Wild Food Foraging Evolution

Wildman Steve Brill

As our level of experience with wild foods continues to evolve and grow, so do our opportunities to share. Eight years ago we were wide-eyed, overwhelmed, and exhausted, trying to take in so much information about so many plants at once. We would take tours with Wildman Steve Brill or Russ Cohen and come away with our heads filled with information, cameras filled with pictures, and a notebook filled with hasty scrawls and notes about dozens of plants. We bought books, watched videos, and read articles online about the wild plants we encountered on daily hikes through fields and forests.

Over the years, we have learned to slow down and take our time to truly become familiar with a plant or mushroom we want to consume. Blogging about our adventures helps me focus on the activity of foraging for wild foods. Developing recipes with our foraged fare gets us to focus on flavors and characteristics of an edible weed or mushroom. We still have plenty to learn, but our pace has slowed significantly now that we have a firm base of knowledge of many common edible plants and mushrooms.

Milkweed, delicious, nutritious, and FREE food

There seems to be an increasing interest in wild food foraging lately, and I am not sure of its source. Is it an increased online presence that has become easily searchable? Is it a food insecurity and poverty-driven necessity? It it a new awareness of the natural world in rejection of an increasingly mechanized society? I don't have an answer to my own questions, but I personally have been affected by the increased demand for the information. This blog has seen increased traffic with each passing month. I have been contacted on numerous occasions by news organizations for comments about wild food foraging, and even more often by individuals who want to join us while we spend our weekends foraging. I see many new blogs popping up, written by amateur foragers and wild food enthusiasts. Established foragers are writing books and touring the country in support of their publications. Fancy restaurants champion and advertise "local, wild" ingredients on their menus as a selling point. There are more people making a living, or at least some money, from foraging now than 8 years ago when we started our wild food journey.

Showing wild grapes

This past month, we have given three wild food walks for limited groups. I am still a bit terrified to speak in a public setting, preferring the shield of a computer screen between my audience and myself. At the Coventry Farmer's Market, the Connecticut Valley Mycological Society (CVMS), was invited back for the annual Forage and Fungus Fair, and we provided 2 short edible plant walks in a field while members of the mushroom club gave fungi walks in the forest for market patrons. Earlier this month, we participated in the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association's first annual Fungus Fair. Almost all of the participants on that walk were familiar faces, so I was much more comfortable and relaxed. While we are listed on Green Deane's Eat the Weeds website as instructors, we are just now taking small steps to actively teach others. We look forward to expanding our experiences, and hope to continue sharing our adventures.

Teaching staghorn sumac

Our Joy of Foraging

Mushroom (and coconut!) hunting on vacation in Hawaii with Dr. Don Hemmes

Wildman Steve Brill,
educator

Our evolution in foraging for wild foods is still ongoing. I am happy to state that our current joy comes from being in the fields and woods with full baskets and camera while we seek out wild favorites and discover new fungi and plants. We truly enjoy tasting new flavors and researching new-to-us plants, while honing our identification skills regarding mushrooms during the different seasons. Participating in forays with experienced mushroom hunters and skilled identifiers is something we look forward to every week during the mushroom hunting season from May until November, and we continue to read books and review photos during the cold winter months. Hiking and learning from experienced naturalists and wild food educators is still an activity we actively seek out, traveling many miles and even finding folks to learn from while we vacation in tropical areas. Learning, experiencing, and tasting the natural, wild world around us is something that we feel wonderful participating in, and we are both becoming more comfortable in our skills as we begin to share our knowledge with groups of interested people at public events.

