Wild Red Raspberry

Each summer we visit family in the Colorado Rockies, where it's tradition to kick off the trip with a walk up to the same overlook, a place we dubbed the "Bear's Lair" more than a decade ago after spooking a bear from its fern-matted day bed nearby.

The route to the Bear's Lair follows an old hunter's jeep track up a ridge through oak scrub and aspen glades, finally topping out on a knoll covered in spruce and lodgepole pine. Sadly, the large pines are all dead now, victims of the pine beetle epidemic that's ravaged Colorado in recent years, and the forest doesn't offer the same respite from the sun that it once did. But the woods are still painted in wildflowers and home to a herd of elk that moves quietly among the hidden meadows and quaking aspens. From there a quick scramble up a dry, dusty slope and over big boulders takes us to the Lair. A single Douglas fir twists out of the rocks and shades the place. We sit up there and admire the view back across the valley. Sometimes we spot golden eagles circling high in the thermals above.

I've hiked to the Bear's Lair countless times in summer and snowshoed up in winter. It's become a ritual to pay our respects here. Yet, on this trip, for the first time, I noticed a nice little patch of wild red raspberries growing from cracks in the rocks right around the base of the Lair, in perfect fruit. How had I missed these before? Could they have just gotten a foothold?

More to the point: Who doesn't love raspberries? Sweet, tart, soft, delicate. Ruby red. I'm more familiar with the blackcap raspberry (Rubus leucodermis), which we find back at home in sunny spots on both sides of the Cascades, often in areas of disturbance such as logging clearcuts. Blackcaps are dark blue or purple and often mistaken for blackberries; the more widely known form, Rubus strigosus (or Rubus idaeus among those who consider Eurpopean and North American red raspberries to be the same species) looks very much like a typical cultivated variety, if a bit smaller. Unlike a lot of domesticated fruits and berries with wild relatives, the taste of the wild raspberry is very similar to the cultivated.

Wild raspberries seem to prefer marginal habitats and tough growing conditions. As a result, it's a rare day when I find enough of them to make a dessert or put up for later. They're trail food—a tasty jolt of energy while hoofing it through the wilderness. And this day was no different. We ate up all the ripe berries we could find, leaving behind plenty that would be ripe for the local bruins in a few days, taking note of this cache for future visits to the Bear's Lair.

Of Grays and Greenies

The first day I visited the burn, in early June, there wasn't a car in sight. The fire had burned right down to the logging road and a trailhead was marked off with police tape. Signs warned of falling trees and other dangers. We could see the morels before getting out of the car.

Over the next week or two a few other pickers trickled in. To the south, a large, well-publicized burn was taking all the pressure—though I knew it couldn't last. By the time this smaller patch was on the radar, I'd dried enough morels for several winters and many holiday gifts. After a few weeks of staying away, I went back the other day. Again, not a car in sight. The conica morels were long gone for the season.

But not the grays. While the morel season is winding down in Washington State (some years, with enough summer rain, you can pick well into fall in the Northwest), the last of the morels are fruiting in limited numbers at the higher elevations. Conditions might be different up in British Columbia.

Just the same, the last act is a good one. Finding clusters of big grays always makes my heart skip a beat. The gray morel (Morchella tomentosa) is the easiest of the many burn morels to identify. In its youth it has a distinctly gray cap that's densely pitted, and unlike other species it also has a dark stem with a nearly rubbery texture. Under a microscope you can see lots of little hairs at the base of the stem, hence its other common name, fuzzy-foot. Grays can be quite large, and mature specimens seem to have two color phases, gray and light yellow, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Commercial pickers sometimes call the big yellow ones blonds, not to be confused with the mountain blond (Morchella frustrata).

The photo at top shows a pod of mature grays, each of them several inches tall. Notice how the stems appear white at this stage, in contrast to the dark stems of younger grays. As these morels age, the stems lose their gray exterior and the ridges on the cap become sharp and brittle. As little bits of the ridges crumble off, the cap takes on a speckled look. Now look at these younger, smaller specimens below.

