Umami Podcast

Umami Podcast - Foraging with Langdon Cook
3.29.24

Elise
0:00:00
You're listening to the Umami Podcast, conversations with producers, purveyors, and scholars exploring food choices we make as a culture. I'm Elise Ballard and I'm here with my friend and co-host, Chris Pfeifle. Thanks for being here. There is perhaps no more bounteous a place to forage than the Pacific Northwest, where author Langdon Cook has been leading foraging expeditions for more than 30 years. On this episode of the Umami Podcast, we learn about foraging, mountains to sound, in the wild and in your own backyard, everything from clams to nettles to morels and chanterelles. Let's dive into the conversation.

Elise
0:00:55
Langdon, I have known you. About 12 or maybe even 15 years ago went on an oyster expedition in Dosewallips, Washington.

Langdon
0:01:15
Okay. I was probably pretty new at leading those classes, actually. Okay. Okay.

Langdon
0:01:20
Yeah. How'd it go? Did we get into them?

Elise
0:01:25
Yes, absolutely we got into them, and we got into some clams, and I learned a ton, and I've been forever changed.

Langdon
0:01:31
That's so awesome to hear. I mean, 15 years ago, I mean, my probably Fat of the Land was relatively new at that point--my first book. And that and that's when I started teaching those classes because there was just so much demand. You know foraging was on its ascendancy

Elise
0:01:45
And you still you still do the these these classes and we can come back to that, but that's right, right?

Langdon
0:01:58
In fact, they're about to start up with a vengeance very soon. Yeah, we're coming into the high season.

Elise
0:02:00
The season is nigh. Okay, the high season. Oh, man.

Chris
0:02:07
Yeah. I mean, just talking about seasons, I've got so many questions about this. Do you find that you're going to have, you're just booked out for spring and then you have a taper off? Or how does this go for coastal or land-based foraging?

Langdon
0:02:29
Sure, well, in the Pacific Northwest, I would say our big seasons, at least for these classes, would be spring and fall. In summer, I take a little bit of a hiatus. You know, there's still plenty of good stuff to find in the summer, but people are traveling and hiking and doing other things. And then, of course, in the winter, it's a little more challenging because of the weather. Of course there are not as many things to find, but actually winter is just a great time for shellfish. Especially if you want to head out to the wind-swept ocean beaches and dig some razor clams, that is the time to do it.

Chris
0:03:06
Absolutely.

Langdon
0:03:07
If you haven't dug razor clams with a headlamp, then you really haven't lived in Washington as far as I’m concerned.

Elise
0:03:13
Whoa, yeah.

Chris
0:03:14
No, you're right. I couldn't believe the bounty out on the Pacific Coast for razor clams. And I honestly can't think of anything better than fresh caught razor clams cooking on a barbecue with a whole bunch of people standing around just being able to share in that bounty.

Langdon
0:03:33
That's right. You know, like in a campground having a few Rainiers, you know, and maybe some beer-battered clams. They are such a special treat, and we are lucky to have good populations of them on our beaches, which wasn't always the case. They've had to be very carefully managed. But in recent years, they've even raised the limits for razor clams, which is something in our era is just unheard of, to actually have bigger bag limits. So they've been doing a good job.

Elise
0:04:05
Raise the limits of how many a person can go and catch.

Langdon
0:04:09
How many clams you can dig, yeah. So for most of my adult, well, at least in the last 20 years or so, it's generally been about 15 clams per person per day. And in the last year or two, they've raised it to 20 clams. So not every dig, but there have been some digs with bigger bag limits. So, they're doing a good job managing the abundance.

Chris
0:04:33
Yeah, as well as frequency that you're allowed to harvest that as well. So, they're getting bigger limits and it seems like they keep reopening the season for another three days, another five days or so. And with that, I'm wondering how many seasonal changes have you seen throughout your decades of foraging of species coming back or disappearing for a little bit?

Langdon
0:04:57
You know, that's a great question. And I mean, I've been doing this now for more than 30 years, and I can say that I have seen changes just in my lifetime. And they're the result of climate change. Mushroom seasons, it's not so much that we're seeing a shifting of the seasons, sort of forward or backward, what we're seeing is more unpredictability. And we're also in this sort of cycle of boom and bust. So, you know, take morels, for instance.

