• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Forager Chef

Foraging and Cooking Mushrooms, Wild and Obscure Food

  • Home
  • About
  • Mushrooms
    • Mushroom Species Archive
    • Posts by Species
      • Other
        • Lobster Mushrooms
        • Shrimp of the Woods
        • Truffles
        • Morels
        • Shaggy Mane
        • Hericium
        • Puffball
      • Polypores
        • Hen of the Woods
        • Dryad Saddle
        • Chicken of The Woods
        • Cauliflowers
        • Ischnoderma
        • Beefsteak
      • Chanterelles
        • Black Trumpet
        • Red Cinnabar
        • Yellowfeet
      • Gilled
        • Matsutake
        • Russula / Lactarius
          • Candy Caps
          • Saffron Milkcap
          • Indigo Milkcap
        • Fairy Rings
      • Boletes
        • Porcini
        • Leccinum
        • Slippery Jacks
    • Recipes
      • Fresh
      • Dried
      • Preserves
    • The Basics
  • Plants
    • Plant Archive
    • Leafy Green Recipes
      • Leafy Green Plant Varieties
    • Wild Fruit
      • Wild Plums
      • Highbush Cranberry
      • Wild Grapes
      • Rowanberries
      • Wild Cherries
      • Aronia
      • Elderberry
      • Nannyberry
      • Wild Blueberries
    • Wild Herbs and Spices
    • From The Garden
    • Nuts, Roots, Tubers and Grains
    • Stalks and Shoots
  • Meat
    • Four-Legged
    • Poultry
    • Fish/Seafood
    • Offal
    • Charcuterie
  • Recipes
    • Pickles, Preserves, Etc
    • Fermentation
    • Condiments
    • Appetizers
    • Soup
    • Salad
    • Side Dishes
    • Entrees
    • Baking
    • Sweets
  • Video
    • The Wild Harvest
    • Foraging Videos
    • Lamb and Goat Series
    • YouTube Tutorials
  • Press
    • Podcasts
  • Work
    • Public Speaking
    • Charity and Private Dinners
    • Forays / Classes / Demos

Duck Egg Spaghetti with Cattail Pollen, Shoot Relish and Marigolds

Jump to Recipe Print Recipe
sifting cattail pollen

If you get to a cattail mat that is ripe with pollen, you wouldn’t need to remove the pollen containing portion of cattail, but I only had a small amount and wanted to get everything I could. Dehydrating the pollen containing portion will make pollen drop off easily too.

If you can collect enough flower dust to bake with you’re a foraging savant, and a better hunter than me. A quick google of “cattail pollen recipes” will show you different ways of using pollen, mostly for pancakes and baked goods.

Honestly the baking looks interesting, and I love the color the pollen adds. But, when I read recipes for cattail pancakes, I have a little cognitive dissonance. I mean I just spent an hour in the heat and bugs gathering 1 cup of pollen, then another hour processing it, and I’m now supposed to blow it on a single batch of pancakes?! In the words of an unruly line cook I used to have: OH HAYLL NO.

Foraged pine pollen

We are stardust.

Getting pollen is tricky. I’m always about a week too late, the plants might have a little pollen in them, but they’re never as fat as pictures in the guides. It’s all about timing.

In 2016, I was driving slow on a country road, hunting by car (a great way to hunt on hot days) when I drove by some cattails that were just fat with pollen. Like with so many wild foods, timing is stupifyingly critical to getting what you want and having it be in a state that will taste good. I grabbed each loaded cattail head and shook the pollen into a plastic gallon water jug with a hole cut in the side a la Sam Thayer. In the end I probably got a good 1/2 cup of pollen after about 30 minutes monkeying around with the plants.

Sifting cattails to remove pollen. I was trying to extract everything I could. If you come upon a cattail mat thats at the right stage, filled with pollen, you can just shake into a container or bag.

Extracting Every last solitary smidge. Generally you should be able to just shake it out of the heads. Stripping off the cattail flower matter as above is for people (like me) who always get to the cattails late.

First thing I did when I brought back the harvest to the restaurant was to bring the jug of pollen to kitchen and see what I could do with it. I tasted some pollen raw, it tasted like tasteless flour. I shook the jug around a little bit, and I could see things other than pollen in it, namely a bunch of ants. After sifting the pollen through a tamis sieve, I got to work. Here’s a outline of how the taste experiments went. I was working with a total of maybe a scant 1/2 cup of pollen, so I needed to experiment with small amounts.

