11 minute read
WILD ABOUT FORAGING
from SEffdz
A global pandemic, climate change and a better understanding of the fragility of our world has prompted many people to look to their gardens and the wild to see what to harvest, cook and eat. In this edited extract from Johanna Knox’s The Forager’s Treasury we find out how to get started and some plants to look out for
Why forage?
Advertisement
There are many compelling reasons to gather from the wild: for health, for economy and for connection.
To keep healthy
The cultivated foods we buy in shops today have been bred for the commercial market, which values size, sweetness, colour, storability and uniformity. Nutritional value isn’t always high on the list of priorities, and consequently many modern cultivars have a lower nutritional value than their ancestors. Wild foods are often more densely packed with nutrients, and a wild-food diet can offer greater species variety.
To save money
In both the short and long term, foraging can save dollars. Relatively few people in this country will live entirely off what they gather, even for a short time, but if you have a pantry stocked with cheap staples you can combine them with many fresh, richly nutritious wild ingredients to make a wide range of dishes.
While I was writing the first edition of this book, money was tight for my family. But I had stores of rice, pasta, flour, sugar and beans. By spending money on only a few extra essentials and foraging for the rest, I killed two birds with one stone: I tested the recipes in this book and helped to keep my family well fed.
To explore terroir
Every plant is a storehouse of valuable phytochemicals – natural chemicals made by plants. Each plant or group of plants specialises in certain chemicals and holds them variously in its roots, sap, bark, leaves, flowers and seeds. Some chemicals appear throughout a plant and others only in one part of it.
The same chemicals can pop up in diverse parts of the plant kingdom. For example, anethol gives liquorice, fennel and star anise their aroma, even though they’re from quite different plant families.
CLEAN SWEEP Broom plants are a common sight along highways, by rivers and forest tracks. The branches can be used to make brooms, brushes and baskets. Some species of broom have flowers that fill the air with a sweet scent during summer and others are noted for giving a yellow dye when you boil up their leaves, flowers and twigs.
I’ve been taught that the most important thing to take into nature is respect: respect for the land, the seas, the sky and all the life they nurture. You’ll also want love, curiosity and wide-open senses. Be ready to slow down, take care and become absorbed. Above all, carry and offer gratitude.
You may be taking karakia with you, or a prayer or incantation in English or another language. Or perhaps you don’t need words and will enter conversation with the life around you in other ways. It’s not for me to say how you should do this – just be true to yourself and do it in a way that feels natural to you and right.
FORAGING EQUIPMENT
Here’s a list of useful things to take:
• Sharp, sturdy scissors and secateurs for tougher jobs • Selection of plastic bags for damp stuff • Selection of paper bags or reusable mesh produce bags for things that should breathe • Good shoes or boots with grip, strength and flexibility. GETTING GOING
Below are some basic tips for harvesting and processing foraged treasures.
• Harvest from places where plants are growing lushly. Bitterness concentrates in slow-growing plants, and the choicest forageables will often be in the fastest-growing patches. • The youngest, newest leaves and stems on a plant will generally be more tender and delicious than older ones. • Avoid stunted, damaged or diseased plants. • Cut greens just above leaf nodes to encourage more growth. • To remove flowers from their sepals, gently squeeze the sepals and, if necessary, pull or twist a little. • Some plants are too delicate to be washed. For the ones you do wash, dry them in a salad spinner. • Some flowers are full of tiny black bugs. If you don’t want to rinse the flowers, place them onto a white plate or piece of paper and watch the exodus. Transfer the flowers to another plate or paper and more insects will emerge. Keep transferring back and forth until the exodus is pretty much complete. • Many leaves and flowers wilt quickly. Unless using them straight away, keep them in the fridge or stand them in water. • When you finish, return your foraged remains to where they came from or as close by as possible. That’s unless they’re weeds, in which case dispose of them in a way that prevents them spreading.
THE CABBAGE IS KING
Tī kōuka (called cabbage trees by the British) have edible flower buds, stems and shoots. The heady fragrance from the flowers can be polarising.
TĪ K Ō UKA I CABBAGE TREE
Cordyline australis
TĪ NGAHERE I FOREST CABBAGE TREE
Cordyline banksii
TĪ RAURIKI I DWARF CABBAGE TREE
Cordyline pumilio
T ŌĪ I MOUNTAIN CABBAGE TREE, BROAD-LEAVED CABBAGE TREE
Cordyline indivisa
Spotting them
Trees in the Cordyline genus grow all around the Pacific. Tī kōuka is the most common in Aotearoa. It grows in open places throughout the country, often on farmland or bursting up through areas of native scrub.
Using them
In Aotearoa, Samoa, Tonga, Hawai’i and many other island groups, Cordyline trees have a long history as sources of food, medicine and fibre. Across the Pacific, ‘tī’ or ‘ki’ appears in local names for the species, indicating that knowledge of these trees dates back to the earliest island voyagers. Māori selectively bred and cultivated tī kōuka and its siblings.
Tougher and more weatherproof than harakeke, tī leaves were used to thatch roofs and were woven into mats, ropes and sandals. The leaves are also highly flammable. They catch fire quickly and make great kindling. Dried fallen leaves can be gathered for use as fire starters. As a form of rongoā rākau, tī leaves are crushed, pounded or pulped to release the juice, which is soothing and antiseptic for sores and cuts.