Langdon
0:05:30
Maybe everything will line up and we'll get the right amount of precip and it'll be a cold winter and, you know, all the sort of things that you need for a good morel harvest, and we'll just have a banner spring. And then the following year, there will be just a dearth of morels, because suddenly it gets really hot early in the spring, the mountain forests dry out, and foragers go home with empty buckets, which is always really sad. So, what I'm seeing more is unpredictability. Whereas the seasons used to kind of go off like clockwork within a few days or a week of what you would expect to find at any given time.

Langdon
0:06:11
Now I'm seeing kind of bigger swings in terms of when certain species are emerging, in what sort of abundance they're emerging, and things like that and and I really attribute that to climate change.

Chris
0:06:31
I live right at Harbor Island underneath the West Seattle Bridge on my sailboat and so I love just watching all the you know seasons come in and I do a bit of venturing myself.

Langdon
0:06:41
It's a crazy scene over at the First Avenue Bridge isn't it? Oh it's incredible.

Chris
0:06:46
I've got a hard bottom inflatable that zips along and the Duwamish area is just the perfect backyard to just take a, you know, once there's enough daylight, an afternoon after work drive and go under, you know, First Seattle Bridge and South Park Bridge. I usually U-turn at the South Park Marina and, you know, sometimes I'll just stop anywhere in there and, you know, you can see where the, this, these eagles have taken over a heron's nest and, you know, whatever. There's, it's still a vibrant nautical landscape with, you know, life running through that river despite being a super fun site and all the industry.

Chris
0:07:30
I love the collision between the two.

Langdon
0:07:33
I do too. In fact, I have a whole chapter about it in my salmon book, Upstream, and I love to take people out on the Duwamish to experience what you call the collision because it is such a surreal fishing experience, you know, to have the trash compactors going nearby and the cement factories, you know, Boeing test flights coming low overhead.

Chris
0:07:57
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, there's just a hum to it, but it's not just all because of industry. There is an underlying rhythm that is bouncing through, and when you're on the Duwamish, you kind of see this collision and you find some center in it.

Langdon
0:08:14
Yeah, that's so true. And last year was a particularly good year. It was a pink run, for one thing, and we had a big run. And so you just saw all kinds of people out on the water enjoying themselves. It's a great place to take kids to catch their first salmon. Lots of happy people.

Chris
0:08:32
And what's nice is the shore is nearby on both sides, so it doesn't feel like you're going out into the sound, which has a striking mood to it. But you're out in water. You can kind of see land, but you're not close to land and that does bother a few people. With that, I'm wondering what kind of foraging are you doing on the seashore around the Pacific Northwest?

Langdon
0:08:59
Well, that was some of the first foraging that I did when I moved to Seattle more than 30 years ago. I'd been a fisherman, but being able to go out and dig clams and have oysters to pick, and of course, you know, the geoduck, which for a long time seemed like just a fable. But I knew I was going to have to get one. And actually, the late Jon Rowley took me on my first geoduck dig, and that's something I will never forget. By the time I was done, first of all, we get out there, and we had a few shovels but he just sort of hands me one and says, okay, you're

Langdon
0:09:42
going to be doing the digging. By the time I was done, you know, it's a race against the tide as well because you're doing it at very low tide and meanwhile that tide is coming back in and by the time I got down to where the duck was, I had basically, you know, I was sitting in a hot tub, essentially.

Langdon
0:10:01
It was like a cake-full-sized hole.

Chris
0:10:02
You're fully committed at that point. Oh, yeah.

Elise
0:10:04
Wow.

Langdon
0:10:05
Soaking wet. But I did. I got it out of the ground. I was super stoked. And yeah, I cooked up a nice sashimi dinner with that first duck.

Chris
0:10:17
Looking through your website, which just has a bounty in itself if you feel like digitally foraging but there was a there's a picture of you holding a gigantic geoduck. Is that what the size we're talking about on this expedition?

