The Picker

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Doug makes his living as a full-time, year-round mushroom picker. He picks the Washington Coast near his Westport home in the fall, travels south to pick California in the winter, and marches back up the east slope of the Cascades following the spring pick, sometimes up into British Columbia if the pick is good.

The other day I tagged along with Doug to see how it was done.

To say Doug is an interesting character is to make a broad understatement. He’s been a logger, served in the military, and captained a crab boat. When you drive around the Olympic Peninsula’s down-at-the-heels timber communities with Doug in his $500 Buick Century sedan, you spend a lot of time waving to the people you pass, all friends or former colleagues: shake rats*, long-liners, other pickers, and those three old codgers jawing around the tailgate at the general store.

More important, at least in terms of Doug’s livelihood, you also spend a lot of time visiting trees that might as well be personal friends. Within a mile or two of our meeting place we pulled over beside a fork of the Hoquiam River. A single sitka spruce of less than 100 years age was busy cranking out porcini buttons. Doug has known this tree a long time and he’ll stop by for a visit every now and again to say hello and load up on the porcini that spring from its roots like Athena out of Zeus’s head.

After that we visited a hedgehog patch. I found myself struggling to keep up. Doug knows exactly where the mushrooms are. He has patches up and down the West Coast, has in fact forgotten more patches than most pickers will ever know. When you follow Doug through the salal and huckleberry and old cedar slash, you’re following a man who has created little trails through the forest just like the deer and elk and bears. These trails lead directly to mushrooms, which end up in his bucket by the pound, and are later emptied into baskets to be weighed by the buyer.

Doug prides himself on providing good product. His mushrooms are fresh, clean, and unblemished.

After picking hedgehogs we visited a chanterelle patch and another porcini patch. A good portion of Doug’s day is spent scouting. The chanterelle patch needed another week and he figured his early porcini patch was about to pop. He predicted a 30-pound haul for the following day, and when I talked to him on the phone the next night he said it put out 35 pounds—and that was just the beginning. He’ll be visiting that patch every other day for the next week or two until the patch peters out.

Meanwhile the hedgehogs were just coming on and there were always chanterelles to pick. Plenty of chanterelles. When I asked Doug why he picked, he didn’t talk about the money or the virtue of hard work or the allure of being your own boss. It was all about the woods. To pick mushrooms on a daily basis is to be intimately involved in the web of life. Doug knows which salmon streams still have decent runs of wild fish, where to find the best berries, and how to lose himself in the forest’s grandeur without getting lost.

Writers have an expression: a writer’s writer might be unknown to the critics and taste-makers, but earning the admiration of fellow scribes is the highest honor. Doug is a picker’s picker.

* A shake rat is a logger who specializes in cutting cedar shakes, or shingles.

Porcini Risotto

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WHILE RESEARCHING porcini risotto recipes, I was surprised to see how many ask you to cook the mushrooms first and then remove them from the pan before adding the risotto rice, as if they’re so fragile that they can only be added back into the dish later as a sort of frilly garnish on top.
 
Nonsense. The whole point is to allow the rice to take on the mushroom flavor as it cooks. Besides, even after a half-hour of cooking, fresh porcini mushrooms of good quality will retain their meaty texture. Why complicate the process?
 
Many recipes simply use dried porcini. This is fine out of season, though I would consider adding fresh mushrooms of some sort, even a bland supermarket variety like cremini, if only for texture. The best porcini risotto is the one that uses both fresh and dried porcini. Here’s mine:
 
8 cups chicken or vegetable stock
1/2 cup (approx 2 oz) dried porcini
1-2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium yellow onion, diced
2-3 cloves garlic, diced
1/2 lb fresh porcini, roughly chopped into 1-inch cubes
1/2 cup white wine
1 1/2 cups arborio rice
2 tbsp butter
4 heaping tbsp mascarpone
1/2 cup parmesan cheese, grated
1/2 cup (or more) sweet peas (frozen is fine)
salt and pepper, to taste
 

1. Warm stock just below simmer in a pot on stovetop.

2. Pulverize dried porcini in blender or food processor and add to stock.

3. In a large pan suitable for risotto, sauté onions, garlic, and fresh porcini in olive oil for several minutes over medium heat until mushrooms begin to brown ever so slightly, stirring regularly. I like to season the mixture with a few grindings of salt and pepper at this point.

