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Award-winning chef, author and forager Alan Bergo. Food is all around you.

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Spring Forage with Chris Bohnhoff

Spring Forage, forager chef, alan bergo,

Crouching to spot the milkweed on the top of a bluff at Bubbling Springs in Wisconsin. Photo by Chris Bohnhoff

Early last winter, my friend, pro photographer and video producer Chris Bohnhoff put a bug in my ear about planning a hunt we would turn into a video the following Spring. Chris and I started working together on videos after we met on a shoot we both did at Heartland a few years ago.

Our collaboration is a creative outlet for both of us, Chris has his day job, shooting food and lifestyle based photos and video, and I have my gig running the Salt Cellar. If you’ve ever known anyone with artistic tendencies though, you know that just one project is never enough.

Our ongoing video series has taught us plenty of things, like how uncooperative the weather and woods can be. People seem to always pick my mushrooms, and the birds eat up my berries. Even so, it’s been a great, relaxed way to collaborate with another artistic mind and see what sort of things we can come up with.

For the Spring video, we took a different approach from the previous one (see a link to that here) in that there is no actual cooking. The video focuses on the beauty of the land at Bubbling Spring Farm in Wisconsin-one of my favorite places to gather ingredients.

It’s a lot different than most food related videos I’ve seen that fall into the realm of the played out “talking head-food network style”. We have a couple more videos in the pipeline we’ve shot lately, and hope to have a fun series put together in the near future to share with you. Enjoy.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Liz Terrance

    November 27, 2015 at 5:43 pm

    No no no no no!!!

    Please don’t harvest milkweed in a field where it is so scarce! Milkweed is essential for the health of native pollinators, including every variety of bee. It’s also the only plant where baby monarchs can grow–when you denude a field you prevent the next generation of butterflies, if the parent’s can’t get to another location before they pass. Milkweed populations are plummeting across the country, and we need to make sure that we preserve as much as we can. I only take milkweed where it’s very very abundant, and never from the same area 2 years in a row.

    Reply
    • Alan Bergo

      November 27, 2015 at 9:54 pm

      No need to freak out. There’s no danger of over harvesting on the top of the hill in the video. It was difficult to see them because it was so early in the season-they are abundant there. For the restaurant, I source my milkweed shoots, flowers, pods and buds from Wisconsin Amish pickers, who rotate patches yearly.

      From my experience too, common milkweed, when cut early in the season, will continue to fruit and flower as normal, it just won’t be as tall.

      Reply

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Alan Bergo
I made vegan fish sauce from ramp juice. You tak I made vegan fish sauce from ramp juice. 

You take the pure juice of the leaves, mix it with salt, Koji rice, and more chopped fresh ramp leaves, then ferment it for a bit. 

After the fermentation you put it into a dehydrator and cook it at 145-150 F for 30 days. 

The slow heat causes a Maillard/browning reaction over time. 

After 30 days you strain the liquid and bottle it. It’s the closest thing to plant-based fish sauce I’ve had yet. 

The potency of ramps is a pretty darn good approximation of the glutamates in meat. But you could prob make something similar with combinations of other alliums. 

The taste is crazy. I get toasted ramp, followed by mellow notes from the fermentation. Potent and delicate at the same time. 

I’ve been using it to make simple Japanese-style dipping sauces for tempura etc. 

Pics: 
2: Ramp juice 
3: Juicy leaf pulp 
4: Squeezing excess juice from the pulp
5: After 5 days at 145F 
6: After 30 days 
7: Straining through Muslin to finish

#ramps #veganfishsauce #experimentalfood #kojibuildscommunity #fermentation #foraging
Oeufs de Gaulle is a classic morel recipe Jacques Oeufs de Gaulle is a classic morel recipe Jacques Pepin used to make for French president Charles de Gaulle. 

You bake eggs in a ramekin with shrimp topped with creamy morel sauce and eat with toast points. 

Makes for a really special brunch or breakfast. Recipe’s on my site, but it’s even better to watch Jacques make it on you tube. 

#jacquespepin #morels #shrimp #morilles #brunchtime
Morels: the only wild mushroom I count by the each Morels: the only wild mushroom I count by the each instead of the pound. 

Good day today, although my Twin Cities spots seem a full two weeks behind from the late spring. 2 hours south they were almost all mature. 

76 for me and 152 for the group. Check your spots, and good luck! 

#morels #murkels #mollymoochers #drylandfish #spongemushroom #theprecious
The first time I’ve seen fungal guttation-a natu The first time I’ve seen fungal guttation-a natural secretion of water I typically see with plants. 

I understand it as an indicator that the mushrooms are growing rapidly, and a byproduct of their metabolism speeding up. If you have some clarifications, chime in. 

Most people know it from Hydnellum 
peckii-another polypore. I’ve never seen it on pheasant backs before.

Morels are coming soon too. Mine were 1 inch tall yesterday in the Twin Cities. 

#guttation #mushroomhunting #cerioporussquamosus #pheasantback #naturesbeauty
Rain and heat turned the flood plain forest into a Rain and heat turned the flood plain forest into a grocery store. 

#groceryshopping #sochan #rudbeckialaciniata #foraging
Italian wild food traditions are some of my favori Italian wild food traditions are some of my favorite. 

Case in point: preboggion, a mixture of wild plants, that, depending on the reference, should be made with 5-23 individual plants. 

Here’s a few mixtures I’ve made this spring, along with a reference from the Oxford companion to Italian food. 

The mixture should include some bitter greens (typically assorted asters) but the most important plant is probably borage. 

Making your own version is a good excercise. Here they’re wilted with garlic and oil, but there’s a bunch of traditional recipes the mixture is used in. 

Can you believe this got cut from my book?!

#preboggion #preboggiun #foraging #traditionalfoods
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