Event report: Wild Food Forage

How much food can be gathered for free and from the wild? Can common weeds be a substitute for regular shopping? What's safe to eat? And are any of these wild plants really worth eating?
These were were some of the questions answered during Sunday's foraging expeditition around Henham Park in Suffolk. Guided by Jacky Sutton-Adam, The Wild Foodie, a 20-strong group of intrepid foragers gathered for Food Safari's first wild food event. Foraging for wild food is by its very nature an unpredictable activity, affected by changing seasons and weather conditions but the rain held off and over the course of two hours and three sites we identified and tasted a multitude of plants.

We were guests of Henham's owner Hektor Rous who kindly let us roam wild across private land. (Tip: when foraging always get the permission of the landowner). Our first spot close to Henham's luxury B&B The Stables yielded a range of wild plants some of which can found in my back garden!

• Nettles - steam like spinach
  
• Ground elder - use chopped as a herb


• Ground ivy - makes a great restorative herb tea
  
• Cleavers (aka 'Sticky Willie') - steam the stems like asparagus
  
• Elderflowers - highly scented, use in cordials on in the panna cotta


• Sea purslane - good in salads
  
• Samphire - steam like asparagus
  
• Fat hen - steam like spinach
  
• Chickweed - use tender leaves raw in salads
  
• Hop shoots - raw in salads or check out Sophie's tempura below
  

We then moved to a very different part of the estate on the beautiful River Blyth estuary. A walk along the shore revealed surprisingly succulent plants such Sea Purslane and my favourite of the day Samphire. This classic wild plant teams wonderfully with simply cooked fish and is typically available in July from fishmongers. There are some nice Samphire recipes here from Hugh Fearley-Whittingstall's Guardian food column. It's too early in the season to pick samphire but we collected plenty of Sea Purslane for lunch.

From the Henham estate we moved to the more domestic surroundings of The Anchor's allotment at Walberswick which provides a steady supply of veg to their kitchen and gathered salad ingredients including the wonderfully named fat hen and the ubiquitous chickweed.

The forage culminated with a memorable feast at The Anchor. All that foraging had made us hungry and it was fascinating to see how wild ingredients can be transformed into dishes in the hands of a professional chef. Sophie Dorber produced some amazing dishes featuring the wild plants we had gathered: samphire fritters made with gram (chickpea) flour, hop shoot tempura, a Moro-influenced carrot and ground elder salad, risotto made with a wild mushroom called Chicken of the Woods (on account of its juicy texture reminscent of chicken breast), flash-fried sea cabbage and a dreamy elderflower panna cotta. One thing that struck me was how some of the 'edgier' flavours of the raw plants were mellowed by cooking to become star ingredients

Mark Dorber served a range of beers to match the dishes starting with a thirst-quenching, elderflower scented real ale from Lowestoft's Green Jack brewery called Summer Dream and including a number of belgian gueze and lambic style beers made with wild yeasts.

By 4.30 everyone was feeling pretty sated and despite the unusually dry spring meaning we couldn't leave with basketfuls of produce, we did leave with some new skills and full stomachs! You really can eat wild!

We'll be running more Wild Food in a Day forays for mushrooms and other wild foods in the autumn. Please visit our web site for more information.

Wild food foraging - research trip

I spent a fascinating couple of hours today up at Henham Park, 3800 acres of parkland best known as the setting for the Latitude Festival, Suffolk's answer to Glastonbury and home of the charming and laid back Hektor Rous. But there's more to Henham than music and comedy - it's a wild food forager's paradise.

I was with Jacky Sutton-Adam, wild foraging expert (and fellow food blogger) to survey the best spots for Food Safari's upcoming Wild Food in a Day on 6 June which she will be leading. Jacky has been foraging seriously since 2004 and as we walked through the fields and woods, we talked about the role wild food can play in a healthy diet but also in bringing a whole new level of interest to simply being outdoors.

As we approached the lake Jacky enthused about what she sees as the 'premier league' of wild foods which are great to eat, good for you and by a stroke of natural fortune, abundant in Britain. These include nettles and dandelions which have outstanding antioxidant qualities and but also fat hen - a delicious alternative to spinach and chickweed.