My first time cooking with pollen

  1. Smell pollen. Pollen smells mild, inert, not unpleasant.
  2. Dip a finger in pollen. Taste pollen raw. Pollen is tasteless, and I’m pissed off I went through the effort to get it.
  3. Warm a few tablespoons of water in a pan, add a pinch of pollen. Taste liquid. Pollen taste is still mild, but pleasant.
  4. Add teeny pinch of pollen to pan,  1 tbsp butter, and salt to taste in a pan, heat and whisk. Pollen tastes like powdered cheese sauce. Now I have something to work with.

The first thing I made was a simple pasta dressed with the butter and the sauce, nothing else. I put the pollen on the back burner for a year, then made sure to hit the patches I knew to get some the next year. I still didn’t have enough to make bread or anything like a baked good. To all you people that fill bags full of pollen I swear it is not real, and that you must be mocking it up with all purpose flour and tumeric. Charlatans! 🙂

But, I had enough that I could serve at least 100 orders of the pasta on a tasting menu, if the cooks measure out by the 1/2 teaspoon, so when I was planning a dinner with Chef Wyatt Evans at Heirloom I knew it would be a good time to bring it out. As we were dreaming up the dishes over a beer one night, Wyatt mentioned he had a lemon gem marigold plant in his garden, and suggested we use it on the dish.

Lemon Jem Marigolds 

Left to my own devices, I would’ve made the pasta with the cattail shoot relish and pollen sauce, but another garnish could be worked in, but it absolutely could not be grated cheese, since it would overpower the flavor of the pollen with it’s salt. Wyatt’s suggestion was the perfect accent: flowers, pollen, pollen and flowers. If you’ve never tasted marigold leaves and flowers, they have a citrus aroma that give you a shocking pop. Think of marigolds like an herb, not like a flower. Lemon jem marigolds in particular are my favorite. Thanks Wyatt.

Here’s the dish we ended up serving that evening. Some of you that attended may even remember it.

duck egg spaghetti with cattail pollen, cattail shoot relish and edible marigolds
Print Recipe
0 from 0 votes

Duck Egg Spaghetti with Cattail Pollen, Shoot Relish and Marigolds

"Swamp noodles"
Prep Time1 hr
Cook Time15 mins
Course: Appetizer, Main Course
Cuisine: Italian
Keyword: Bergamot, Cattail Pollen, Cattails, Creeping Charlie, Duck Eggs
Servings: 2

Equipment

  • Pasta roller

Ingredients

  • 4 ounces homemade pasta made from whole duck eggs all purpose flour, salt, and chopped Monarda fistulosa (Bergamot) and Glechoma hederacea (Creeping Charlie) to taste.
  • 4 tablespoons unsalted butter
  • Kosher salt to taste
  • 1 tablespoon cattail pollen
  • 1 tablespoon dry white wine
  • 2 tablespoons cattail heart relish see my recipe here
  • Lemon gem marigold leaves and flowers to garnish (optional)
  • 2 tablespoons pasta cooking water

Instructions

  • Add the pasta to boiling, salted water, then remove 1 tablespoon of water and mix with the wine and butter over low heat. Add the pollen to the water-butter mixture, then toss in the pasta and season lightly to taste with salt.
  • Gently mix in the rest of the butter (yes I know its a lot, just deal with it, it'll be worth it) then heat gently, swirling the pan occasionally until the sauce has thickened and looks a bit like cheese sauce.
  • Double check the seasoning, then divide the mixture between two warmed pasta bowls, garnish with the relish and marigold flowers and leaves and serve immediately.

Notes

See the recipe for the duck egg-wild herb pasta here. 
Yes that is 4 tablespoons of butter for an appetizer for 2 people. Also, if you harvest pollen I like to keep it in the freezer until you need it to preserve it's life and flavor, a plastic ziploc works for me. 
Plating duck egg pasta with cattail pollen

Pasta plating pro tip: spin the pasta with tongs gently to coat it with the sauce and help it stand into a mound and give the plate volume.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Print
  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit

Related

Previous Post: « Wood Nettles
Next Post: Burdock Flower Stalk Noodles »

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. sam

    June 16, 2018 at 12:56 pm

    Nice post about cattail pollen. I liked the notes you put about the tastings.

    I got some nice duck eggs from someone and also chicken eggs from them. I didn’t notice the flavor difference. Do you find it is different, such that you recommended duck eggs here?

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recipe Rating




Primary Sidebar

Pre-Order MY BOOK

Categories

Forager Chef

Forager Chef

Instagram

foragerchef

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
Load More... Follow on Instagram

Footer

Privacy

  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2021 · Foodie Pro & The Genesis Framework

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.