11155 The Forager Chef's Book of Flora

Introduction In Japan, in the early spring, people might harvest various wild plants called sansai, which loosely translates to something like “mountain vegetables,” some of the best known of these being shoots of the angelica tree (Aralia elata), Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica) shoots, edible ferns such as common fiddleheads and the bracken ferns (Pteridium aquilinum, also loved in traditional Korean food), as well as things like hosta shoots (Hosta spp.).

Sansai does not refer to one single plant; it’s a colloquial blanket term for many plants regarded as being good to eat—not mushrooms, not fish or game, but plants. The sansai are known for being variable in flavor, and being intensely bitter is not necessarily a bad thing.

My girlfriend’s father was Greek and would often exclaim when he saw a familiar plant, especially dandelions, things like, “We call that horta” and “We eat that.”

Wouldn’t you know, in Greek cuisine, horta is a term not only for a dish but also for many different edible plants, exactly like sansai.

Across, Photograph by Mathew Hintz.

In Italy entire books have been dedicated to cooking piante spontanee, which translates to “spontaneous plants.” Besides being fun to say, it’s one of my favorite cultural descriptions for a variety of wild edibles—as if the plants have a mind of their own, popping up randomly as though in a game of Whac-AMole on top of every hillside and rural area in Italy. Erbe selvatiche is a synonym.

In Latin America people use the term quelites, a sort of diminutive, affectionate name for (you guessed it!) a variety of wild edible plants. Generally, quelites refers to, but shouldn’t be limited to, purslane (Portulaca oleracea), orache (Atriplex hortensis), seepweed (Suaeda spp., an aquatic cousin to lambsquarters), and various species of lambsquarters (Chenopodium spp.) and amaranths (Amaranthus spp.). While thought of as everything from pesky to an outright plague in the case of Palmer amaranth (A. palmeri) in the United States, have been cultivated in South America as food plants for millennia.

Now let’s look at the English-speaking world. We also have a catchall term for wild plants, but it’s not a term of endearment.

Inedible, dangerous, and poisonous, or delicious, edible, and valuable, it doesn’t matter; the only term we have for our spontaneous plants is weed, and the relationship we have with them is one of eradication and chemical warfare.

Some people might think treating weeds as anything but an enemy is precious, or crazy, especially people who plant any sort of crop, food or otherwise—and that’s understandable. A lot of work goes into tending the land in order for it to grow food plants, and I’m guilty of throwing the term weed around, just like anyone else. If I were to plant a row of tomatoes, or anything at all, you can bet I’d weed it to ensure the plants get the sun and nutrients they need to grow. The difference is that sometimes the weeds I pull from the garden would go straight into the house for dinner instead of simply being thrown away.

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Working like that, I—and you—can harvest food continually from the garden during the entire growing season, sometimes enjoying multiple generations of food plants before the first tomato, carrot, or potato is ripe.

A few years ago, after years behind the stove in a variety of professional kitchens (and watching many of the restaurants I love get shuttered), I took a break from the constant pressure of running a restaurant to work as a consultant, which gave me more time to be outside discovering plants, mushrooms, and other ingredients I love. I started researching, consuming everything I could find on historical uses of wild plants, some of the most fascinating being ethnobotanical references to wild foods eaten in the Mediterranean, South America, and precontact North America. Here and there I’d stumble on things: a reference to an obscure regional dish calling for a specific wild plant, say (like Gazpacho Vuido, page 31), or an ethnobotanical account of a plant I’d never heard of (hyacinth bulbs / lampascioni). Each thing I uncovered felt like a treasure. There were references to storied regional dishes I’d never dreamed were possible, such as the Minestrella di Gallicano (page 33) that, depending which accounts you read, might include thirty, forty, or more individual species of wild plants. The Pistic of Friuli Venezia Giulia (page 35) was said to include even more—up to fifty! As a chef, I’ve made my share of fussy dishes with lots of components, but I would never have thought to conjure something like either of those. If I were to make a soup out of every plant I could find, it might not seem that special, but knowing the background of a dish, and the context of where and why it was created, gives it a name, and with a name comes a soul. Sometimes a recipe’s history can be just as delicious as the dish itself; “eaten” together, the experience can be paradigm shifting.