4. De-glaze with white wine. When liquid has nearly bubbled off, add rice and stir well, coating thoroughly. Allow rice to cook until slightly toasted, 2-3 minutes.

5. Add 4-5 ladlefuls of stock to pan, stirring. It helps to have a risotto spoon. Reduce heat to medium-low. Continue to add a ladle or two of warm stock as the liquid is absorbed, stirring regularly, about 15 minutes.

6. Risotto is nearly done when creamy yet al dente. Now stir in the butter, mascarpone, and half the parmesan along with a couple more ladles of stock, then mix in the peas, and cover for a a minute.

The finished risotto should be rich and creamy. The peas add a dash of color and nice pops of texture as a counterpoint to the porcini and rice. Add salt if necessary. For an attractive and tasty garnish, thinly slice a couple small porcini buttons and saute in butter until lightly browned. For a soupier risotto, add more stock. Serve with remaining parmesan as a garnish. Serves 4.
 
 

Into the Elwha

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Say wha’? The Elwha River Valley, on the north end of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. 
 
Last week I backpacked into the Elwha Basin in Olympic National Park to see the place before it undergoes profound change next year. You see, in 2011 the process of undamming the Elwha will begin in earnest and five species of Pacific salmon will have a chance to re-colonize a river that historically supported large fish runs. Since most of the watershed is within the boundaries the park, the habitat remains in good shape and there are great expectations for filling the river once again with fish.
 
With this in mind, I decided a trip into the Elwha to see the place before the dams come down would be a good thing, a way to compare the before and after. My timing looked bad, though. Local weather guru Cliff Mass was telling his blog readers that this was a week to stay out of the mountains. A dreaded marine layer was headed our way from the Pacific with a forecast of rain every day for a week. Pigheaded as usual, I hoisted my pack anyway and walked directly into the teeth of the storm. 
 
The rain held off and that first evening I made it as far as the Lillian River, a major tributary, and a dark, dank foreboding place to make camp. Rodents pestered my tent all night but fortunately, with my food bags hung safely from a bear wire, nothing larger. The next  day I got deeper into the valley, leaving behind the popular destination Elkhorn Camp at the 10-mile mark to penetrate another six miles up-valley to where the Hayes River meets the Elwha. It was around Hayes that I felt civilization’s shackles start to loosen—and here is an important lesson known to serious backpackers: go deep. Your destination may be labeled wilderness or national park, but the essence of the wild doesn’t kick in until you’re suitably removed from the trappings of town. In this case I was 16 miles up a trail and another dozen or so miles inside a national park boundary before the magic of the back-country began to percolate. 
 
And percolate it did. Beyond Hayes the trees got bigger and the forest took on an enchanted quality. A lush carpet of moss covered everything. Winds whistled down from surrounding peaks carrying with them the sounds of glaciers creaking and melting. The river brawled through steep canyons. A fallen tree across the trail was as tall as me in its prone position; someone had counted the rings and noted them on the cut: 560 years old, this tree was a sapling here a generation before Columbus set sail for the New World. 
 
On Day 3 I left base camp to hike another 11 miles into the valley, making for a 22-mile day. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of the headwaters but the weather finally caught up to me. It rained all day and the mountains remained mostly hidden, socked in with fog. I had to settle for close-in views of the Elwha Basin and a look at a tumbling, roaring river that gouged out its banks and stacked enormous logjams of old-growth Douglas-fir like cordwood. In this way the river looked nearly perfect on the surface. But I knew that deep within those dark blue pools behind the logjams—ideal shelter for salmon fry—the currents were empty of anadromous fish. For now.

At Happy Hollow, the last shelter on the trail before it becomes a climbing route, I ran into three trekkers who had just come down from the Bailey Traverse, a famous bushwhack through a remote range in the Olympics that has never seen a designated trail. The trekkers had a fire going to dry their gear and seemed both exhilarated from their multi-day expedition and glad to be found. They had spent a full day lost in the hills and told me they were two days behind schedule and worried that a search party might be sent after them. I agreed to notify a ranger of their whereabouts on my way out.

