupy and far from set. The person who made it had the best of intentions, but ended up running short on pectin to make the jam firm-up. They tried to use some alternate methods to tighten the jam, but it didn’t really work out, and in a busy kitchen with 30 hands or so in it a week, things can fall to the wayside here and there and be forgotten.

One of the most important parts of being a chef is making sure product doesn’t go un-utilized. Since I’m not an owner, I have masters to answer for and every piece of carrot, onion, celery, burodock and watercress needs to be accounted for, or at least had had some hedge-betting involved in it’s purchasing.

As far as the chokeberry jam experiment went, I’m always on the lookout for a new sauce to garnish meat entrees, since making reductions out of stock takes time and I also don’t like to run more than one stock reduced sauce (demi-glace based) on the menu at once.

I had some duck breasts that were going to go on the menu that I knew would love a dark fruit sauce, but the sugar content of the jam needed to be adjusted.  I knew adding a couple things could help round it out and turn it from a sweet puree to a punchy compliment, namely a spiced, sweet and sour sauce I usually describe on the menu as fruit ketchup.

cow parsnip seeds

Dried cow parsnip seeds

I took some aromatics and spices and cooked them with red wine, red wine vinegar, and the jam. On a whim, I added some dried cow parsnip seeds, thinking that they would blend in with the other spices and fade into the background. But as I was pureeing the sauce in the blender, the aroma punched me in the face. All I could smell was the eery lime-esque scent of the seeds, everything else was in the background.

I put the sauce in the fridge for a day to let the aromas meld and relax, (a trick I learned making homemade steak sauce) when I dug into it a second time and was surprised: it was still all cow parsnip flavor in the foreground, and it was really good.

Pork Tenderloin with Chokecherry-Cow Parsnip Ketchup

The sauce is excellent with pork, chicken and game. Pictured is pork tenderloin with parched wilt rice, heirloom carrots, fines herbes and chokeberry sauce from a recent Lucia’s menu.

I made the sauce again a few weeks afterwords and learned something after toying with the recipe. Thinking the cow parsnip was so strong I didn’t need any other spices, I made it with only the wild seeds, removing all other dried spices. The sauce I ended up with tasted good, but it lacked the depth and character of the previous one somehow, even though I couldn’t have told you that there were any other spices in it. What the sauce lacked was just the je ne sais quoi you notice when the sum of a few ingredients become greater than the parts, the beguiling taste that invokes the deep flavor in dishes like braised meats and slow cooked sauces.

Chokecherry-Cow Parsnip Ketchup_-2

Chokecherry-Cow Parsnip Ketchup_
Print Recipe
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Aronia Berry-Parsnip Seed Ketchup

Yield: 5 cups
Prep Time20 mins
Cook Time30 mins
Course: Snack
Cuisine: American
Keyword: Aronia Berry, Ketchup

Ingredients

Spices (toast these before adding them to the mix, except the parsnip seed)

  • 2 tablespoons wild parsnip seed don’t toast these
  • 1 tablespoon cumin seed
  • 5 whole cloves
  • 5 allspice berries

For the ketchup

  • 2 cups shallot diced ¼ inch (or red onion in a pinch)
  • 1 cup chopped fresh ginger
  • 1 cup chopped garlic
  • 1 cups red wine vinegar
  • 2 cup red wine
  • 3 cups aronia berry jam or another dark berry jam Or 4 cups aronia berries and 1 cup sugar
  • 2 cups water

Instructions

  • Combine all ingredients and simmer gently for 1 hour.
  • Puree in a highspeed blender, pass through a fine strainer or chinois, then return the mixture to a sauce pan and simmer until it’s thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, about 30 minutes.
  • Transfer the chokeberry sauce to a labeled, dated container and reserve until needed.

Notes

If you don’t have jam, you can substitute 4 cups of aronia berries and 1 cup of sugar, just remember to continue reducing the sauce until it's as thick as you like. 

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Related

Previous Post: « Quest for the Mushroom of St. George
Next Post: Spring Dug Parsnip Soup with Acorn Oil »

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Ronald Fan

    March 18, 2017 at 9:58 am

    I love this. The thought process as much as the final result.

    Reply
  2. trish

    March 25, 2017 at 12:30 pm

    Alan, there is a beautiful photo on the right of buttermilk chicken livers. Need to know if you have them on the menu or a recipe? Love to try them. Will also be in search of the St George soon!! and will advise. Trish

    Reply
    • Alan Bergo

      March 27, 2017 at 3:26 pm

      Hi Trish, the chicken livers were on the menu a while ago. Here’s how I make them. Soak trimmed chicken livers in salt water for a few hours, then remove, dry, and soak in buttermilk until you’re ready to cook them. Dredge them in aggressively seasoned all purpose flour, then deep fry, or shallow fry on the stove. You need to be careful frying livers though because they like to pop, and may even migrate out of the pan if you’re unlucky. When I deep fry them I hold the livers under the oil with a fryer basket, haven’t tried it at home, but you can definitely shallow fry them.

      Reply

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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. 

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🌱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. 

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🌱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. 

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🌱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. 

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🌱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. 

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🌱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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