To harvest food from tī trees sustainably, reach inside the ‘leaf explosions’ for the central growing shoot, snap or twist it off, and leave the plant to grow new shoots. Peel back the tough outer leaves of the shoot. Inside you will find delicious paler leaves surrounding a ‘heart’. It’s better to strip away too few leaves to start with. Before cooking a shoot, remove the stem from its middle. Chef Charles Royal (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga) recommends harvesting them before the tree starts to seed. Cooked, these shoots offer up a beguiling mix of sweet and bitter tastes with similarities to artichoke and asparagus, and you can use them in recipes as substitutes for both. Boil them for about six minutes or roast them. If you throw them in with roasting vegetables, put them in towards the end, when there’s about 10 minutes left to go.
Tī trees produce creamy clouds of flowers in spring and summer. The scent is heady, distinctive and highly indolic. In her stunning book Hiakai, chef Monique Fiso discusses the edibility of tī flower buds and stems: eat the stems raw, and try dehydrating the flower buds.
Tī flowers also have potential in perfumery, and you can make beautiful scented infusions at home using the stalks of the flowers. Cordyline flowers also make a divine pomade (a scent-infused fat).
HELPFUL HARAKEKE
Flax fibre is traditionally used for ropes, fishing lines and net making. The nectar from the flowers can also be used as a sweetener and the white or green seeds are edible.
New Zealand flaxes
HARAKEKE I NEW ZEALAND FLAX, SWAMP FLAX Phormium tenax WHARARIKI I MOUNTAIN FLAX Phormium cookianum
Spotting them
With their enormous fibrous, strap-like leaves and imposing flowering stalks, harakeke and wharariki are easy plants to spot. Wharariki has slightly shorter and softer leaves than harakeke, but the easiest way to tell the two species apart is to check the flowers and seedpods. Harakeke flowers are reddish, while wharariki flowers are greenish. Harakeke seedpods curve upwards like bananas, but wharariki seedpods are slightly twisted and dangle downwards. The two species can hybridise with each other.
Using them
The flowers of both harakeke and wharariki are edible. They also produce a lot of nectar and pollen, both of which can be collected and added to dishes. The nectar is a sweetener that contains several sugars and small amounts of vitamins.
Harakeke seeds are highly edible. When white or greenish, they are sweet and meaty; when black and shiny, they can be bitter. The sweet ones are nice on their own, sprinkled on a salad, or ground into a pesto or dip. You’ll generally find the sweet seeds early in the season – late spring or early summer. The seedpods also make a valuable dye, yielding a range of rich browns.
Propagating harakeke
If you find one of those precious flax bushes that has tasty seeds, you could try propagating it by separating a fan of leaves from the side of the bush and planting it directly into fertile, well-drained soil. Here is advice from the Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research website (landcareresearch.co.nz) on how best to do this.
Taking fans off the parent bush can be hard work. If possible, choose a time when the soil is moist. We like to use a long-bladed planting or trenching spade, a grubber, or even a crowbar to dig around and get under and behind the fan we are lifting.
Divided fans are usually trimmed of outer leaves, leaving the rito (shoot) and the two ‘parent’ leaves on either side (awhi rito or matua). The parent leaves should be cut back if too long, but it is a good idea to have some protection of the rito. If possible, plant the harakeke fans together in groups of three. This will give them a good start.
The traditional way to plant harakeke is to ‘plant the puku to the sun’, so that the bulge on the fan faces halfway between the rising and setting sun. This protects the baby fans, which will emerge at the back of the clump, and gives them shade and moisture.
THE FORAGER’S TREASURY
Extracted from The Forager’s Treasury: The essential guide to finding and using wild plants in Aotearoa by Johanna Knox. $45. Published by Allen & Unwin NZ.
CHARLES ROYAL, COOKING WITH CHARLES ROYAL, 2010
Aspleniaceae / spleenwort family
This is one of many fern families in Aotearoa. Ferns are plants that don’t have flowers, but instead reproduce by spores. A lot of ferns contain carcinogens and it’s not advisable to eat them. However, Māori culinary traditions include several species that are safe, including mouku and pikopiko, or common shield fern (Polystichum neozelandicum).
Mouku
MOUKU I HEN AND CHICKENS FERN, MOTHER SPLEENWORT Asplenium bulbiferum
Spotting it
This fern has characteristic little bulbils on the tips of its leaves. These curled babies – the ‘chickens’ – grow furled, then drop to the ground and grow into new ferns.
Mouku is common in lowland bush, especially near streams. The growing season is through spring and summer, although it varies from region to region.
Using it
‘fiddleheads’ or ‘fiddlehead greens’. These are the coiled shoots of young ferns that burst up from the ground. Once they’ve unfurled, they’re no longer edible.
Mouku fiddleheads are a delicious vegetable, raw or cooked. Raw, they’re crisp, have a mild, ever so slightly tart taste, and are juicily mucilaginous as you chew them. They are mildest near the base and become slightly more bitter as you nibble up to the top of the spiral.
They can be chopped into salads, or boiled for about 2-5 minutes, steamed, stir-fried or baked. You can treat fiddleheads like asparagus.
In his book, chef Charles Royal says to harvest fiddleheads by snapping them off at the weak point near their base, taking only those that are less than 25 centimetres long. To prepare the fiddleheads, remove the small fem-shaped leaves along the main spiralling fiddlehead stalk and discard them. Then wash the main stalk well, rubbing off as many of the little brown spots along it as you can, as these are bitter.
The Japanese sometimes serve cooked fiddleheads at room temperature, with shoyu (soy sauce) and sesame seeds sprinkled over the top. With their curls and twirls and flourishes, fiddleheads are a beautiful food, offering many possibilities for gorgeous presentation.