Langdon
0:10:32
You know they can that I'd know the one you're talking about and there might be a little camera trickery involved there too. You always whenever you catch a fish you always hold it extended. You hold it out. Yeah yeah but no that was a very nice duck. I have never gotten into one of those double digit poundage ducks that you hear about, but I think I've probably gotten a duck that was six or seven pounds, which is very large. I actually teach geoduck classes in the late spring and early summer. We usually do one or two a year. You know, you have to have those very low tides.

Langdon
0:11:13
It has to be at least a negative three foot tide. And you get those around the solstice. And we'll take people out and dig a few ducks. And most of them tend to be in the sort of two to three pound range. But every now and then you get a bigger one. And those are the ones that really fasten themselves down in the muck.

Langdon
0:11:35
And they almost create sort of a vacuum. So you have to get your, not only are they three feet down first of all, so you've got to dig a really deep hole, but then you've got to get your hands kind of under the shell a little bit to kind of break that seal, that vacuum seal in order to pull them out. And more than once, I've seen people snorkeling for them before in my classes. It's an awesome sight and people get so into it. They're soaking wet and just, you know, it pushes all the foragers' buttons. These are buttons that we have in us, that we all have, because as I like to tell my

Langdon
0:12:20
classes, we're all the descendants of successful foragers from the deep, deep past. You know, our ancestors who managed to not kill themselves, you know, when they were trying out new plants and fungi and other things and ways of getting things. Yeah, we we we descend from them and we have it in us. I mean, it's in our DNA. You know, it's in our muscle fiber.

Elise
0:12:43
That's really great that you bring that up. We we just had a an interview with Valerie Segrest, who is a Muckleshoot tribe member and who talked to us as well about foraging. We talked about dandelions and we talked about nettles and things like that, and what you're talking about brings that up for me. My follow-on question is about the sort of, when we bring up geoduck, when we talk about salmon, when we talk about vegetables, sea vegetables, clams, you know, that sort of thing. I have a general question, which is, is there a way of coaxing cultivation?

Elise
0:13:26
So is there a spectrum between something that's fully wild, like those geoduck you're talking about, to somewhat farmed, somewhat cultivated, somewhat coaxed into making themselves available?

Langdon
0:13:42
Well, I mean, for instance, geoduck are being farmed at this point. And, you know, most of the oysters that you will find at an oyster bar in Seattle have been farmed. They come from wild stock. But, you know, most of the oysters that we're eating around Puget Sound, and in fact all over the country at this point, are Pacific oysters, which are not even native to here. They came over probably in ship ballast 100 years ago. They really like it in Puget Sound. They go by all sorts of different names.

Langdon
0:14:24
It's like wine varietals. But most of them are Pacific oysters. And then you have Kumamoto oysters. That's another species all together. And then of course we have our native Olympia oyster, which was nearly fished out at the end of the 1800s. And we're slowly kind of rebuilding those stocks. Actually, the guy that I teach these shellfish classes with is a third generation shellfish

Langdon
0:14:54
farmer named John Adams. He has a shellfish farm down in the South Sound, which has actually one of the largest populations of native Olympia oysters anywhere. They have just managed to reseed themselves, and he's got good habitat there and it's a great comeback story that's happening right in his backyard.

Elise
0:15:19
So that's a good example of good farming in terms of seafood.

Langdon
0:15:26
Well, so he's not using any sort of pesticides. He's doing it very naturally. In fact, I know that he's getting support from some different organizations like the Nature Conservancy because he's not, he's just, he's doing it, you know, all on the up and up, no pesticides, you know, I can't go into all the details of how he does it, but I think for the most part he has natural set, the set is where the oysters are spawning. And the babies actually do set on the backs of the elders on their shells. That's why you need good substrate. And in fact, that's why it's in the rules if you look them up.

Langdon
0:16:21
You know, you need to know the rule book when you go out foraging and there are very specific rules about harvesting oysters in Washington. We're very fortunate. I think we're the only state on the west coast other than Alaska where you can go and forage oysters on public land. I don't think you can do that in Oregon or California.