 
The mushrooms were just starting to pop and they seemed to grow right in front of my eyes, the shiny red caps of Russulas emerging where there had been only moss just a few hours earlier, and hedgehogs clustering in the darkest patches of forest. I made dinner with a medley of wild mushrooms, including chanterelles, lobsters, and hedgehogs. I also caught rainbow trout and released them back into the river where they will seed the future stocks of steelhead that will hopefully reclaim the river once the dams are gone.
 
Trips like this got me foraging in the first place and when I reemerged on Day 5 to find my car in the parking lot, the spell of the wild was still on me. I drove back to Seattle in a daze, blissfully unaware of the traffic, neon signs, and hurly-burly of the city, at least for a little while.

Batty

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Maybe this is one of those had to be there moments but I can’t resist sharing this short video with you all. The past two weeks of cabin-sitting a friend’s place off the grid in the remote Rogue River Canyon of southwestern Oregon was mostly a quiet affair, a vacation away from cell phones, laptops, blogging, Twitter, and the rest of the plugged-in foofaraws. 
Instead we basked in that rare Cascadian commodity, sunlight. These were dog days to be sure, with a few afternoons hitting triple digits. We swam in the river and didn’t think twice about unanswered emails or what wild food options might be afoot. For that matter, the foraging was slim anyway. Chinook salmon had already pushed through on their way to upstream spawning grounds and fall steelhead had yet to arrive; it was still too dry for mushrooms and the evergreen huckleberries were just beginning to form hard, green little nodules on the bushes.
Come dusk, though, when the heat dropped a notch and does brought their fawns to the meadow to browse, the lazy day was given a jolt of earthly electricity…

Angel Dust: Fennel Pollen

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You hear the same old quote repeated endlessly about fennel pollen, something about the sprinkling of spice from the wings of angels. Let’s just call it angel dust. You remember that stuff from late-night cop movies—a drug that made users goofy and totally out of their heads. Like truffles, saffron, and a handful of other exotic, pricey, and painstakingly harvested goodies, fennel pollen enjoys the same reputation in certain quarters.

I happened on a patch of wild fennel in late July when I was scouting locations for a class on urban foraging, part of a summer course offered by Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle called “The Art of Food.” I was looking for ripening blackberry bushes in the downtown core when I saw these towering thickets of yellow blooms adjacent to a parking lot in the International District. Sure enough, the blooms—some of them several feet high and buzzing with bees—turned out to be wild fennel plants.

Who knows how they got here. They might have been planted on purpose long ago by Italian immigrants who populated my own nearby neighborhood in Rainier Valley, when small agricultural plots still existed within the city limits, a place fondly remembered as Garlic Gulch. Fennel is technically a weed in this country but it’s native to the Mediterranean and has always been a favorite vegetable and spice of Greek, Italian, and other culinary traditions from that region.

I don’t have much experience with fennel pollen. I’ve eaten meats dusted with it in restaurants and that’s about it. In my car I found a pair of scissors and some paper grocery bags (always useful to have nearby) and set to work. Basically I just looked for the best blooms and snipped them at the stem right below the flower head. It didn’t take long to collect two full grocery bags of flowers. These I bunched together with the blooms facing down into the bag, stems tied. For the next several days I allowed the flowers to drop their tiny orange pellets of pollen and occasionally gave the bags a shake to speed the process along, a tip I gleaned from this article.  By the end of the week I had accumulated about three tablespoons of the stuff. That’s not a typo: 3 tbsp! Go crazy, huh.

The thing of it is, though, you don’t need much fennel pollen to jazz up a cut of meat or add an ineffable savoriness to vegetables. For my first try I used a couple teaspoons with pork chops (considered a classic combo in the Old Country) on a bed of sauteed broccoli from the garden. I rolled the fatty end of the chops in the pollen before grilling, then dusted the remnants on the broccoli as it cooked in the pan. One of the chops—the control—was left untreated as a comparison.

