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!

Chicken - the full story

We spent a fascinating morning with Charles Nash who runs Sutton Hoo Chickens on land next to the site of the great Anglo Saxon ship burial. It's a beautiful, atmospheric place with views over the river Deben - lucky chickens.

Charles - tall, blue eyed and charming - has been farming chickens for a decade and his birds - both free range and organic are reared for flavour. We've been cooking Sutton Hoo chickens on a regular basis over the last few months and there's no doubt they are our favourite for flavour, texture and succulence.

With the sun on our backs we walked and talked. The chicken story at Sutton Hoo goes something like this: once every two weeks 2,000 - 3,000 day old chicks arrive from a specialist chicken breeder in Lincolnshire. The breed is a hybrid of a brown feathered mother and a larger white feathered father and is known as the 'Suffolk White' around here. It's a slow-growing bird which consumes 1.5 - 2x the amount of food compared with an intensively reared chicken during its life. At any one time there are around 15,00o chickens at Sutton Hoo.

The young chicks are fed with 'crumb' a protein-rich mix of wheat and soya while the older birds eat pellets of the same ingredients in different proportions. The birds are housed in modest sized warm, dry houses with plenty of space (a little like caravans) with fresh straw bedding laid out every day. The houses are portable and moved periodically onto fresh grass.

The result is a premium quality free range bird which enjoys a better quality of life than would be necessary to qualify for the label 'free range'. Slaughtering is done as humanely as possible.

So what about the difference between organic, free range, freedom food and so on? At Sutton Hoo there is a field for organic birds (Charles sells about 1/3 organic to 2/3 free range). It was interesting to get behind the scenes of chicken production to understand these labels more quickly. The only real difference between Sutton Hoo Free Range and Sutton Hoo Organic is diet: the chicks which arrive can become either but are fed either a regular feed or an organic one. What we learned is that if you are not sure of the provenance of a chicken (say you are buying from a supermarket or eating in a restaurant) then is is certainly true that the label 'organic' tells you that the bird has had good welfare. However, Sutton Hoo 'free range' enjoy exactly the same quality of life as their 'organic' neighbours.

While it might further complicate things to add a new label we left the farm feeling that these 'free range plus' birds are a great choice and justifiably can command a higher price than a bog-standard free range bird.

We'll be back at Sutton Hoo in 2009 with some Food Safari events where you will be able to learn what we did, catch, pluck, cook and eat. Watch this space.