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!