Invasive garlic mustard

Native and abundant sassafras root

Two of our focuses are sustainable harvest of native plants and possible control of invasive species of plants through consumption. We are careful to research the wild edibles we hunt to make sure they are not endangered or threatened species, we take only small portions of a population of plants for our own use, and harvest conscientiously by using the renewable plant parts like berries, leaves, or stems. Digging of roots and therefore killing a plant is not an activity we do often, unless we have a specific need for the roots and the plant population is healthy and able to sustain itself with the loss of a few individuals. The identification and eating of invasive, non-native species of plants is a newer focus of ours. Many of our recipes use invasive plants as their main ingredient and we try to make finding, identifying, and consuming these invaders less daunting and delicious. As a small family of two adults and one child who forage only for ourselves, our personal impact on our environment is low, but we aim to share the ideas and knowledge of sustainable harvest with others that we teach. Foraging wild plants for profit is an activity that we do not advocate or support, and the commercialization of foraging has become a mild concern. Foraging for personal use is an activity we enjoy as a family, along with sharing our experiences with others.

Foray table with Connecticut Valley Mycological Society

Russ Cohen, educator

Blanche Derby, educator

We are fortunate that we have the time, income, and desire to spend on wild food foraging and education. Sharing the experiences, travels, and interactions with other educators with our daughter is another joy we experience through our foraging activities, hoping she will learn while having fun. We are also fortunate to have found so many wild food and fungi mentors, teachers, and friends. I cannot stress enough the importance of learning about wild edible plants and mushrooms from experienced teachers, face to face. While I prefer to read a book, and Robert prefers to learn by watching videos, we both benefit greatly by learning from actual people in the field. You may end up spending lots of money and time on travel to find your local educators, but it is always worth it, in my opinion. Traveling, camping, and recreating with like-minded friends makes the learning even more fun. Our silly hobby of eating weeds keeps growing into a learning and sharing based lifestyle, where we are continually immersing ourselves some of the things we like to do the most: eating wild foods, hunting mushrooms with friends, seeking out new wild flavors and adventures while traveling, and sharing our knowledge with others.

Fungi hunting with Terry, Bill, Noah, and Walt

Rose Petal Recipe - Rose Petal Syrup

Here in the New England area, the beaches are often backed by wild roses (Rosa rugosa) that have large white or pink 5 petaled roses. The flowers will develop into large, 1" deep orange hips, and the stems are wickedly thorny. They are commonly called beach roses or wrinkled roses and are originally from Japan. Now they are listed as invasive in many areas, including Connecticut. They tolerate the salty conditions at the shore, and have proliferated there as a result, growing along sandy dunes on the east coast from southern Canada to North Carolina, and west to Wisconsin and the Great Lakes.

Before the vitamin C-packed rosehips develop later in the summer, we gather the fragrant petals from the flowers. The best time of day to gather the flower petals is late morning or early afternoon. They open each morning, become dusted with pollen around noon, and will drop their petals by late evening, leaving the pollinated and developing hip behind. By gently grasping the whole flower head with your hand and tugging the petals, you will often get most of the petals off easily. The hardest part is avoiding the prickers, and there is often poison ivy growing among the bushes, so be mindful and wear shoes and maybe even jeans when picking.

Thickets of white and pink flowered roses line the shore

The petals contain the lovely rose smell, and are edible raw as a pretty garnish in salads. They can be added to cookie dough, like shortbread, for color and flavor. We also use them to make this wildly beautiful syrup, which we then use to add to seltzer for flavor, as a flavored syrup at breakfast, add to mixed cocktails like simple syrup, and as a base for a floral sorbet. At first, the color will be a dull purple, but adding the ascorbic acid powder will create the intense pink and preserve the syrup. We buy bulk powdered ascorbic acid from the local vitamin shop, it is more commonly known as vitamin C. You could use this recipe for roses you have in your yard, as long as you have not sprayed the roses with chemicals. Many hybridized and domesticated roses no longer have the heady fragrance of wild roses, though, so we prefer the wild roses for this recipe.


