Those wanting to use more wild-sourced ingredients in their cookery often ask questions like ‘where do I find recipes for …such and such…’. Whilst it’s true that many recipes for wild ingredients do exists and there are large sites catering for precisely this market, the real key to using wild-sourced ingredients in your cookery is to understand those ingredients.
Just like most good cooks will know that you can substitute plain flour with baking powder added for self-raising flour or you can substitute marjoram for oregano or turkey for pork, using wild ingredients is simply a process of knowing your ingredients and their characteristics. Once you know an ingredient, what it tastes like and how you can used it then you can simply substitute the wild ingredient in a normal recipe.
For example, young dandelion leaves are quite like bitter salad leaves. You can use them directly in any recipe calling for radiccio or endive. As salt counteracts bitterness in any food you can also blanch dandelion leaves in salted water and use as a spinach alternative.
Wild greens such as sea kale and sea beet, being members of the cabbage family can be used in any recipes that call for other members of the cabbage family (eg cabbage, kale, collard greens, turnip greens, chard and even spinach). They just need to be blanched in salted water for a few minutes to make them tender and less bitter before use.
Common mallow has a taste profile and a mucilaginous nature that’s very similar to Egyptian corchorus and so can be directly substituted to make the Egyptian soup, Melokhia. In a similar vein dried Linden (European lime) leaves are similar to West African baobab leaves and American sassafras and like their culinary equivalents can be used to thicken stews and soups.
Wild fruit, of course, can be used in any recipe that calls for a domestic fruit: jams, preserves, cakes, ice creams, granitas etc. Just remember that wild fruit tend to be a little more sour than their domestic cousins and adjust the sugar content accordingly.
Standard wild greens such as Good King Henry, Fat Hen, chickweed, bedstraw and many others can be used in a very similar way to spinach and work well anywhere spinach would be used. If young they can even be eaten raw in salads.
Edible flowers can be candied (just store in sugar for a few days) and used in ice creams or to decorate desserts and cakes. Edible wild flowers provide an aromatic and sweet note to many dishes and are excellent in salads and as decoration for desserts and cakes.
Young shoots of many wild plants, such as Japanese knotweed and hogweed can be prepared, steamed and eaten in much the same way as asparagus and make wonderful alternatives to this vegetable.
Essentially, once you know what a wild ingredient is equivalent to or can be substituted for you can modify any recipe with that traditional ingredient and substitute-in the wild ingredient for it. So, the question when coming to wild foods isn’t ‘where do I find recipes for this?’ but rather, should be ‘what can I use this ingredient instead of?’ Then you can just mix and match and substitute to your heart’s content.
Make life easy for yourself, rather than hard!
Dyfed Lloyd Evans is the creator of the Celtnet Guide to Wild Foods, a large list of edible wild foods and how to use them. He is also the author of the Wild Food Recipes, a catalogue of recipes incorporating wild foods.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dyfed_Lloyd_Evans
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