The shape and coloration is variable. Of the nine in this picture, all but one still have dark outer stems that contrast noticeably with the inner white where they've been cut. The pits on the smallest are elongated and barely open. A few of these, particularly those three on the right, appear to be maturing into the blond form.

Grays often command a slightly higher price in the market place because of their beauty and meatiness, even if their flavor is mild compared to other species.

I also found a few greenies, or pickles, the other day. At first I wasn't sure what species these were, but Jeremy Faber of Foraged and Found Edibles confirmed them as greenies based on these photos.

Notice the multi-layered stem when cut (at right). Sometimes the stem is so thick it appears solid, as seen in the photo at lower left. To my eye, these morels look quite a bit different from the greenies I saw in the Yukon two years ago, which were considerably larger and darker, with noticeably dense pitting like gray morels. Faber suggested that the lack of moisture this season has prevented this variety from attaining its usual size and coloration. They were scattered in the burn mostly as singletons, with perhaps a dozen in all making it into my bucket.

Some mycologists dispute the existence of greenies, considering them just another form of typical burn morel known in the industry as conica, of which there are probably several hard-to-separate species that require microscopic study and DNA analysis for identification. Still, the greenie familiar to commercial pickers has its own distinct appearance and it's always the last to show in the burn, if it shows at all. The species that it seems to come closest to in the recent taxonomic reclassification of morels is Morchella capitata, but I wonder whether it's in fact a species that has yet to be described by science. No doubt the mystery surrounding greenies will be unraveled in coming years as morel classification continues to be a hot topic among mycologists.

So, what about the taste? Unfortunately there wasn't a conica in sight the other day, and the non-burn morels have been done in my habitat since mid-June. That leaves grays and greenies to duke it out. Most western morel enthusiasts rank the non-burn "natural" black morel as the tastiest, with conica next. Mountain blonds, though beautiful, tend to lack strong flavor, and the early season logging morels are generally derided as unsightly. And those late-flushing burn morels?

I put two grays and two greenies head to head in a summer burn morel taste-off. They got simply sautéed side by side in butter, with a sprinkling of salt. The grays, it must be said, had tremendous texture: meaty, chewy, crisp on the outside. The greenies, however, get the nod for taste. I won't bore you by waxing grandiloquent like a wine snob. The bottom line is that I was reminded yet again that morels don't really taste all that much like mushrooms; they taste like something that hasn't been named yet—a mixture of meat and fungus that pleases the palate with its burst of umami. And for this reason, they made an excellent accompaniment to my first beach-caught salmon of the season, in a summer risotto, along with chard and tomatoes from the garden.

Big Fall Books Preview

My new book The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America has been included as an Editor's Pick in Amazon's Big Fall Books Preview. Scroll down to read editor Jon Foro's review. He calls it "a ton of fun—equal parts adventure, natural history, and gastronomy." Foro adds: "Naturalists (who aren’t necessarily foodies) will learn about some of the more exotic fungi and their uses on the table, while foodies (who might not be naturalists) will find the loamy details of the mushroom trail enlightening." Loamy details. I like that!

Also, Amazon's book blog Omnivoracious has a slideshow of my personal photos of mushroom hunters and buyers paired with excerpts from the book.

The book is available now for pre-order and officially on sale September 10.

Summer Berries

The hot dry weather in the Pacific Northwest has pushed the berry season along at a rapid clip. It looks like the red huckleberries have already peaked through much of the lowlands around Puget Sound, with our native blackberries close behind.

On Sunday I took a class berry-picking on Bainbridge Island. Whereas two years ago on the same date we had bushes overflowing with red huckleberries and even salmonberries, this year the red hucks were already long past their prime and there wasn't a single salmonberry in sight. The sunny spots still had a few trailing blackberries, and we found one patch of blackcap raspberries. I watched a towhee skillfully nabbing huckleberries on the wing, a hint of where all the berries had gone.