Excavating a few antique recipes was only the beginning, though. As I cooked and ate my

way through the landscape, I started to see not just food but also ideas and concepts. As a chef running a seasonal restaurant, I liked to think I was connected to the landscape by buying my food from local farmers and suppliers, but in honesty all my years behind a stove for twelve hours a day meant I was disconnected, in a way. Conversely, being outside nearly every day—seeing, watching, tasting, learning, and constantly looking out for the next new thing I could eat—fundamentally changed not only how I think about wild plants, but also how I see what we commonly conceive of as vegetables, too. After all, most vegetables we enjoy now were once wild plants themselves, carefully selected and bred over time by humans to enhance or remove certain characteristics to make them more useful to us in one way or another.

Watching wild plants grow and searching for new edible parts of familiar plants has transformed my culinary style, similar to how the nose-to-tail, grass-fed, and organic movements have affected the way chefs consider animals.

Understanding the properties of leaves, stems, roots, and flowers can inform how you cook something exotic (like the heads of immature sunflowers) as well as how you adapt the same techniques to cook something mundane (such as a broccoli stem or Brussels sprout). Now when I see squash in the garden, instead of waiting for them to ripen, I harvest some while they are still green and unripe, as well as the shoots, flowers, and seeds during the growing season, all before the first squash is “ready to eat.”

As a society we’ve forgotten this type of old-school knowledge, including many brilliant culinary techniques that were born of thrift and necessity. For our own sake, and that of our planet, it’s time we remembered.

That idea, in a nutshell, is part of what this book is all about.

Monoculture has shaped, for the worse, what we think vegetables should look like.

Broccoli is just a floret; we don’t eat the juicy stem or thick, collard-like leaves. We think of beets as a root when in fact, cooked and put

Squash shoots were one of the first secrets about garden plants that foraging revealed to me.

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on a plate during the summer, they’re mostly stem and greens.

Foraging, in my mind, isn’t just an act—it’s a mindset and a healthy way of life. It’s about the willingness to look beyond the status quo for exciting and unconventional ingredients; an eagerness to make the best possible uses of all the edible parts of plants and animals; and a desire to have a more personal, meaningful, and gratifying relationship with our food.

Plant Families and the Flavors They Share Have you ever stopped to think about why one thing tastes like another? With meat we might say that something tastes like chicken if it’s light-colored and doesn’t have a lot of fat.

Plants are a little more complex, though.

My journey down the rabbit hole of why certain plants share flavors started when someone sent me a video of people eating buds of mountain ash (Sorbus americana) trees, claiming they tasted of almond. I made a note to sample a small amount of the raw buds of my local mountain ash the next year, and, sure enough, they taste strongly of almond. Later I remembered famous French chef Michel Bras eating the seeds of an apple in a documentary (Entre les Bras, 2012) and mentioning that apple seeds—you guessed it—taste like almonds. And there’s more.

Plum kernels are rich in oil, so much so that it’s pressed and sold commercially, and that oil tastes faintly of almonds, not plums.

The young tender growth of cherry trees and their leaves can have the same flavor and in Japanese cuisine are sometimes pickled, as well as being used in new distillation techniques by Empirical Spirits of Copenhagen to lend an almond flavor to spirits. Bird cherry flour, made from pounded, sun-dried wild cherries (Prunus padus) in Siberia, is used to make a cake with an almond flavor (Bird Cherry Cake, page 262) that is a 4 | TH E FO RAGE R C H E F ’ S BOO K OF F LO RA

cousin to Native American wojapi, originally a sort of dried, pounded cake of chokecherries (P. virginiana) and their stones, according to my friend Linda Black Elk, a Native American ethnobotanist. Mahlab, a type of Arabic almond seasoning, is made from the dried stones of cherries (P. mahaleb) and used to flavor baked goods. In France apricot kernels are crushed and used to infuse liquor for a sort of almond extract called noyaux. Interesting, right?

Now consider another flavor: artichokes.

I’d wanted to cook immature sunflower heads like artichokes for a while after I saw the chef of Eleven Madison Park do it, and I wasn’t disappointed when I did. After cooking (see Sunflower Artichokes, page 134) I thought it was interesting that the cooked sunflower not only looked like an artichoke but tasted faintly of one, too. Later in the same year, I was serving stuffed grape leaves filled with quickweed (Galinsoga parviflora) and was confused when multiple people asked how I was able to fit the artichokes inside the grape leaves. Guess what? There were no artichokes in my stuffed grape leaves.