I can say that the pollen added an almost sweet dimension to the pork chops with its hint of anise, though in this forager’s opinion it was the broccoli that really shined; somehow that fennel fairy dusting gave the veggies a brightness, an aliveness, that they otherwise would have lacked. The rest of my pollen, all two-plus tablespoons, went into a spice jar, awaiting the next experiment. While I don’t expect to become an angel dust junkie anytime soon, you know what they say about pollen being a gateway drug…

Strawberry Fields

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While hunting porcini the other day in the Colorado Rockies we stumbled on a large patch of wild strawberries (Fragraria sp.). Score! It seems I never find wild strawberries back home before the animals get to them, but for whatever reason we hit the jackpot on this less familiar ground.

The strawberry is one of those edible plants little improved by domestication. Sure, garden varieties are more prolific, with bigger berries, but their taste seldom rivals the complex strawberry flavor of their wild progenitors. In fact, the native strawberry patch is a perfect place for a wild food skeptic to have a Demascan Road moment—the small red, intensely flavorful berries are an object lesson in the providence of nature and testament to the fact that our tinkering is not always an improvement. My friends, who were along for the mushroom hike, had never eaten wild strawberries before and were quite simply blown away that something this delicious could be growing so inconspicuously on the forest floor.

Wild strawberries are found through much of the temperate world and across most of North America. Look for them in clearings, forest margins, and along roadsides and trails. Though frequently found in shady woods, they need ample sunlight to fruit. Woodland critters crave them as much as we do and my experience has been that the biggest obstacle to eating a handful of wild strawberries is not in locating the plants but in returning at just the right time to pluck ripe berries before the squirrels and rabbits and box turtles finish them off.

If your timing is good, you’ll find the next difficulty is living beyond the moment and putting a few aside for later to top pancakes and so on. The hand-to-mouth impulse proved too strong for us. There would be no conveying any berries home. Instead we happily sat in the dirt and gathered handfuls to eat as fast as we could pick.

Rocky Mountain Kings

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The biggest fruitings of king boletes I’ve ever seen haven’t been in the Pacific Northwest. No, the Rockies own that distinction, in particular the high montane reaches of northern Colorado. We visit this region every year to see family. I can think of three separate occasions when I’ve hit the porcini jackpot dead-on. The first was a solo backpacking-fishing trip on the Colorado-Wyoming border that gave me my first inkling of what the Rockies could do from a mycophagist standpoint; the second an all-day singletrack mountain bike through high meadows not far from a gap in the Gore Range where the Colorado River punches out of Middle Park; and the third this week southeast of Steamboat Springs.

I don’t visit the Rockies enough to have firm beliefs about the mushroom hunting possibilities here, but this is what I’ve gathered so far. August is generally the month to check your porcini spots. If it’s not a drought year and normal patterns of afternoon showers prevail, start looking a few days after the rains start. Go high. Get above the lodgepole pine forests into more mixed coniferous forests, especially spruce. Here’s a shot of a “king with a view” just below an 11,000-foot pass in the Zirkel Wilderness. 
 
A mushroom hunter from Seattle would be forgiven if he was confused by the taxonomy of these kings. Though clearly an edible form of bolete with its white pores (in young specimens) and faint pink netting on the stipe (reticulation, in the parlance), these kings routinely exhibit much darker caps, sometimes a deep wine-red, that contrast sharply with the tan, sometimes pale caps of Cascade kings. Still, they are currently classified as the same species as the world-renowned kings of Italy, the Pacific Northwest, and elsewhere: Boletus edulis. 
 

The taste, though mushroomy and choice, might not be quite as nutty as Cascade fall porcini. Which brings me to my main question: Why the lack of a commercial culture surrounding this mushroom in the Rockies? Is the territory too remote? A lack of demand? Is this subspecies of king considered inferior to other varieties and therefore not sought after? I’ve never seen another pot hunter around here, never a buy station, never encountered that bane of the Northwest mushroomer: the cut stem. Maybe we’re far enough from Denver here to escape the competition.

 
To the south of me, in the pine forests of the Southwest, there’s another king bolete (currently classified as its own species) that some say is the best tasting of all the world’s porcini: the white king bolete, Boletus barrowsii. Supposedly it fruits earlier than other kings. One of these years I’ll make a roadtrip in July to suss out this hallowed variety of porcini. In the meantime, I’m loving my quietly regal Rocky Mountain kings.

