The latest buzz word around restaurants in search of the freshest, most unusual, wild ingredients, is foraging. Also available to everyone anywhere, foraging is the age-old tradition of taking what mother nature is giving out for free and finding some great new ingredients for your home cooking!
Into the Wild
Foraging has picked up pace in restaurants such as Rene Redzepi's Noma in Denmark, where his team of foragers scour the countryside searching out traditional wild Nordic treats such as moss, sea lettuce, wood sorrel, wild garlic flowers, wild celery, pennywort, wild rocket, sweet woodruff.
Miles Irving, the author of The Forager Handbook, claims that «taking food directly from the land reminds us we were once hunter-gatherers.» Miles' company Forager (www.forager.org.uk) sources foraged foods mostly from the British countryside, with a lot coming from Kent, and supplies top-end restaurants including Redzepi's Noma. Forager is described as a « small, rural enterprise » and claims that most of their foraging produced wild plants in the form of leaves, roots, flowers and fruits, but a little game and fungi were also present.
Miles and his fellow professional forager Fergus Drennan can spend up to 40 hours a week scrambling through the hedgerows and woodland of the countryside to find the most interesting ingredients.
The enthusiastic Fergus tries to feast on foraged foods all year round, eschewing 'unnecessary' additions such as seasoning. His foraging extends to roadkill, which perhaps isn't everyone's idea of gourmet but he insists that the wilder, the tastier. « I made a badger burger for a rather straight friend of mine - I gave him 100 guesses and he still couldn't tell what it was. Squirrel and seagull are two of the tastiest wild meats to eat though. »
Seaside Delicacies
Foragers cite the excellent fayre caught in seaside rockpools as excellent additions to a bisque or sauce. Crabs and shrimps are in abundance around Europe's shores and are often collected up using a child's bucket and spade. In addition to this, berry- and fruit-picking around the countryside, especially in oopen orchards, can illicit some excellent finds for the perfect organic desserts and jams.
As well as providing some great new recipe ideas and allowing creativity in the kitchen, the foraging experience can be a great learning experience for any young members of the family.
Be warned though, that foraging is not a free-for-all in all instances. British chef Prue Leith caused a furore among bird lovers for taking the eggs of the Canadian mother goose and elicited a stern warning from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) that it was in fact illegal to take wild birds eggs. So next time you're thinking of foraging to make yourself an omelette, perhaps its better to forage in the supermarket instead.