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Forager Chef

Foraging and Cooking Mushrooms, Wild and Obscure Food

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Wild Caraway

Wild caraway

Wild caraway (Carum carvi), is another great addition to the growing list of amazing plants and herbs I never thought possible to be picked in the wild. It’s a thing though, and if you come across some, like me, you might fall in love. I knew nothing of caraway until I read about it in…

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How to Freeze Wild Mushrooms

Sous vide, frozen wild chicken of the woods mushrooms

If you’re a mushroom hunter, even a beginner, you’re going to have excess shrooms, and that’s a good thing. But you’ll want, and need to have some solid methods for preserving them in your bag of tricks to make the most of your harvest. Drying and pickling are my favorite methods. But, if you’ve ever…

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The Blue Chanterelle

Polyozellus multiplex or clustering blue chanterelles

I remember a time when I knew the word chanterelle, a type of golden mushroom French chef’s loved, and, that was it. Even after I cooked my first ones in a restaurant, I still only knew the golds. I knew nothing. I don’t think I could’ve ever imagined how complex and beautiful Nature’s chanterelle palette…

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Ramaria botrytis

Ramaria botrytis or pink tipped edible coral mushrooms

Ramaria botrytis. These are the best coral mushroom for the table I’ve eaten in the Midwest, and, most importantly, by far the easiest species to identify (they’re pink!). There isn’t a lack of coral mushrooms in my area, but really good ones can be tough to pin down. With the exception of another yellow variety…

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WildFed: The Pigeon Hunt

Smoked pigeon brochette with sunflower rolls, wild cherry sauce and foraged greens

Pigeons were the first fowl domesticated by man, but we’ve moved a long way from what they used to be: companions used for communication, and sustenance. Only 200 years ago, owning a few breeds of “fancy” pigeons would have been seen as a worthwhile hobby like falconry, as well as fashionable, in the Victorian era….

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Pig Ear Mushrooms / Gomphus clavatus and Friends

Pig ear mushrooms or gomphus clavatus

Mushroom hunter: “Hey Alan, do you know what mushroom this is?” Me: “Err, hold on, ok. Send me your GPS coordinates immediately along with panorama photos and no harm will come to you or your family.” That sort of scenario is why I sift through plenty of ID requests and pics from random numbers every…

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The Bachelor Farmer, and My First Book

Flora Book, Sample Cover

The last restaurant I ran, the place I thought could be a forever home for me, Lucia’s, closed in 2017. Those of you close to me in the Midwest knew that, a lot of others, especially my friends over seas, don’t, as I never wrote about it. It was an ugly close, and it traumatized…

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Smilax Shoots / Carrion Flower

Foraging for edible carrion flower shoots, or smilax / greenbriar

A few years ago I was in Northern Florida on a T.V. pilot shoot called Forage to Table that was supposed to focus on squirrel hunting, foraging plants, myself, and Madison Parker: a Vietnam Vet who trains Seal Team 6 in pre-black powder survival techniques. Madison was supposed to get the meat and I was…

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Non-Bitter Tylopilus

Tylopilus indecisus or ferrugineus mushrooms

Boletes! Hot damn, they’re everywhere!  Is a typical summer scenario after a heavy rainfall. The heart of bolete season, in the middle of Summer in the Midwest, is *the* fairy tale mushroom season for me, with fungal scenes all over the place, each one something you could make a project out of in a viewfinder,…

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Crock Pot Stock and Bone Broth

Crockpot Stock and Bone Broth

Guess what? You can make higher quality stock than the majority of professional chefs in the restaurant industry at home using a crock pot. Story goes last year I read a book about the science of home cooking from J Kenji Lopez-Alt, the man behind the intensive blog at Serious Eats. The book won the…

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Forager’s Winter Tasting Menu

1/2 lamb roulade (lambchetta) with tkemali sauce, horseradish leaves, burdock root and pig ear mushrooms

Ever wanted to put together a menu for an event, or just dream one up? Special event menus are a creative process I crave. The final event I did for 2018 was the yearly gathering for the Twin Cities Chapter of the Society of Amateur Chefs, who requested a 7 course tasting menu following an hour…