Chris
0:16:45
The PNW is pretty amazing as far as landscape and what it has to offer as far as foraging and just beauty. But we're like dancing right on the edge of stewardship, where we're talking about what, you know, how to bring a certain species back and then how to not take more than what you need, not considering, you know, doing it commercially, you know, as far as mushrooms and what you had said on the other podcast that you were on, which was a fantastic interview. But can you speak on stewardship a bit and how that dovetails into everything you've been talking about?

Langdon
0:17:23
Yeah, I get this question a lot and it's the sustainability question when you get down to it. And, you know, it's tough for would-be and new foragers because there aren't, you know, a lot of guidelines for this sort of thing. And in fact, there's not even, there could be more science on it. In some cases, it's really just going by what feels right. And I tell folks, especially in my classes,

Langdon
0:17:52
I'll say, you know, like if we're going out and picking mushrooms, well, you're not gonna find a bag limit in most cases for what you can take. But take enough for yourself and maybe your friends and family to be able to share. But I leave the small ones, I leave the old ones because they're in the middle of reproducing

Langdon
0:18:13
and I kind of take the ones in the middle. And I know that usually I'm not seeing them all. But you try and forage responsibly and not overdo it. Especially if you suddenly just hit everything just right and there's just a boom, an abundance. It's easy to get carried away. I think I refer to it in my book, Fat of the Land, as the mushroom greed, especially with mushrooms.

Langdon
0:18:44
It's very easy to get the mushroom greed and we have to restrain ourselves. We have to have some self-control. The other thing I tell folks is just go by the sort of leave no trace policies. Maybe pick up some trash when you're out there and bring it back in. Don't tread heavily on the landscape.

Elise
0:19:07
Take something, give something or something like that.

Langdon
0:19:11
Yeah. Just try and be a good steward. That's why I think, though, that foraging is such a great activity for kids, for families, for people who maybe are not that familiar with the natural world but want to spend more time outside. I think foraging is a great way to be introduced to nature and to feel more connection to it, and from that to have a stake in it, to become a steward of the land and the water. So that's why I want to see people out there doing it. I often get asked, well, if all these people are out there foraging, doesn't that mean

Langdon
0:19:49
that they're ripping up the landscape and taking all these wild foods home for themselves? In general, I think if more people get turned on to foraging, that's going to be good for our environment. Because I think those people will in turn become stewards of the landscape. It's an education process. So we'll have more people who are tuned in and can share that experience with others and hopefully explain why it's important that we protect these places and take care of them.

Elise
0:20:24
That makes a lot of sense and that's very well said. I wonder about exactly what is the difference between a cultivated thing and a wild thing. I wonder about starting with nutrition, you know, why is a cultivated dandelion less nutritious, less interesting, less flavorful than a wild dandelion, for example. There are so many other examples. And maybe it extends to fish, to shellfish and that sort of thing, to clams, oysters.

Chris
0:21:05
We may see a trend, but...

Elise
0:21:06
Yeah, right, right, right.

Langdon
0:21:08
Well, let's start with the psychological piece here, and then we can get more into the sort of scientific basis for it. But as I tell people in my classes, there's nothing better than going out and for instance, finding some oyster mushrooms yourself. The secret sauce is that sort of sweat and toil that you put in to challenge yourself to learn how to find them and then to be successful

Langdon
0:21:33
and bring them home and cook them up. There's just nothing like going out into the wild and finding something yourself and then making a wonderful meal out of it. So the secret sauce is sort of contained within that experience. But let's look a little more closely now at the oyster mushroom. That's an example of a wild food that we have learned to cultivate it.

