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Forager Chef

Foraging and Cooking Mushrooms, Wild and Obscure Food

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Prickly Ash

Prickly Ash Sausage

Wild prickly ash or Szechuan peppercorn sausage recipe

If you harvest your own prickly ash berries (Xanthoxylum/Szechuan peppercorns) sausage should be on your list of things to make.  I love the bright, citrusy flavor and gentle numbing quality that prickly ash adds to a dish, but it can be difficult to incorporate them into foods and have them taste coherent if you’re not…

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Lacto Knotweed Pickles

Brine fermented japanese knotweed recipe

One of the best parts about this site I never would’ve imagined as it was hatched when I lived in my friends basement years ago was that I’d be able to talk to people outside of the Midwest. In hindsight, the Internet being, well, the Internet, I should’ve known, but it came as a real…

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Szechuan Parsnip Leaf Salad

Parsnip leaf salad with wild Szechuan peppercorn / prickly ash dressing recipe

Parsnips and their relatives like carrots are loved and cherished food plants around the world for good reason: they’re relatively easy to take care of, they can be stored for long periods of time—even over winter, and most importantly, they’re delicious. One thing no one talks about about though is that the leaves are also…

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Liver Ketchup

Liver ketchup, a condiment made from venison, lamb or other livers

Liver ketchup is another piece of history I came across doing research on lamb and goat in an old Scottish book by An Comunn Gaidhealach (a seriously legit Scottish name) first published in 1907 under the title of The Feill Cookery Book. Like most of the old books I have, a lot of the recipes…

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Chilled Melon Curry with Kinome Leaves

Chilled Melon Curry with Kinome

I’ve been on a cold soup kick lately at the restaurant. During the Summer, I crave cold and room temperature food. Of course I’ve had tomato gazpacho, but It wasn’t until I tasted Daniel Patterson’s now famous chilled pea soup with buttermilk and nasturtiums that I started to understand the possibilities and thought process of…

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Kinome Leaves

kinome, sansho, wild szechaun peppercorn leaves prickly ash

In Minnesota and the surrounding area, its too cold for citrus plants to grow, or is it? Prickly ash/Zanthoxylum species is technically in the rue/citrus family. It doesn’t make a fruit like a lemon or lime, but it does make fruit-small, limey tasting berries which are technically wild Szechuan peppercorns, which I talked about previously…

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Watermelon Pickles With Zanthoxylum

Watermelon Pickles With Wild Szechuan Peppercorns or Zanthoxylum

Old family recipes can be treasured heirlooms. For a while, I got on a kick where I would reinterpret dishes I remembered the women in my family making. To get inspiration, I called my grandma one week and asked her if she had any recipes from Granny Alice (my great grandma), who was always referred…

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Wild Szechuan Peppercorns

Zanthoxylum wild Szechuan peppercorns (17)

As someone who’s built his career around food, I’ve tasted plenty of interesting things. Nothing prepared me for the first time I ate wild Szechuan peppercorns though. I got introduced to them through my friends mother, an experienced wildcrafter. On night after dinner, the topic of Zanthoxylum came up, she said it was a plant…

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Magic In The Woods

chanterelles cooking on a campfire

When my friend and photography mentor Chris Bohnhoff asked me if I’d like to do a little mushroom hunting and cooking project with him a couple months ago I was thrilled. He has a sort of series he does involving chef’s and some of their varied talents. Check out some of his other great work…

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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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