Rose Petal Syrup                          makes about 4 cups of syrup

2 1/4 c. water
3 c. granulated sugar
2 c. packed rose petals, coarsely chopped
3 Tbsp. ascorbic acid powder

1. Heat the water to boiling and add the sugar. Remove from the heat, and stir until the sugar dissolves.
2. Allow the sugar syrup to cool to 80°F, then stir in the chopped rose petals. Cover the pot and let the flowers steep in the syrup for 24 hours.
3. Filter out the flowers and squeeze them well to extract all the flavor. Filter the syrup through a fine mesh coffee filter.
4. Remove 1 cup of the syrup, and warm it in a saucepan. Add the ascorbic acid, using a whisk to dissolve it. Add the warmed syrup back to the remainder, and mix it all well.
5. Store in airtight, sterilized glass containers in a dark place, up to a year.

White Memorial Bioblitz 2013

This past weekend we spent 24 hours with a large group of dedicated and enthusiastic science-minded folks at the White Memorial Bioblitz. What is a bioblitz? It's a 24 hour event that tallies every species inhabiting a study site. Biologists blitz the area in search of every living species, and the bioblitz finishes with a final count of all the species discovered. There were bird people, fish people, plant people, lichen people, bug people, and we were part of the fungus working group, along with some other members of CVMS, the Connecticut Valley Mycological Society. The final count for the kingdom Fungi was 89 specimens, and the final count of all species of life was 931 species.

The end of May and very beginning of June are not terribly exciting times of the year for finding fungi in Connecticut. We mostly collected wood decaying fungi and several slime molds, but fellow myco-nuts Emily and Mike did surprise us all and found 3 beautiful morels on site. They were greatly admired specimens.

CVMS Fungi display and one of our club experts, Terry

Some of our better-looking fungi were brought over to the Tree of Life Museum, along with some informational sign boards. Some of our finds included lots of turkey tails (Trametes versicolor and Trametes hirsuta), the platterful mushroom (Megacollybia rodmanii), the blonde morels (Morchella esculentoides), winecaps (Stropharia rugosoannulata), and a few slime molds including dog vomit (Fuligo septica), chocolate tube slime (Stemonitis), and Ceratiomyxa, which was incredibly abundant that weekend. Also on display at the other tables were assorted ferns, some caterpillars, fish, flowers, lichens, moss, and some stuffed animals from the White Memorial Museum.

Robert took some photographs of something we could not at first identify. It looked like yellow tapioca beads on some decayed wood. If the tapioca beads were white, we would identify them as Stemonitis species in their plasmodial stage. Left to age overnight, we were greeted by the wet "chocolate" stage, the fruit body, or sporangia, of the slime mold. Later that day, we dispersed the spores by gently blowing on the strands, leaving the structures that held the spores behind. This is a great species that Robert would like to time-lapse photograph, so we'll keep our eyes open for more of the "tapioca" stage slime. Slime molds are not in the kingdom Fungi, but we often collect and identify them while on forays.

Stemonitis in three stages

Photo Collage - Chicken Mushroom

We find our chicken mushrooms (Laetiporus sulphureus) more often in the fall, but they can be found starting in the spring, though the summer, and into autumn.  Our orange and yellow chicken mushroom can be a large specimen, providing huge amounts of food when the fungus is still young and tender. When the shelves are cut, they should ooze a little liquid and be juicy. Old, crumbly and bleached and faded chicken mushroom will taste like sawdust, and no amount of cooking or boiling will remedy that.

To use the flesh, we slice or cube the shelves and meaty core into manageable pieces, and use it just like chicken. It will retain it's beautiful orange and white color, and will crisp up nicely when sauteed. We have made pot pie, skewered satay, soup, "fried chicken", stuffed bread, and a pulled meat style barbecue sandwich with this versatile fungus, along with just frying it up in a pan and eating it with a sprinkle of salt and lemon juice.

Gillian holding a pink and white chicken, cut
from the base of an oak tree

Chicken mushrooms are polypores, which means they have small holes, or pores, on their underside instead of gills. They rot the heart wood of hardwood trees here in the Northeast, growing on the upper portions of the tree trunk. A similar chicken, the pink and white Laetiporus cincinnatus, rots the roots and butt of the tree, and therefore appears at the base of a tree. We actually enjoy the taste of the pink and white chicken slightly more than the orange and yellow chicken, but both are very good edibles.