Langdon
0:21:55
So you can go to your local supermarket now and probably find oyster mushrooms for $10 or $15 a pound or whatever it is they're charging. They come in all sorts of different colors. They come in yellow and pink and blue now, not just the standard gray. Hey, those are great. I've cooked with them. I enjoy the cultivated oyster mushrooms. They're certainly good in a pinch, but to be able to learn the life cycle of the wild thing and go out and find it is something special. Now the reason that we've learned how to cultivate oyster mushrooms is that they are saprophytic fungi,

Langdon
0:22:38
which means they are living on dead matter. They're kind of the great decomposers of the forest. And in our region here in the Pacific Northwest on the coast, they are specifically feeding on dead red alders. If we didn't have oyster mushrooms, we'd be up to our eyeballs in red alder trees. They are abundant and they are short-lived and they're constantly dying and falling over. If you go into an alder forest, you'll see all sorts of alder snags and alders that have fallen over across the trail and they're all over the place stacking up.

Langdon
0:23:17
But the oyster mushroom, along with the beetles and woodpeckers and other things, are helping to decompose those alders. And once you learn that, then all of a sudden, you're starting to unlock the puzzle. And so, one of the things I tell my students is, if you wanna find mushrooms, learn your trees. It seems counterintuitive, but mushrooms have relationships with trees. And in some

Langdon
0:23:45
cases, they're just digesting those dead trees like oyster mushrooms. In other cases, they're actually killing the tree. They are parasitic fungi. And then in still more cases, they are living kind of harmoniously with the tree, those are the mushrooms we refer to as #mycorrhizal fungi. And to me, that life cycle is sort of the most interesting because they are living along with the tree and they're sort of helping each other out. And the vast majority of wild mushrooms that you might see on a restaurant menu fit into that category.

Elise
0:24:22
In the mycorrhizal category.

Langdon
0:24:25
That's right. So unlike the oyster mushroom, which we have learned to cultivate because we can just give it its substrate that it needs to live on, with mushrooms like #chanterelles and #porcini and #blacktrumpets, you know, we have not figured out really the nuances of that relationship with the specific tree that it lives with. And so you have to, you need a forager to go get them.

Elise
0:24:53
Right. So they're not cultivable. Is that the word?

Chris
0:24:58
Probably.

Chris
0:25:00
We know the variable is they're living in a symbiotic relationship. We just don't know how to parody or cultivate that symbiotic relationship. And that happens a lot with different animals we want to keep. You can't keep a great white shark in captivity. It just doesn't work.

Langdon
0:25:22
That's right. You know, there are some mycorrhizal mushrooms that people have been trying to figure out how to cultivate. There's one in particular, the morel. Now we don't actually know exactly what the morel's life cycle is. Is it mycorrhizal? Is it saprophytic? Is it parasitic? It might actually change its lifestyle over the course you know of its life. It might go from being sort of saprophytic to mycorrhizal or vice versa. So we don't we haven't unlocked the secrets of its lifestyle, but apparently in a few places, especially in China, they have

Langdon
0:26:09
learned enough to cultivate in small quantities morels. In their early life cycle or small quantities all the way through their life cycle? Well, to adults. So in other words, they have fruiting bodies. In other words, morels that can be harvested and sold to market. And in fact, I've seen them in markets in Seattle. And I can tell you that of all the different morels out there, and we could spend this entire podcast talking about morels because there's so many different species and they have so many different life histories and the taxonomy is constantly changing. They're so much fun and they're such a mystery.

Chris
0:26:56
The three of us are going to start a podcast called Morels! Morels! Morels!

Elise
0:27:02
I wrote down as one of my questions to ask you, which is, I walked through the Pike Place Market yesterday and there were morels for sale and I haven't seen them anywhere else. So the question is where are they coming from?

Elise
0:27:18
What are they?

Langdon
0:27:18
I haven't seen those particular morels, but I'm going to hazard a couple of guesses, okay?

Elise
0:27:23
Okay.

Langdon
0:27:24
But what I was going to say just a second ago was that those morels that the Chinese have figured out how to cultivate, I think it's going on in some other countries as well, they are hands down the least tasty of all the morels. I think I've heard it said that, you know, wet cardboard is a good comparison.

Langdon
0:27:46
So, yeah.

Elise
0:27:47
Okay.

Langdon
0:27:48
And I wouldn't be surprised if those morel, because it's early March, you know, there are not a lot of morels out anywhere yet. There are probably a few morels popping in the Southeast right now, places like Georgia, and there may be a few morels coming up in California, especially in the olive groves, where they sometimes show up early in the season.

