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Japanese-Style Day Lily Shoots (Gomae)

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Japanese style day lily shoot salad recipeDay lily shoots are a great spring edible, and one of the very first things that come up where I live and hunt in Minnesota and Wisconsin. 

Day lily shoots are delicious in all kinds of things, but a classic Japanese gomae preparation is one of the first things you should try with them. The basic recipe is really easy: take some nuts or seeds (sesame are traditional) toast them and mash up in a mortar and pestle, then add some soy sauce, a dash of maple syrup or sugar, and some of the same oil of the nuts or seeds that you used. 

Edible Day Lily and Tiger Lily Shoots

Day lily and tiger lily shoots: both edible.

Traditional gomae does not often include oil, but I find it indispensable in the ones I make, and allows you to really deepen the flavor and focus on a single nut or seed. Although sesame is one of the most delicious, and the one I have pictured here, there are many different combinations you can use. Here’s a few examples:

Nut and seed combinations 

  • Sunflower oil + sunflower seeds
  • Pumpkinseed oil + pumpkinseeds 
  • Black walnut oil + black walnuts 
  • Pecan oil + pecans 
  • Hickory nut oil + hickory nuts 
  • Acorn oil + ground acorn meal 

Soy sauce substitutes

Soy sauce is good, but there’s lots of other things you can use. Mushroom ketchup, fermented mushroom ketchup, garum, colatura–any sort of salty delicious sauce will be good here. 

  • Mushroom Ketchup 
  • Fermented Dryad Saddle Shoyu 
  • Garum 

Sugar Substitutes 

Traditionally white sugar is used, but maple syrup, birch syrup, or honey are all good too. 

Other Shoots to Use 

  • Hosta Shoots
  • Wood Nettle Shoots 
  • Fiddleheads 
Blanched day lily and tiger lily shoots

Blanched shoots, cooling and draining.

Warning: Don’t eat daylily shoots raw

Day lily shoots should never be consumed or served raw. Some people can tolerate them, but most (including myself) cannot. Intense nausea and dry-heaving typically follow just eating just a few grams. 

Japanese style day lily shoot salad recipe

Japanese style day lily shoot salad recipe
Print Recipe
5 from 1 vote

Day Lily Shoots Gomae

Day lily or tiger lily shoots served in the classic Japanese style tossed with gomae dressing.
Prep Time5 mins
Cook Time1 min
Course: Appetizer, Salad
Cuisine: Japanese
Keyword: Day Lily Shoots, Gomae
Servings: 4

Ingredients

  • 3 tablespoons nuts or seeds such as sesame
  • 1 tablespoon soy or equivalent
  • 1 tablespoon oil from the same nuts
  • 1 tablespoon maple syrup
  • 4 ounces fresh day lily shoots

Instructions

  • Blanch the day lily shoots in boiling water for 45 seconds, then drain and spread out on a tray lined with a towel to dry naturally and cool.
  • Toast the nuts, then grind to a paste in a mortar and pestle, and stir in the remaining ingredients.
  • Toss ½ of the dressing with the greens, double check the seasoning, adjust as you see fit, adding more dressing to your taste, and serve, cool, lightly chilled or at room temperature, fashioned into high mounds on small appetizer plates, garnished with additional toasted nuts or seeds, and served with chopsticks.

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Toothwort is peaking right now. Makes a great garn Toothwort is peaking right now. Makes a great garnish. Here with @shepherdsongfarm goat tartare, ramp vinaigrette and wild rice sourdough. It adds a nice bitter, mustardy note. 

#cutleaftoothwort #cardamineconcatenata #goat #tartare #normalizegoatmeat
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
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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
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