Les Stroud's Wild Harvest

- If there was ever a time to caution you of the safety measures needed if you're going to enjoy the wild harvest, if you're going to go local forging, it's in a place like this right here, right now.

I'm actually behind a shopping mall.

You can't see that.

You don't need to see it.

Trust me, there's a big building on the other side of you and yet here I am in this wonderful field full of wild edible plants, but I cannot show you everything you need to know in this film about how to gather this wonderful tumbleweed mustard, for example.

I can give you lots of tips, and I will, lots of techniques, absolutely, to be truly safe, 100% accuracy and positively identifying a plant, turn to the experts, take a course.

Go out with somebody who is competent and professional and can teach you the ways of your local foraging.

And that way, even when you're not wild and you're just in a back lot behind a shopping mall, you can still enjoy the wild harvest.

It should be pretty obvious that one of my favorite parts of wild harvesting is heading out into the wilderness.

Whether I'm beside a lake or a river, side of a mountain, the hinterlands, if you will, but in truth, probably the most accessible forging you can do is right within the city limits, the back lots, the abandoned fields behind industrial buildings or even shopping malls.

That's where you'll find not dozens of plants, hundreds of wild edibles.

Bottom line is you don't have to go all wild to enjoy the wild harvest.

(upbeat music) There's all kinds of wild edible plants here.

There's actually about seven or eight different edible plants.

Let me take you up to show you.

- [Paul] It's a nice color.

- My favorite one here, beautiful, look at that.

Common name for the plant, tall hedge mustard.

Small tumbleweed mustard.

- [Paul] Tumbleweed.

- And the reason why it's called tumbleweed is because when it dies, the roots actually come up, and it blows away like a tumbleweed.

So that's how it got the nickname tumbleweed mustard.

- [Paul] Interesting.

- Yeah, this is member of a family that also has the mustards, broccoli, cabbage, wasabi, and it's a wonderful plant in the kitchen because this time you get to concentrate on hot and spicy.

This is a spicy plant.

Don't believe me, go ahead, take a leaf and give it a shot.

- Okay.

- [Les] It's right there, isn't it?

- Oh, you said wasabi.

[Les] Yeah.

It tastes just like wasabi.

It's big, it's robust.

[Les] Yup.

My whole palate is covered.

- I've got another plant that I want you to play with today.

I'm gonna go gather that on my own and share it with you back at the restaurant.

[Paul] Okay.

So for now, here you go.

This is your harvest here.

Gather what you think you're going to need in the kitchen and I'll meet you afterwards.

- It's explosive, but it doesn't start initially, you know, with that first bite, that first chew, it kind of happens, a second, is like a little bit of a time delay and then boom, there it is, explosion of flavor.

All right, how these flowers taste?

They are similar but they don't taste the same as the leaf.

Fascinating, it's still spicy.

I think the combination of the two is a sweet spot.

- I love foraging on the side of a mountain but I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for finding wild edibles inside the cities around the globe.

With four rounded bright yellow petals, and six greenish stamens with yellow tips, this delicate wild edible is actually native to the Mediterranean but it's pretty much naturalized throughout the world.

Sadly, like so many wonderful wild edibles, it's yet another species that gets written off as being a weed.

When, and I'll repeat this fact until the ends of my days, there really is no such thing as a species of plants known as weeds.

They're all wild edible, or medicinal species of flowers, shrubs, and trees.

By its Latin name, sisymbrium, this flower is a hairy stemmed beauty and in zero danger of ever being over harvested.

So like chicory or dandelions, go foraging and gather as much as you can enjoy.

Ah, there's just so much here.

I mean, there's lettuce, there's dandelion, there's chicory, there's mustard family.

It just goes on and on.

And then I come up and I see this, horseradish, the real deal and it's delicious.

So I think keeping with the theme of hot and spicy for Chef Paul on this episode of Wild Harvest, I'm going to bring him home some horseradish.

Oh, this is exciting.

Come on, hopefully I got something out of it.

Ha ha ha, look at that.

Oh, that's horseradish.

You know what, there's so much of it and it's just widespread and abundant, I wanna get him a few more.

It's gonna be great.

These roots can go down upwards of 10 feet.