Langdon
0:28:15
But I would say there is a good chance that those morels that you saw are from China.

Elise
0:28:20
And that brings up problems with the Pike Place Market in general. I mean, that's a subject for another podcast.

Langdon
0:28:28
Well you know what they're gonna tell you? They're gonna tell you that they're from Oregon because that's where they were probably imported. That's where they were probably imported. Wow, okay. Lots of, yeah, but they're not. They're not. And you know our morel season doesn't really get going until April and really that's to the south of us. On here in Seattle, we really don't get going until May for morels. Now, there is a type of morel, we call it, some people call it a mulch morel

Langdon
0:29:04
or a landscape morel. This is actually the species that is being grown in China from what I understand.

Chris
0:29:14
Sure, because it would be easier to reproduce a mulch or kind of landscape bark environment than it would to be a felled tree.

Langdon
0:29:24
Exactly, and these are the morels that will show up in people's yards early in the season, you know, up and down the West Coast. And we'll have them, they'll be in Seattle, and it has to be new wood chips that are put down. So, you know, keep track of your neighbors who put down some wood chips, maybe over the winter or last fall.

Langdon
0:29:47
And this spring is the time to look for them. It's usually a one and done sort of deal, especially restorations. You know, if you know of a habitat restoration going on somewhere that's using a lot of wood chips, go check it out.

Chris
0:30:02
I remember in my early days of moving to Seattle, keeping my eye out for beauty bark, fresh beauty bark, season or over. It was morels or something else that I was looking for. I'm not entirely sure.

Langdon
0:30:18
They're fun to find, but I would be hesitant because those beauty bark strips, you have no idea what goes into them.

Chris
0:30:30
They must be processed. They're entirely processed and it's like getting pressure treated wood is what I kind of equate

Langdon
0:30:36
that to. Exactly. There could be chipped up telephone poles in there.

Chris
0:30:42
Oh, wow. Nasty stuff. With that, what about some urban foraging? Something that isn't necessarily having to go out into, you know, basically I drive a van, so I have no problem going out into whatever and staying there for a few days or so.

Elise
0:30:58
We were thinking about just like the, down the street from where I live, there are a couple of mulberry trees. Mulberries are amazing. And hazelnuts.

Langdon
0:31:07
Mulberries are amazing. They're everywhere. And yeah, so things like that.

Langdon
0:31:11
No, there's certainly lots of urban foraging opportunities. And in fact, I often tell people, just step out your back door. That's a great place to start because you are almost certainly going to find some wild foods right there, you know, in your own landscaping, in your yard. And if you're not using, you know, nasty herbicides and pesticides and weed killers and things like that, remember all that stuff ends up in Puget Sound, you know. So it's affecting our fish, it's affecting our children. So I really try and tell people, don't use those chemicals.

Langdon
0:31:46
And then you can go pick the weeds that are growing right out of your yard because they are probably more nutritious than anything you can grow in your vegetable garden. Dandelions, all sorts of things.

Chris
0:31:59
Free-range dandelions.

Elise
0:32:00
Free-range. Yeah,

Langdon
0:32:01
Yeah, I mean dandelions, you know, have been thought of as food for centuries, if not millennia. And it's only, you know, in this country in recent years that people have realized that, you know, just how delicious they can be if they're prepared properly and the fact that they're just full of nutrients. You know, I try not to throw around the word superfood too much. But a lot of the weeds really, I mean they are just off the charts nutritionally. So I'm talking about like dandelions and lambs' quarters and watercress, wild watercress is incredible.

Langdon
0:32:39
And it's just, it's a weed here, it's not a native plant, but it is, the wild stuff absolutely blows away what you can buy in the supermarket. Is that the same thing as miner's lettuce? No, no, no. Miner's lettuce is a native plant and it's all over Puget Sound. In fact, you can find it along Lake Washington. It can be quite common, but mostly in the woods and if you take a hike in the foothills, you will find miner's lettuce. It should be coming up fairly soon. Right now what we have is stinging nettles and they're just starting to emerge.

