Forest food foraging is rewarding but not without risk

A walk in the forest with your family during a pandemic lockdown may be just what the doctor ordered in terms of exercise and a diversion from our COVID-19 fatigue and you might find something good to eat.

However, if you are going foraging searching the wilds for food do it with caution and responsibility, says chef, forager and Conestoga College culinary arts instructor Steve Allen.

"Really the only way to forage is to go with somebody who really knows what they're doing. The first thing I tell anyone is that if you're looking at a mushroom or a plant that you are 99.99 percent sure was what your grandmother fed you as a kid, you do not eat it!" stressed Allen.

"It is 100 per cent certainty or nothing," he cautioned.

When he forages, Allen, a Cambridge resident, compares and cross references, often using a National Geographic app. "If my app says it's this particular thing, I will look in my books and I can say that's exactly what it is. Then I might check another source as well. Combine different resources, and you can be confident."

More foragers

The pandemic, it seems, has encouraged more people to get out and forage: Allen says last year he saw only a few people but this year he's seen a lot more. "In fact, my fiddlehead spot has been picked through, which has never happened before."

Last week, I joined Allen on a sunny, cool Saturday morning along a trail bordered by the Grand River and Highway 24 between Cambridge and Brantford. We were foraging for mushrooms,plants such asleeks, wild garlic and fiddleheads, as well as roots.

"One mushroom we're looking for is the Dryad's saddle," Allen said. "There are lots of morels this year too, more than in the past. I've found about five pounds this year."

A couple of hours' searching turned up no morels, sadly.

• From CBC Windsor: Morel mushroom hunting

We did find lots of stinging nettles; that I know for sure. The plant can cause some discomfort, so beware: tiny needles can inject you with a histamine, and you'll start to feel a burning sensation. I experienced that on my finger, and the jab can penetrate thin clothing too.

"The great thing about this plant though, is that it has about 28 percent protein in it, which is really weird for a green," Allen noted. "Secondly, there's a ton of vitamins in it."

Of burrs and burdock

You've probably found a burr on your pant leg after walking in the bush and if you've ever tried to remove them from a dog's shaggy coat, you know that little nightmare.

However, the burdock root contains a lot of starch. "When you identify the plant positively, dig down and the root comes out almost like a parsnip. Clean it up, slice it thin and you can fry it into delicious chips," suggested Allen.

One of that morning's primary targets, the Dryad's saddle mushroom (or pheasant's back, because of its pheasant-feather pattern) was prevalent on many dead and fallen trees. "If you get them small enough, two to six inches across, they're typically really tender," Allen said. "They smell like the rind of a watermelon or a cantaloupe."

While they don't have the cachet of an oyster mushroom or the much-desired morel, they're one of Allen's favourites. "Slice them up and pickle them in the basic pickle recipe. Serve them with charcuterie. They're fantastic."

Environmental stewardship

The activity of foraging has several environmental elements, according to Allen. We spotted large patches of pretty plants about 40-centimetres tall with attractive white flowers: he explaining that garlic mustard is actually an invasive species. "They are delicious, and if I saw someone coming out the woods with two hundred pounds of [it], I'd be happy," he said.

In Ontario and Quebec, large swaths of ramps, or wild leeks, have been picked clean by irresponsible foragers, wiping out the crop for others.

It's important when picking the very popular fiddleheads to break off only a few of the baby fronds and leave a few so that the plant can photosynthesize the rest of the season. "If you pick them all, you're going to kill the plant," he said.

Next, picking from an abundance of bushy plants with many leafless shoots, Allen notes that the field horsetails' ancestors contributed to fossil fuels on earth.

"A couple of hundred million years ago, the entire planet was covered in these things. So eat them and do your part," he said with a laugh.

Its spores and rhizomes can spread dozens of metres in a single summer and is poisonous to young horses.

Pollinator role

With pollinators under pressure from a variety of obstacles, including climate change, Allen, in a way, "forages" bees, which propagate by splitting their colony, especially if it does well over the winter.

"The hive quickly becomes crowded, and the colony sends the Queen and half the bees to find a new home for themselves. The remaining bees take an egg previously laid by the Queen and feed it a special mixture including royal jelly which will turn an ordinary bee egg into a Queen," said Allen, who tends his own hives and long experience working with bees.

He creates "bee traps" in select locations which become a good spot for them to build a home. "I bait it with honeycomb from an old hive along with painting the insides with melted beeswax," he said.

By adding a "pheromone mimic," made from lemongrass-oil which attracts scout bees, he can catch a swarm. "I take them back to my own apiary and put them in a real hive box," he said.

Allen says if you know what to look for and can do it safely and responsibly, trekking into the woods can turn up dozens of edible plants.

"There are a lot of species in the wild that people don't even realize are edible... and delicious."