Scrumptious Delights:- Sioux chef Sean Sherman - Rare Magazine

Written by Matthew Clarke

We are committed to revitalizing Native American cuisine and in the process we are re-identifying North American cuisine and reclaiming an important culinary culture long buried and often inaccessible.

- Sioux chef Sean Sherman

Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and I can barely contain my excitement about how much food I’m going to enjoy this year. I love discovering new recipes that my friends and family make, but mostly I just love having allof my loved ones together in the same space. Love and food are one in the same, and every,third Thursday of the month of November I get to have both in copious amounts. It’s basically my idea of heaven. There’s another reason that I love Thanksgiving so much in that it gives me a chance to search for other culinary arts that in a lot of ways have faded into the shadows of history.

In my curiosity I came upon a chef whose passion for bringing back authentic pre-contact indigenous foods has become a sensation. Chef, author and educator Sean Sherman has become a revolutionary force in the culinary world, taking his own cultural culinary riches and making them into exquisite edible works of art.

Chef Sean Sherman Founder: The SIOUX CHEF Company

His use of bright colors, forged ingredients, and the dedication to keeping his dishes authentic has made him a hero of sorts. When he isn’t cooking, he is educating communities about his cultural history, how to make various delicious recipes, and about how food can be a cultural lesson in itself.

Chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota, is a self-taught chef, who over a thirty year period has learned the art of farming, hunting, harvesting various foods, food preservation, and has even taught himself how to make both salt and sugar. These acquired skills are not easy to learn, and are even more difficult to master. Yet this determined and passionate chef has not just mastered these skills, but uses them to create incredible culinary plates of art.

It’s true when people say that you eat with your eyes first. Each plate he creates is swimming in bright radiant colors, and intricate designs. In 2014, with marketing and PR genius Dana Thompson, Whapenton- Sisseton and Mdeswakanton Dakota tribes, started a catering and educational company called The Sioux Chef. The mission statement of their company revolves solely around shining a light on a culture whose culinary cuisine has faded in the background of American culture.

These cuisines don't contain European additions such as dairy, gluten, and certain types of meats. Instead it focuses on what their ancestors had available to them prior to contact: berries, bison, duck, rabbit, trout, sage, wild rice, and varieties of wildflowers. What makes his company The Sioux Chef truly different is that there is so much hands on experience in the cultivating of all these ingredients. There is the hunting and gathering aspect, where you must see and know the sources of your food. I firmly believe that when you get your hands or feet into the dirt of the earth, you make a connection with Gaya, or mother earth. Now taking that experience and using it to gather nourishment must be one of the greatest of intimate moments a person can have. Chef Sean Sherman does multitudes of education to various communities.

Read the rest of the article in our November issue highlighting rare indigenous taste-makers.