By Katherine Price: Foraging for a restaurant sustainably.
Foraging has exploded in recent years, especially in the restaurant world, with chefs across the country tuning into nature and becoming more aware of how they can use ingredients gathered from their surroundings on their menus.
However, the volume requirements of a restaurant will be much higher than someone foraging for personal consumption, so how can chefs ensure they’re foraging sustainably in a way that allows the plants to continue growing and return year-on-year?
Take only what you need
Chris Harrod, chef-patron of the Michelin-starred Whitebrook in Monmouthshire, puts it bluntly – if you don’t forage sustainably, it won’t be there next year. Harrod famously got into foraging after he took on the restaurant 10 years ago and the late forager Henry Ashby turned up at his kitchen door with a bag of leaves.
“He always used to say, ‘you pick what you need and the quality you need’,” recalls Harrod, “Henry used to forage the area way before I started, so he’d been foraging the area for 20-plus years, and it was always plentiful.”
It’s a lesson he passes on to his chefs. Harrod and his team calculate how much of each ingredient they need for the week’s service and pick only the best leaves or flowers they can find, from pennywort and fiddle fern to coastal herbs such as samphire, sea spinach and sea aster from the River Severn estuary.
The Whitebrook is down to operating a four-day week, allowing Harrod and the team time for foraging anything further afield or in larger volumes, in addition to the few hours they spend before each service foraging for nearby ingredients for use that day.
Forage with respect and take your time
Picking individual leaves, flowers or fruits might be a more time-consuming approach, but Harrod points out that it is also less wasteful.
“If you rip out the whole plant, you’ve then got to bring it back, pick out the best leaves, wash it and then throw away everything that you don’t want to use,” he explains.
“If you pick it sustainably and take a little bit from here and a little bit from there, a plant will naturally flower, go to seed and spreads and grows again and comes up even more next year. If you take all the flowers in one go or rip it out, then it’s not going to reproduce.”
Ian Waller, head chef at Michelin-starred Pine in Northumberland, agrees: “You should never strip something of everything that it’s grown because then it’ll just lose its ability to reproduce. A lot of it is common sense and not being greedy,” he explains.
“If it’s for a restaurant, you’ve got to think about the longevity of that project anyway. If you want to come back year on year, you need to leave some, otherwise it just won’t be there next year.”
The restaurant, which also has a Michelin green star, sources all its ingredients from within 20 miles, and foraging has been key to unlocking flavours that aren’t native to British soil. For example, Waller doesn’t use marzipan as almonds don’t grow in the UK. Instead, the kitchen team infuses rowan buds into oils, butters and milks for a similar nutty, rich flavour, which they use for example in a buttermilk custard and forced rhubarb dessert. He also uses magnolia for its floral, ginger-like flavour, which is released by brining the buds for about six months. “It’s not as spicy but I prefer it,” he says.
Waller, who credits his induction into the world of foraging to his time working with Kevin Tickle at the Forest Side in Grasmere, Cumbria, says that if there is only a very small patch, you either shouldn’t take very much of it or should try and find another more plentiful source.
Keep your eyes open
Careful foraging of individual leaves, fruits and flowers also means you’ll naturally notice things that shouldn’t be disturbed, like ground-nesting birds and butterfly eggs.
“If you’re not hacking it all away and looking at what you’re picking, which is the responsible way, you’ll see those things quite naturally. If you’re going at it with the best of intentions, those things will reveal themselves,” says Waller.
For example, Harrod says that meadowsweet is often full of small insects. Instead of washing them off, he leaves his foraged meadowsweet on a tray outdoors for a few hours to allow the insects to disperse.
“And you have to make a point of leaving some for them [behind],” he adds.
Learn before you forage
Understanding what you’re foraging can also be the difference between picking a delicious ingredient and something poisonous. Ashby taught Harrod about foraging, and although both Harrod and Waller recommend Miles Irving’s The Forager Handbook as the foraging bible, explaining not just how to use each plant but also its sustainability and how to pick it properly, Harrod says the best way to learn is from an expert.
“There are such similarities between certain things,” he explains. “Hemlock and wild chervil or cow parsley – they look identical, there’s only a very small detail that shows the difference and one’s seriously poisonous. Realistically, you’re not going to get that from a book. You need someone there to show you.”
Waller adds that it’s important to realise that while a mushroom variety may itself be edible, where it’s growing can impact its edibility, for example if it’s on a yew tree, any debris from the tree lodged inside the mushroom will be poisonous.
The Association of Foragers is a good place to start for engaging an expert, suggests Harrod, with an online directory of professional foragers, all of whom have signed a code of conduct to promote sustainable, safe and mindful foraging.
Waller suggests that foraging professionals can support a restaurant team to gather ingredients that they may find too time-consuming to collect in the quantities they need.
“Expect it to be time-consuming,” he stresses. “To forage things in any kind of volume is a lot of effort, it takes a lot longer than you’d think, especially when you’ve got to go to multiple sites so you don’t over-pick.”
Research the area
And it’s not just the specific site on which something is growing that is important, it’s also vital to understand the area in which it’s located.
“I wouldn’t recommend people just go out and pick because you don’t know what damage you’ll be causing, and you need to know what the land is you’re picking from,” advises Harrod, “is it farmland? What chemicals are they using? What’s being used in the area?”
He adds: “If you’ve got to trample over a load of habitat to get something, then really you shouldn’t be going there to get it.”
Waller, for instance, uses Japanese knotweed, a highly invasive species that can even devalue a property, which he juices to make a tart that he says has a similar sour taste to apple skins and rhubarb.
“That’s something you don’t have to worry about over-foraging because you don’t want it to be there,” he says, however he adds that chefs shouldn’t forage it on public land because local authorities may have used powerful pesticides on it, and it also has to be disposed of properly.
“We make sure that everything that comes onto the site is used… so there’s nothing left, but you have got to be a little bit responsible if you’re going to use those things because you don’t want to get them into our microclimate here. You’ve got to be really careful,” says Waller.
Foragers should also make themselves aware of not accidentally encroaching on any nature reserves national parks, or private property, information on which is available online.
Make use of your network – but ask first
That’s not to say it’s not ok to forage on private property with permission – Pine makes full use of its network of local guests who are often more than happy for the kitchen to collect produce they may have no use for from their gardens, such as fruit trees.
“It’s more a problem for them to pick it off the floor when it falls off the tree, so they’re quite happy for us to swoop in and take it before it falls,” says Waller. “You’d be surprised at how much is available from private property.”
However, it is vital to ask first or risk ending up in the community’s bad books.
Choose your plants carefully
Ultimately, there are some ingredients that can often be foraged in abundance, for example wild garlic, as well as invasive species such as hogweed, ground elder, mugwort and three-cornered leek. Whereas others, such as lion’s mane mushrooms, are so rare they should be left alone.
“Do your research before you pick anything – what are the pros and cons? Some things are struggling a bit more than others so they should be left alone for a bit,” advises Waller.