Langdon
0:33:22
In fact, stinging nettles typically emerge before winter is even done. They are super early in spring. Often they are sort of the first dab of green that you will see on the otherwise, you know, really drab forest floor that looks like it's still waking up from winter.

Chris
0:33:41
They want to be picked.

Langdon
0:33:43
Well, and that's another weed that's just off the charts nutritionally. In fact, I probably harvest more stinging nettles than any other wild green in the spring. I take bags of it home. I'm actually going tomorrow to get my first nettles of the year. Well, you put on gloves, first of all. I think we probably all at some point in our childhoods experienced the business end of the stinging nettle. That's not fun.

Langdon
0:34:15
It's a pretty potent cocktail of I think histamine, serotonin, and formic acid.

Elise
0:34:21
I mean, although a good cocktail.

Langdon
0:34:24
Yeah, analogous to like this thing of a fire ant, but in a slightly different combination so that it's not as painful. But for me, if I get stung, like I notice it for maybe 12 hours, you know, it's lingering. And so you wear gloves, you don't want to get stung, you know, pants and long sleeves. And then I just take my kitchen shears out. And I like to have either a bucket or a basket or one of those, you know, good sturdy bags that holds its shape

Chris
0:34:55
Yes, nothing's poking through

Langdon
0:34:57
Well, but also just because ergonomically speaking, you know, it's it's stoop labor when you're foraging you're often kind of stooping down and and You know, you can get a sore back after a while and If you're if you take like a garbage bag or something, you're constantly trying to open it up and get the nettles in there. I like to have something that's ready to go and I can just toss my nettles in. I top them. I'm looking for nettles that are maybe, I don't know, 8 to 18 inches off the ground.

Langdon
0:35:29
They're still growing. They're still vigorous. They haven't started their reproductive cycle yet, you know, they're not flowering or going to seed. So all their energy is put into growth and that's when you want to get them. And they're tender as well at that stage when they're young and if you go to the right spot, you know, you can be standing in something, you know, the size of a hockey rink that's just chock-a-block with nettles where you can't like turn around without stepping on one. That's what you want and they tend to be in disturbed areas. So there are

Langdon
0:36:10
lots of those you know along trails and trailheads and old burn zones and blowdowns you know that sort of thing. But even abandoned lots in the city. So what do I do with them? Well so you need to neutralize that sting. So when you get home, you process them through boiling water. 10 seconds in a cauldron of boiling water and they're totally neutralized. And then I'll shock them under cold tap water to stop the cooking process. I want to keep all those good nutrients in the plant. Also that beautiful, vibrant green color.

Langdon
0:36:47
And then once I'm done processing all my nettles through boiling water, then I've got this big cantaloupe-sized mass of cooked nettle, which I'll chop up. And at that point, I could put it in freezer bags in the freezer and just wait for another day. But usually what happens is they go into my Cuisinart along with a bunch of peeled garlic and some olive oil. You might see where I'm going here.

Elise
0:37:15
Pesto-y situations, yes.

Langdon
0:37:17
Salt, yeah, I love making pesto.

Langdon
0:37:21
And that I will put in, I like a smooth pesto, and I'll put it in ice cube trays and freeze them up, pop those out. I call them my nettle pesto pops.

Langdon
0:37:33
Oh, they are so good. I mean, you're talking about, it's like a healthy mac and cheese. You know, just put a couple of cubes in the microwave and you've got some pasta, you know, already cooked. You know, there you go.

Chris
0:37:48
Season 3 of Game of Thrones is about to start and I'm feeling good about this.

Elise
0:37:53
Talk to us a little bit about what you, you know, of all of the wild foods we're talking about. For example, stinging nettles, going back to that, I understand that they're super high in vitamin C and in calcium and I've also heard that there's a correlation between how bitter or astringent a food is and how many sort of phytochemicals, nutrients they have available in them. Do you have any perspective on that?

