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Pollen and Honey Cookies

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Pine pollen and honey cookies Pine pollen and honey cookies are a love letter to the life of bees, and a little study in complimentary flavors you can use when cooking with pollen. Although bees (at least to my knowledge) don’t harvest pollen from pine trees or cattails, the flavors of pollen, and the inspiration you can use from this, definitely go hand in hand. 

Foraged pine pollen

Foraged pine pollen is a fun ingredient you can incorporate into baked goods and other things.

Pine pollen (cattail pollen too) has a natural affinity for honey and lemon, and showcasing that, along with making a simple, delicious shortbread-type cookie using only honey as the sweetener, is the big takeaway from this recipe I’m trying to share with you. The cookies are great, but you can also use the same technique and proportions with other simple quickbreads and batters like pollen pancakes and pollen bread. 

Pine pollen and honey cookies

Roll the dough into a log and cut into 1/2 inch rounds. They don’t have to be perfect.

Pine pollen and honey cookies

I like to make a cross-hatch in each cookie with the back of a knife.

Crisp or Chewy?

The age-old cookie question. Depending on how you like your cookies, you can adjust the cooking time here for the result you prefer. Cooking for 7-10 minutes will yield cookies that are more crisp, like a traditional shortbread, while the 5 minutes I suggest will give you more  tender cookies that, in my mind are a better representation of the fudgy quality pollen gives to baked goods when used in a decent amount.

Pine pollen and honey cookies

Pine pollen and honey cookies
Print Recipe
5 from 1 vote

Pollen and Honey Cookies

Simple, buttery cookies made with pine or cattail pollen, flavored with honey and lemon zest are a great introduction to cooking with foraged pollen.
Prep Time15 mins
Cook Time5 mins
Hydrating time8 hrs
Course: Dessert, Snack
Cuisine: American
Keyword: Cattail Pollen, Cookies, Pine Pollen
Servings: 4

Ingredients

  • 1 stick butter at room temperature
  • ¼ cup pine or other pollen
  • 1 cup all purpose flour
  • 1 large egg
  • 1/3 cup mild honey
  • ¼ teaspoon kosher salt
  • Zest of half a lemon grated

Instructions

  • Mix the flour, salt and pollen. Whip the honey, lemon zest and butter until emulsified with a beaters, then add the flour-pollen mix and incorporate well, transfer to a sheet of buttered parchment, roll into a log and refrigerate to firm it up and hydrate the dough (this gives the cookies a better texture), overnight, or for at least a few hours.
  • Preheat the oven to 325F.
  • Roll the log out to smooth it and form it into an attractive cylinder after chilling, then quickly cut into ½ inch rounds and lay them spaced out on a sheet of parchment on a cookie sheet.
  • Make a cross hatch in each cookie with the back of a knife, then bake, 5 minutes for tender cookies, 7-10 minutes for more crisp, traditional shortbread, erring on the side of under-versus over done.
  • Cool the cookies and store in a covered container on the counter. They’ll last for 3-4 days.

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Previous Post: « Pollen Bread
Next Post: Prickly Ash Sausage »

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  1. Charlie

    March 10, 2021 at 11:14 am

    5 stars
    Looks great

    Reply

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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
🌱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
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