It's a very robust plant.

It'll take over your whole yard if you let it.

Oh, that just smells so good.

There we go, there we go.

Oh yeah, look at that old rootstock there.

Ooh, spicy.

Tender young leaves.

That's the one.

What a beautiful score.

- Let me get that for you.

- Okay, my friend here is your tumbleweed mustard which you've already tasted and it's so wonderful.

Another 40 feet past all of this wonderful tumbleweed mustard was this, armoracia rusticana, horseradish, simple as that.

It's remarkable how similar they are, two completely different plants growing in the same field and I'll leave you to discover that on your own.

- Okay.

- [Les] Enjoy yourself.

- Thanks, well, this is really cool.

horseradish is something that I grow in the garden but I've never actually taken it out of a remote location.

Ooh, that is spicy.

This is such a powerful flavor bomb.

I don't think I have to reinvent the wheel here in the application.

I think what I have in mind is more a traditional application of that horseradishy spice and what it works well with.

I'm excited for this.

So right now I'm assembling a vegetable sticky rice roll.

Nice cucumber ribbons.

The wild ingredients are gonna be showcased on the outside of the roll, that's gonna show the magic of the wild harvest.

So one of the important techniques to cooking vegetables is blanching and refreshing, dunking the vegetables in boiling hot, salted water, rapid boil, cook it to the doneness that you like.

Once you're there, you drop them in ice water and something else magical happens.

Look at that color, it pops.

Really a good tool for making beautiful presentations.

Now here I've got the classic horseradish root with the bark on the outside.

I'm just gonna scrape that off with my knife, and some mayonnaise and some fresh grated horseradish.

Now, I don't wanna make this too hot, I just want some underlying horseradish notes to be present.

It's perfect.

I'm lucky I have so many beautiful leaves.

I can just pick the choice ones, just a really coarse chop on this.

Time to get my flowers ready.

Pull these off, they're beautiful.

I love the color.

This will be the outside of the rice.

That is the wild mustard leaves, wild mustard blossoms.

Look the color, I love that.

It's a good thing, good old fashioned nori paper.

It's back, I think it's gonna have the the right color to make this dish pop.

Now I'm just gonna press all that in, into the rice.

Flip it over, there we go.

I've added just a little bit of pickled ginger.

Just add some pop.

All right, time to roll.

Stand it up so it all sticks together.

Now I just have to cool that down.

Into the fridge it goes.

Now I'm deep frying some of this rice.

I think it's just gonna be a fun temperature texture play, like sticky rice here in Chini.

(upbeat music) A big pile of horseradish, 100% necessary.

(melodic music) [Les] Ah ha!

All right, this is kind of a vertical presentation.

Start at the front.

[Les] Yup.

Have a dip.

Just straight soy sauce, mustard, the tumbleweed mustard flour and leaf on the outside.

- Wow, at this point, it tastes subtle.

Like I'm not really being bombarded with the mustard flavor, the wasabi flavor, if you will.

I'm gonna try it again and I'll do the combination of some soya and some horseradish.

Mm, bam.

- You got it.

- That's the winner right there.

Wow, first of all, I'm overcoming what's in here.

I'm expecting or was expecting super hot.

And I don't know what you did in that other room over there when you've been working away all afternoon, but the combination, the soy sauce with this horseradish, and everything you've got going on the, it's not killing me like some sort of hot sauce or anything like that.

And I also found that as I was eating it, it is one of those flavors that washed over my entire tongue all at the same time.

So what are these?

- So those are little rice balls.

They're deep fried.

I used a little ice cream scoop.

Underneath them happens to be a horseradish mayonnaise.

- First of all, I love the texture difference between the rice ball and the rice roll.

This actually reminds me of trying different little mini sauces on oysters.

- You have the same sort of experiment.

I thought the amount of horseradish I had on the side, both you and I would be sitting here giggling, going oh my goodness, that is this spiciest thing I've ever had, not the case at all.

I honestly expected that this dish was designed to knock down the power of either ingredient but when they were combined, it was over the top.

It blew me away.

- But bringing it to me, you brought it into a perfectly balanced combination.

So how did you do that?

- In all honesty, I struggled.

It was a raw experimentation.