Langdon
0:38:32
Yeah, that's something I remind my students about because, you know, we've gotten so far away from bitter. Our palates have swung way over to the sweet side and a lot of that just has to do with high fructose corn syrup, Big Macs, and all these sweetened foods from the last century and processed foods that we're used to. So we really crave that sort of sweetness, right? But when you think about it, our ancestors, they were really searching out those bitter foods because those bitter foods told them that, okay, there are a lot of nutrients in

Langdon
0:39:12
this particular plant. That's what they were looking for. And so, you know, a lot of the wild greens are going to have those sort of hints of bitterness. And, you know, we live in a pretty good place for kale eaters, I think. You know, I think we have a lot of kale eaters.

Elise
0:39:31
We are a kale eating population.

Langdon
0:39:34
I'm a proud kale eater. I know in some parts of the country that it's used as sort of a slur, you know.

Chris
0:39:40
It's a very divisional term. It's very divisive.

Langdon
0:39:44
It's part of that sort of whole polarization thing, you know. But really, I mean, kale is good food. It's good for you. I grow tons of kale here. We have a little garden out on our sort of median strip.

Chris
0:39:58
It likes to grow.

Langdon
0:39:59
We've grown it for us, you know.

Chris
0:40:00
It likes to grow and it grows strong.

Langdon
0:40:03
It grows like 12 months out of the year.

Chris
0:40:07
Kale wants to be here.

Langdon
0:40:09
Yes, but if you like kale, you're going to like the wild foods. And part of it is also learning how to cook. For me, the foraging and the cooking was a tandem process. So when I was in my early 20s, I was learning, newly arrived in the Pacific Northwest, I was learning how to do both kind of at the same time. And so one was informing the other. And so in terms of cooking some of these more bitter foods, you know, a squeeze of lemon, a little sea salt, maybe some soy sauce or some apple jelly or something or garlic, you know, to your own.

Langdon
0:40:45
There are so many ways to make kale taste good, well just do that with your fiddle heads or with your other wild greens. With stinging nettles, they're slightly different because you've boiled them to neutralize the sting. I should also mention you can dehydrate them in a food dehydrator and that will also neutralize the sting. That's good for using the nettles as tea or something like that. But most of the nettles I will boil and cook. And then, you know, they're great as filling.

Langdon
0:41:23
Basically in anything that you might use, cooked spinach, you could substitute nettles. So, you know-

Elise
0:41:30
It wants to be with ricotta, for example.

Langdon
0:41:33
There you go. Well, that's where I was going with this. I'm a huge proponent of nettles, but all the wild greens are good for you, they're fun. I mean, they're pretty easy. It's a matter of learning some identification. The forager's golden rule is never eat anything from the wild without 100% certainty of what it is. But the learning curve for this is not that high.

Langdon
0:42:02
You can go and get some field guides and bone up that way, but I really think the best way is just to take a class or go out with a friend or a neighbor who knows what they're doing and learn firsthand.

Chris
0:42:15
It's the cause and effect that's so attractive to it and being able to either walk down the block and pick some rosemary or kind of engage in almost any level that you feel you're capable of engaging. And I imagine there's certain excursions you've gone on where you might have been like, wow, I am out there right now. It's such an accessible and healthy way to go about looking, you know, around your at your surroundings.

Elise
0:42:45
Well, Langdon, thank you so much for your time tonight. It's been really nice to talk to you and I hope that we get to maybe continue, delve deeper in the conversation in the future.

Langdon
0:42:54
Yes, well I hope I run into you all again, you know, whether in the woods or on the shoreline to do some more foraging. It is, you know, it's a fun way to spend time with other people, but also with nature. And I just, you know, I find it inspiring all around. So it would be great to see you out there again.

Elise
0:43:24
Yeah, I hope we can do that soon. Excellent, well, it's been wonderful talking with you.

Langdon
0:42:54
Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, thanks so much Langdon, we'll talk to you soon. Bye bye.

Elise
0:43:57
The Umami Podcast is produced by TNE Network. Find us anywhere you get podcasts and on Instagram at the Umami Podcast. Also don't forget to check out our website where you can find tons more resources about today's subject. While you there, consider supporting us with a small monthly donation or one-time gift. And please tell a friend about us.

Chris
0:44:06
You're listening to the TNE Network.