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Horseradish Leaves

Wild horseradish leaves or greens

If you’ve ever seen horseradish growing, you might have wondered “can I eat the leaves?”. The answer is yes, definitely. Horseradish leaves are a great example of finding underused parts of plants to enjoy, I mean sure, everyone is familiar with jars of horseradish you find on grocery store shelves, but the leaves create different…

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The Mangalitsa Bacon

mangalitsa pork bacon

My girlfriend loves to eat great food, and is also a health and fitness guru. Two years ago, while on a water fast out west, I got a message from her about needing to call a butcher. She told me that she’d been craving food (on a water fast, go figure) and decided to buy…

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foragerchef

Let’s talk roadkill. Honestly, the roadkill is t Let’s talk roadkill. Honestly, the roadkill is too specific a term for me—I don’t limit myself to vehicular-harvested meat. 

However you feel about the topic, grab some popcorn and head over to the comment section on my blog (link in bio) for the 🔥personal stories from readers have shared from around the world. 

There’s the kid who brought home a nutria after school, a wife getting 4 deer with the same car, a train hitting a herd of elk, a bear named squish, living in a house with weasels, and more. 

#budgetgourmet #gleaning #scavenging #meatismeat #roadkill #freefoods #finderskeepers #wastenotwantnot
Sam Thayer dropped 25 lbs of his highbush cranberr Sam Thayer dropped 25 lbs of his highbush cranberry cultivars (3 types!) on me before the last snowfall and I honestly don’t even know where to start after processing them. I’d already made jams and hot sauce already and I have enough for a year. 😅

Great time to practice the cold-juice which ensures the juice isn’t bitter. 

Anyone else have any ideas? 

You can still find some on the shrubs if the birds didn’t get them up by the north shore. 

#highbushcranberry #winterforaging #birdberries #sweetnectar #foragerproblems #juiceme #embarassmentofriches #wildfoodlove
100% wild candy bars. I don’t usually make raw v 100% wild candy bars. I don’t usually make raw vegan snacks, but when I read about Euell Gibbon’s wild hackberry candy bars I had to try them. The  originals were just crushed hackberries and hickory nuts, but, I’ve read that Euell grew to dislike the crunch of hackberry seeds later in life. 

Here’s the thing though, if you sift the hackberry flour, you get a fun texture, with no worries about cracking a tooth. 

These are equal parts ground hackberries, dried wild blueberries, and hickory nuts, with a splash of maple syrup to bind.

The end product is a shelf stable, nutrient-packed bite filled with protein, carbohydrates, fats and natural sugars infinitely adaptable to your local landscape.

The texture is chewy and nougat-like, and now I’m curious to see how they’d perform baked in recipes that use frangipane or almond paste. 

#euellgibbons #energybars #hackberry #crushin #paleobreakfast #tradionalfood #wildfoodlove #rawfoods
Hackberry milk spoonbread with black walnuts and c Hackberry milk spoonbread with black walnuts and chokecherry gastrique is one of the dishes @credononfiction and I filmed for @headspace. 

I cook hackberry milk with cornmeal and maple syrup, whip some egg whites and fold them in, then bake. Eats a bit like crust-less pumpkin pie, if pumpkin pie came from a tree. 

#hackberry #souffle #wildfoodlove #chokecherry #blackwalnuts #brunching
Hackberry milk is a sort of rustic nut milk made f Hackberry milk is a sort of rustic nut milk made from ground hackberries and water. I grind the berries to a meal, then simmer with 3x their volume of water, strain through a chinois (without pressing) season with maple and a pinch of cinnamon. Tastes like pumpkin pie in a glass, also a decent cooking medium. 

#hackberries #nutmilk #foraging #wildfoodlove #celtisoccidentalis
Are hackberries a fruit? A nut? They're a bit of b Are hackberries a fruit? A nut? They're a bit of both. They also contain protein, fat, and carbs, and the oldest evidence of humans enjoying them goes back 500,000 years. Right now is the best time to harvest them in the Midwest as the leaves have fallen. The full break down and introduction to them is in my bio. 
#hackberry #celtisoccidentalis #winterforaging #wildfoodlove #traditionalfoods #manbird
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