I thought I nailed this.

I thought I didn't even have to think about it.

- Well, and again, not that I'm trying to, you know, save your emotions on it or anything like that but, as the person partaking of eating it, for me, you did nail it because then again I didn't know what to expect.

I thought it was wonderful.

On to the next.

So while Paul's working in the kitchen, I'm actually out just doing some shopping for some used books.

I come around the corner and what do I find, more of the tumbleweed mustard.

Here it is.

Let me prove it, a little taste, and there it is.

Nature's ready to go wasabi.

This is why I love to point out the gathering of wild edibles within the city limits, making sure that you know that it's an area that does not get sprayed.

Making certain that you have permission to be where you're gathering, making sure that it's a place that dogs don't urinate and defecate all the time.

There's some logistics behind gathering within city limits but they're not difficult.

And you find a patch like this and it just becomes fun and you didn't have to leave the city at all, right down from your condo or your apartment to that vacant lot that you know exists, to the seven plants you've identified there.

You harvest and you enjoy your meal.

All right, now I'm gonna go back to Rouge Restaurant and see what Paul's cooking up for me.

- For dinner tonight, I want to make lamb.

It's gonna take some time to marinate.

And I'm thinking a buttermilk marinade should be a beautiful flavor to go along with wild mustard.

Whew, making get my eyes water, it's so aromatic.

Lamb and mustard are friends and lamb and buttermilk marinade are friends, combine the mustard and the buttermilk and I think I've got quite possibly the perfect combination for marinating a lamb rack.

Because I'm in my restaurant, I'm using a technique called sous vide to cook the lamb.

The lamb and the marinade will be in a bag.

I'll take the air out and I'll seal it and then I'll cook it under pressure or cook under vacuum, more specifically.

That precisely the exact temperature for a nice medium doneness lamb.

It's that easy.

- Given the common name of horseradish, simply because the word horse is associated with strong or coarse, this plant has been mentioned since the times of antiquity.

Today, Hungary is the largest single producer for market, making 12,000 tons annually.

It's rich in vitamin C with a modest amount of sodium, folate, and dietary fiber.

Once again, not a weed, a wild edible and medicinal plant worth getting to know.

Now, if it makes you uncomfortable gathering within the city limits, you know, going in behind a warehouse or in behind some kind of grocery store or something like that, looking for those abandoned fields, then just consider your own neighborhood.

I mean, this is a fence not far from my house and I happen to know that there's rose hips all along this fence.

Every year they grow in perfusion.

So I check with my neighbor, hey John, you mind if I go over and gather the rose hips from the fence over there?

And nine times out of 10, anybody you ask if you can go and gather their dandelions or their rose hips, they're going to say, yeah, go for it.

So that's half the fun of it, is you get to know your neighbors a little better.

They are happy that you are harvesting what they might consider a weed and you get to enjoy your local wild harvest.

We'll have a look up here.

So not ready right now, wrong season, but these are delicious, delicious blackberries.

Now they happen to be a very invasive species and they're all over the West Coast, but invasive or not, they're delicious.

Local forging just opens up so many opportunities for you to get to enjoy the nature around your own home if you happen to live in an area like that.

So here's a driveway up here.

For years, I would go up there and I would gather acorns and madrone berries amongst other things.

Well, now someone has built up there, great.

I get to know them and I let them know and say, hey, do you mind if I come in here once a year, maybe gather up some acorns and I'll make you some acorn flour, make you some acorn loaf and it connects me to them.

It connects me to nature.

And I think maybe even better than that, it connects them to nature.

This is what I mean when I say you don't have to fly to the mountains.

You don't have to be on a canoe trip.

You don't have to go off on big adventures.

The adventure is in your own neighborhood, in your own backyard, down the street.

Of course, there's things to know when it comes to gathering in places that are not yours and you have to get your permissions.

You have to know where you are.

And of course, you always wanna know about spraying, but it's still incredibly worthwhile.

This is what I think is the true essence of local foraging is foraging in your own backyard.

- Let's see if I can separate this out.

There we go.

What I realized preparing my first course is it's easy to lose the panache in the heat of the tumbleweed mustard.

So these little mustard leaves, I'm gonna mix in with grilled brassica.