Finding the perfect spot for a Food Safari's foray is harder than I'd expected - we were looking for a concentration of lots of interesting edible plants in a compact area to allow maximum gathering time. Finally close to The Stables, Henham's luxury b&b, Jacky spotted a particularly promising looking area of meadow. With a triumphant "I'll get my shears" Jacky headed off.

She identified at least 10 edible plants within about 15 minutes, some of which we tasted although Jacky advocated that in most cases it's better to take things home and cook with them than eat them raw. I can testify to this! We've been experimenting with some wild foraging of our own this spring around Framlingham, including alexanders which are related to celery and lovage. My husband enjoys eating the stems raw but the rest of us are more sceptical - apparently they are good cooked like asparagus. Jacky explained that by late summer the dry black seeds can also be used as a seasoning.

Later, over lunch with Mark Dorber at the Anchor in Walberswick we discussed the wild food menu to be served after the forage. There were lots of ideas including teaming mackerel with alexanders, making a fresh pasta dough with cooked nettles to add colour and flavour and elderflower panna cotta. There was real excitement about the possibilities especially because the nature of wild foraging is that what we find on the 6th June will be unpredictable!

At Hill Farm Oils - extra virgin rapeseed oil

Hill Farm Oils are one of the great success stories of farm diversification in Suffolk. They've taken a familiar crop, rapeseed, which turns so many fields bright yellow from April onwards and produced a nutty cold pressed extra virgin rapeseed oil. The oil is now widely available in Waitrose and Sainsbury's nationwide, East Anglian Tescos as well as independent farm shops and delis.

The Fairs family have been farming for 35 years in and around Heveningham, near Halesworth in Suffolk, but in 2001 Sam Fairs was inspired to develop a new product from the rapeseed crop after hearing a friend had been rapeseed oil tablets to lower his cholesterol. Sam began to experiment with the cold pressing the rapeseed into a premium cooking oil that has half the saturated fat of olive oil and is high in omega-3, an essential fatty acid which can help lower cholesterol and prevent heart disease.

Rape covers about 3% of England's farmland and closer to 10% in some areas but it is not a crop that we usually associate with food. It's main use is for the manufacture of cooking oils, margarine and processed foods, with much of the by-product used as animal feed. Many varieties aren't even edible and are used for the production of lubricants and adhesives to cosmetics and gardening products.

It was fascinating to talk to Sam about the challenge of getting people to switch their buying and cooking habits. Sam talks about how olive oil has become so deeply ingrained in our minds as THE healthy oil, the one we reach for automatically in the supermarket aisle or standing at the stove. His focus is on educating people about the health benefits of rapeseed oil and encouraging them to try the taste for themselves. He tells me how in their experience once people have tried Hill Farm Oils they are converted (I vouch for this). Their greatest marketing opportunity is to get people to see the oil being used in cookery demonstrations, used in recipes and promoted by food writers and chefs. Mark Hix is a great fan and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall often uses it in his recipes. Mike Keen, Head Chef at The Anchor, Walberswick tells me he's a big fan and we'll use it wherever possible in Food Safari cookery demonstrations to encourage more people to give it a try.

Sam gives me a tour of the site and talks through the cold pressing process and shows me the bi-product which becomes cattle feed. The whole process from pressing to bottling is extremely high-tech and makes use of some very expensive bits of kit. The Fairs family have invested heavily in this enterprise.

Sam generously gives me several bottles of oil to try at home and to pass on to friends and chefs!

I've made great use of it and recommend it to add texture and flavour to home-made bread, to replace butter in muffins and flapjacks and for stir-frys and roasting vegetables; its high smoke point make it ideal for this.

If like me, you try to buy as much food locally as you can, Hill Farm Oil is great news - single-estate, extra-virgin oil from just up the road - has to be a great alternative to Italian, Greek or Spanish olive oils.

Winterfest: seasonal walk, cookery demonstration and feast @ White House Farm, Glemham

Just confirmed - Food Safari and White House Farm have teamed up for fantastic pre-Christmas event on 7 December. Jason Gathorne-Hardy, the charismatic force behind Alde Valley Food Adventures, farmer, artist, broadcaster and all round food polymath won't be around but he's kindly agreed to let Food Safari use White House farm as our base for the event.

Join us for a winter walk, demonstration of some seasonal cooking and of course a winter feast. This is a truly wonderful location.

For booking enquiries call me on 01728 621380