There are more examples I could go into, but I think these already paint a pretty clear picture. Here’s the big takeaway, as I see it: The flavor of almond, how almonds taste, isn’t specific to almonds, but is a mix of flavorful compounds concentrated in different edible parts of plants in the Rosaceae family with many concentrated in the genus Prunus. The artichoke flavor is similar.

Botanically speaking, artichokes don’t taste like artichokes per se; rather, they share a taste that comes from flavorful compounds also found in plants such as sunflowers, Canada goldenrod, cardoons, compass plants, sochan, dandelions, and probably many others all found in the Asteraceae, or daisy, family. All of these plants acquire the tastes they share through heredity, passing the flavors down in their genes to the next generation of plants.

Clockwise from left: Unripe sunflower, prickly lettuce flower with bud, sunchokes and flowers, cardoon, galinsoga, artichoke, and sunflower seeds all share a similar flavor.

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The Whole Sunflower Sunflowers are more than a seed crop. Drive down country roads in the summer where I live, and you’ll see giant sunflowers towering over gardens, telling you summer is at its peak. If you look at the plants while they’re growing, at the stage before the flowers bloom you might notice that they resemble an artichoke, and you’d be right.

An artichoke, is, after all, just an unopened flower caught at the right stage. The process of cooking sunflowers is slightly different from that for cooking artichokes, with the result being a unique vegetable with the texture of an artichoke and a strong sunflower flavor.

There are a few chefs who know this trick.

I learned it by watching Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park, but I was also reminded of it by my friend Sean Sherman, who says there was a long history of Indigenous use of sunflower heads. He describes a method for cooking them in his book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen.

In addition to their unripe flowers, sunflowers have other edible parts most chefs I know rarely think to use. The leaves, although a bit too intensely flavored to serve as cooked greens, are great blanched and used for things like Roulades Verts (page 28) or wrapping a delicate fish such as a walleye before it hits the grill. At the same time you cut the unripe flower, the top 6 to 12 inches (15–30 cm) of the stem can be tender and delicious, peeled and cooked into what I would call sunflower marrow, in a nod to Chef Dan Barber who does the same with kale, broccoli, and cauliflower stems.

If you miss the period of growth for sunflower artichokes, the seeds that form afterward, still white and immature, are tender, mild, and delicious in soups, in risotti, as a sprinkle, or tossed into pilafs. Finally, the tubers or sunchokes / Jerusalem artichokes, although from a cousin plant, are delicious and have a beautiful, otherworldly shape. Harvesting them is like digging for buried treasure in the fall.

Unripe sundlower seeds.

A bundant

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Sunflower Artichokes Serves 2 as an appetizer This recipe is easily scaled, depending on how many heads you have. When choosing sunflowers to harvest, look for the largest ones you can find. Small sunflower chokes might look appealing, but there isn’t much food left after trimming. I think the most interesting thing to consider, though, is what other unopened flowers are still out there for us to discover—and eat?

1 large green sunflower 5 cups (1.25 L) unsalted water or vegetable stock, divided Kosher salt, to taste Olive or Smude’s sunflower oil, for serving (optional) Bring 4 cups (945 ml) of the water to a simmer in a tall saucepot, then cook the sunflower head for 3 to 4 minutes. Remove

the sunflower from the pot, then transfer it to a sauté pan with the remaining water and a good pinch of salt. Cover the pan, then simmer, turning occasionally, until the sunflower bud is tender when pierced with a knife, about 3 to 4 minutes, depending on size. Make sure the buds are tender, as you won’t be able to clean them properly otherwise. Allow the sunflower to cool, then transfer it to a cutting board and trim with a paring knife, first removing the outer leaves, then scraping out any flower petals from the inner portion of the bud, just as you would with an artichoke.

Do not remove the base of the stem. It’s delicious—almost the best part of the plant, just like an artichoke. If you won’t be using the buds immediately, transfer them to a lidded container and refrigerate until needed. I like to serve them cut into pieces, warmed, drizzled with Smude’s oil and lemon, and crowned with a sprinkle of sunflower seeds.

Sunflower Artichokes with galinsoga, sunflower seeds, and Smude’s sunflower oil.

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