This time I'm using yu choy, which is also a brassica so I'm matching brassica to brassica.

It's gonna be interesting to see how this all comes together.

I've got so much to choose from.

This is fantastic.

And this was one, two minutes to harvest.

That was it and it's growing everywhere.

There's no guilt harvesting this.

Just excitement from having a fun and flavorful ingredient to pair with my lamb dish.

All right, time to go to the barbecue.

Woohoo, 700 degrees.

That will work.

Here we go, a little olive oil, a little salt.

That's a good sound.

So remember, the lamb is already cooked.

What I'm doing is I'm just adding that outer layer of flavor, adding a crust to it one might say.

Time for the vegetables onto that very hot charcoal barbecue.

There we go.

Thunder.

Now the lamb's resting so gonna gimme a chance to finish the yu choy.

To add some depth of flavor, I'm adding some chopped shallots and a healthy amount.

Now it's time to finish the brassica salad.

Now I've got the yu choy leaves, the tumbleweed mustard leaves raw and the flowers raw.

I'm adding acid, this time it's lemon juice.

Mix that up.

Alright, that's got notes of bitter, notes of spice, notes of sour.

My worry now is whether or not the lamb will stand up to this vegetable.

(melodic music) All right.

- [Les] Ooh, lamb.

- [Paul] This is for you, that one's for me.

- Wow, that looks good.

How do you recommend eating this?

- [Paul] Okay, well there's a vegetable.

- [Les] Okay.

- It is a combination of yu choy and the tumbleweed mustard.

So I've got cooked leaves.

I have fresh leaves and I've got the flowers.

- Okay, let's give this a try.

It's a flavor I wasn't expecting, especially for lamb.

The lamb definitely has its own flavor that's coming through.

And if I add in this horseradish, the horseradish doesn't take over.

It's just combining with the lamb.

They're just both coming to the forefront, easily I would say too.

That's my favorite way so far, of this is combining all three together in a fork full because then the flavors dancing around on my tongue.

- When we were harvesting today, it was incredible.

The hill, was different hues of yellow and brown and green.

It's definitely a dry location.

That's what I noticed.

Some blue was popping.

There's some flowers that were out.

But in the background, above the hill, the sky was absolutely stunning.

And I actually chose this plate thinking of that vision where, you know, I'm looking up, I'm watching you forage, and I'm looking at the sky and it's like, wow, this is just an incredible moment.

- I am seeing all of that on the plate.

And your presentation, the color represented like the drier grasses in the field.

So this is really cool.

This is delicious.

Well, cheers my friend.

I think you still killed it.

I know, it's funny, you as a chef feel like, that wasn't quite right.

It wasn't where I really wanted to be, but me, as the participant in the eating, I'm really happy.

There's nothing, I'm not sitting here going, eh, you know, you could have done this a little better, Paul, not at all.

To me, if you'd not told me that you had any issues working with these flavor profiles, I wouldn't have known.

I would've thought you just nailed it.

So it's really delicious.

- [Paul] Cheers.

- And that's how I think it is with the wild harvest.

The wild part comes in, if not with our more primitive and primal cells and that connection to nature, then maybe with our ancestral selves and their connection to nature 'cause each and every single person living on this planet today comes from a history and ancestry of local forging, of gathering from the wild, of knowing wild, edible, and medicinal plants.

I'm sure that thousands of years ago, I have ancestors who got up in the morning, left their little hut or shelter, walked outside about a hundred yards and forged locally and really enjoyed the wild harvest.

(upbeat music) If you'd like to continue to wild harvest with me and Chef Paul Rogalski, then please check out our website at wildharvestfilms.com where we have recipes and foraging tips, along with deleted scenes and outtakes from the making of Les Stroud's Wild Harvest.

- [Narrator] Directly inspired by the series, Chef Paul, and expert forager Les Stroud, bring you the Wild Harvest Recipe Book, highlighting all of Paul's dishes and complete with behind the scenes stories.

It is available for $29.99.

In addition, a DVD of this season is also available for $19.99.

To order, please go to wildharvestfilms.com, Wild Harvest TV show on Facebook or Les Stroud's Wild Harvest on YouTube.