In renowned forager Pascal Baudar’s new book, The New Wildcrafted Cuisine—Exploring the Exotic Gastronomy of Local Terroir, the LA-based author explores flavor and terroir, revealing how he uses both old and subversive culinary techniques to create his trademark wild-food dishes.
Photography by Pascal Baudar, except where noted, courtesy of Chelsea Green Publishing.
From familiar elderflower cordial to the challenging lerp sugar collected from insects, by way of ubiquitous and invasive mugwort, this is armchair travel, a thrill ride, and kitchen survivalism combined, underscored by the author’s passion for place and ultimately, his appetite for really good food.
Using wild mushrooms, seeds, herbs, leaves, stems, flowers, fruits, nuts, and bark, as well as the earth that surrounds them, Baudar has created a new language for food.
The book is organized by season.
Food preservation is a recurring theme in Baudar’s book (and also for anyone—gardener, forager, farmers’ market shopper—who has dealt with the poles of glut and deprivation).
Baudar also supplies ingredients and finished products (like pickled black walnuts and aged vinegars) to high-profile chefs like Ludo Lefebvre.
What most readers would consider recipes are called “procedures” in the book’s pages. A recipe for pine needles, white fir, and lemon soda gives precise instructions as to the creation of a homemade soda (shown above), bubbles and all.
The author is a realist who knows that not everyone has the time or the desire to wild-source every ingredient.
Two pages are dedicated to the importance of observation when it comes to knowing when a batch of wild soda is ready.
One of the easiest and most satisfying ways to experience and use foraged ingredients like sweet white clover is in flavoring homemade farmer’s cheese.
From the simple to the stratospherically esoteric, the most basic of meals—a baked potato—is elevated to the mouth-watering heights of the most delicious food entertainment.
Photograph by Mia Wasilevich.
Baudar is acutely aware of issues of sustainability when it comes to wild gathering, and tends some of his harvest grounds as a native farmer might have, harvesting just 20 percent from certain patches of chickweed, say, or broadcasting lamb’s quarters seeds just ahead of the rains, to make more for the next harvest.