From MushroomExpert.com:

Ecology: Parasitic and saprobic on living and dead oaks (also sometimes on the wood of other hardwoods); causing a reddish brown cubical heart rot, with thin areas of white mycelium visible in the cracks of the wood; annual; growing alone or, more typically, in large clusters; summer and fall, rarely in winter and spring; east of the Rocky Mountains. The mushrooms do not appear until well after the fungus has attacked the tree; by the time the chickens appear, they are definitely coming home to roost, as far as the tree's health is concerned.
Fruiting Body: Up to 60 cm across; usually consisting of several to many individual caps arranged in a shelving formation or a rosette.
Caps: 5-30 cm across and up to 20 cm deep; up to 3 cm thick; fan-shaped to semicircular or irregular; more or less planoconvex; smooth to finely wrinkled; suedelike; bright yellow to bright orange when young, frequently fading in maturity and with direct sunlight.
Pore Surface: Yellow; with 2-4 circular to angular pores per mm; tubes to 5 mm deep.
Stem: Absent.
Flesh: Thick; soft and watery when young, becoming tough, eventually crumbling away; white to pale yellow.
Odor and Taste: Not distinctive.
Spore Print: White.

Spring Chicken Mushroom

As the spring season progresses, we are finding ourselves very busy and out in the woods and fields almost every day. Between jobs, our daughter, her school functions, and other obligations, we try to head out to find our favorite wild foods when we find some time. While May and June are not the best times for mushroom hunting, sometimes we find ourselves a lucky spring chicken (Laetiporus sulphureus), or sulfur shelf mushroom growing from dead wood. While out on our desperate hunt for Connecticut morels, Robert came across a small yellow blob on a dead tree. Really small, only about an inch across, but he still recognized it as an immature chicken mushroom.

Three days later, we went back out to check the progress of the mushroom. Rain does not have too much to do with the progression of this polypore, since it is growing from wood and not the ground. It has been very dry this month, so there is not much else in the way of fungi to be found in the forest. The original small blob had erupted into a colony of soft and wet growing parts, about the length of our arm, along with other growths along the dead tree. There were no shelves yet, so we left it to grow some more.

After seven days total, we went back today to find a beautiful, big chicken. The humidity brought out some small bugs, but they flew away with a burst of breath. The knife cut through the tender flesh of the mushroom easily, and we grabbed about 15 pounds of fresh "meat" from several clusters of shelves. There is not much to clean, just a few small twig inclusions and a bug or two, and now we have several meals planned this week.

Connecticut Morels

We have only been searching for mushrooms for about 3 years now, but had never found morels in Connecticut. Until this weekend, that is. Connecticut does not get the large amounts that you can find in the mid-west, and we don't have forest fires very often, so we don't have burn morels like the west coast. Our season is short and erratic. It had been very dry- no rain for 16 days- this spring, so we figured it was another season we would not be able to find morels. We camped out with a group of mushroom hunting pals this weekend, and we made a group exploration effort that yielded 27 morels and a pile of young dryad's saddle (Polyporus squamosus).

Andrew may be in love!

Camping with mushroom hunters, wild food foragers, and fishermen and fisherwomen definitely had advantages. Dinner back at camp that evening included fried dryad's saddle and morels in butter and oil, fire roasted ramps naan bread, morel kasha and pasta salad, fresh caught rainbow and brook trout stuffed with sheep's sorrel and ramps, maitake chili, chaga tea, and some dandelion wine purchased at the dandelion festival in Ohio. We sampled, we chatted, we drank around the fire telling fish stories and mushroom hunting tales. I wish we had photos of the food, but it was dark and we had to eat in the covered tent because it was raining a bit. Looking forward to a fruitful mushrooming, foraging and feasting year with friends!

Dryad's saddle, we ate the smaller, more tender specimens

Can you spot the morels in this picture?