Sassy Saskatoons

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Sassy might be overstating it. More like solid. Saskatoon berries and their close relatives in the Amelanchier genus fruit in 49 of 50 U.S. states (sorry Hawaii) and what they lack in edge or mystery they gain in abundance and flexibility. Saskatoons can be used in pies, cobblers, jams, sauces, and really whatever you require of a versatile berry, including pemmican. But get this: they’re not really a berry…
 
Saskatoons (Amelanchier alnifolia) are more commonly known as serviceberries, sarvisberries, juneberries, or shadbush on the Atlantic Coast where they flower right around the time the shad run. The fruits are pulpy and reminiscent of blueberries both in look and taste, although their seeds have a nutty flavor and botanists will tell you the fruits are actually pomes, making them relatives of apples and pears.
 
 
I missed the main fruiting of sakatoons in Washington this summer, but here in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where we’re visiting the rellies, saskatoon berries are in full flush. Near the Sarvis Creek Wilderness—a place that might have been named for the abundance of sarvisberries—I fished the Yampa River for monstrous rainbows while Ruby and Marty loaded up on the berries. 
 
Harvesting saskatoons is one of those exercises in berry-picking that will restore your faith in the process after earning a case of carpal tunnel from red huckleberries: the berries are big and hang in clusters that make for easy pickins and quick buckets. That is, if it’s a decent crop. Some years the fruits are less than plentiful.

We made pie with ours.

Purslane Salad

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THE BEST THINGS in life are free—and easy. Take this weed salad that uses purslane as the featured ingredient. It’s delicious in inverse proportion to the time and skill required to make it. Which is to say it’s really good and really simple.

 

First, a word about weeds. Most gardeners  are busy pulling purslane (Portulaca oleracea)l—and pulling their hair out, too, because like Himalayan blackberry purslane can never be vanquished. But it can be eaten. 

Here’s what you do. Pick a bunch of purslane, stem it (making sure to keep many of the leaf clusters intact), and toss it with a chopped sweet onion such as a Walla Walla and a large ripe heirloom tomato. That’s it. Season with salt and pepper and allow the tomato juice to form the dressing; squeeze a chunk of tomato into the salad if necessary to get the juices flowing.

You’ll be amazed by the results. Purslane has a crunchy texture and a complex flavor that marries perfectly with the acidic tomato juice and sweetness of the onion. Jon Rowley turned me onto this salad last summer at an oyster fest and we ate it again the other day when I dropped by his house to pilfer a few of the shoots for my own garden. 
 
That’s right, I’m planting weeds!

Wild Berry Tartlets

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A MIXTURE OF foraged red huckleberries and trailing blackberries is the perfect combination of tart and sweet for these fun single-serving tartlets.

Tart Dough

1/2 cup flour
3 tbsp cold unsalted butter, cut up
2 tbsp confectioner sugar
2 tbsp cold water

Combine flour, sugar, and butter in a food processor and pulse until grainy. Add the water a tablespoon at a time to food processor while running. Pulse until dough forms. I used my hands at the end to finish combining what the Cuisinart missed. Roll into a cylinder, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate for 30 minutes minimum or up to a day.

Sweet Cheese

1 8-oz package cream cheese, cut into 8 pieces.
6 tbsp sugar
1 large egg yolk
1 1/2 tbsp flour
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
lemon zest of half a small lemon

Combine cream cheese and sugar in food processor. Whir until smooth. Add flour, egg, vanilla, and lemon zest and whir again until creamy.

Berry Topping

1 cup wild berries
2 tbsp sugar
2 tsp corn starch

Briefly cook berries with sugar and corn starch until juices are syrupy.

For the final tarts I took my dough out of the refrigerator and sliced it into a dozen disks. Each disk I flattened into a 3-inch diameter round on a lightly floured surface before pressing into a muffin tin and forming into a cup. Each little tart—tartlet, if I may be so bold—then got a dollop of sweet cheese filling before being topped with a spoonful of the cooked red huckleberries and a few fresh blackberries. I baked the tartlets for around 20 minutes at 400 degrees.