Nevertheless, we managed to pick enough huckleberries to make berry tartlets (see recipe here) back at the park center, putting a sweet exclamation on a day pleasantly divided between field and kitchen.

Crazy for Conifers

When beginner mushroom hunters ask me how to find fungi, I have two answers. First, join a mycological society and go on a foray; there's no substitute for spending time in the field with a seasoned pro. The second answer might be more surprising: learn your trees.

Experienced mushroom hunters in southwestern Oregon and northern California know the many culinary treats that hide among roots of Notholithocarpus; boletivores of the Rockies are skilled at locating high meadows dotted with Picea; and don't even get me started on the need—the absolute necessity—to know the habits of Abies grandis if you plan to look for edible fungi on the east slope of the Cascades in springtime.

Knowing your trees is a huge part of the mushroom puzzle. This is because many species of fungi have symbiotic relationships (aka mycorrhizal associations) with trees and shrubs. The fungi and trees exchange water and nutrients, and in some cases the bond is so strong that the fungus will form a protective and permanent sheath around the tree's root tips, a sort of shotgun wedding.

For those of us hunting mushrooms in the western U.S.—in the Pacific Northwest in particular—the trees to know are overwhelmingly conifers. I have a whole library of books about the life histories and identification of trees in my region, and a new one has just found a prominent place among them. Michael Edward Kauffmann's Conifers of the Pacific Slope: A Field Guide to the Conifers of California, Oregon, and Washington is an important addition, and a broader companion to his earlier work, Conifer Country, which focuses on the rich conifer biodiversity of the Klamath Mountain region.

Of the world's 600 or so species of conifer, more than half populate the Pacific Rim, and 65 species can be found along the Pacific Slope of North America. Northwestern California is the epicenter of conifer diversity on the continent. A hike into the Russian Wilderness's "miracle mile" in the Klamath Mountains will reward the conifer enthusiast with potentially 17 (maybe 18) species, one of the richest assemblages on the planet.

Kauffmann has been mentored by some of the best. He dedicates his new book to John O. Sawyer, one of the pioneering botanists of California, who died in 2012. Stephen Arno, whose Northwest Trees has been considered a must-have for tree fanciers since its publication more than 35 years ago, calls Kauffmann's guide "comprehensive" yet "user-friendly." The book is divided into sections for each of the three families represented: Cupressaceae (cypresses, junipers, cedars, and redwoods); Pinaceae (firs, Douglas-firs, spruces, pines, larches, and hemlocks); and Taxaceae (yews). Most species descriptions are accompanied by multiple photos depicting bark pattern, cones, and foliage, along with range maps. Text includes discussion of habitat and other observations and remarks.

Tree geeks will need this book because Kauffmann is generous with information about locating some of the more hard-to-find species. Never seen Picea breweriana, the Brewer spruce? Try driving the Bigfoot Highway near Happy Camp, California. Or the beautiful subalpine larch, Larix lyallii? Hike into Washington's Pasayten Wilderness and check north-facing slopes above 6,000 feet.

It pays to be arbor-aware. Mushroom hunters and foragers in general benefit from recognizing a landscape's tree composition, whether looking for fungi, wild greens, berries, nuts, or roots. Besides, trees are some of nature's most beautiful creations, and recognizing their many forms and life histories makes us all the richer.

Saskatoon Berry Sauce

In eastern Washington, wild Saskatoons (Amelanchier alnifolia)—aka western serviceberry, shadbush, and juneberry—grow near the extensive orchards of cherries, apples, and pears that follow the river valleys. The Wenatchee River corridor near Leavenworth is loaded with Saskatoons, and it's interesting to see how this free food is all but ignored while the domesticated fruit trees are bombed with pesticides, tended to by an underclass of migrant workers out of Mexico, and fawned over by tourists.

The other day I picked a good quantity of Saskatoons in view of the orchards while passing motorists wondered what the heck this crazy guy was up to. The paradoxes of modern food culture pile up on our plates...

A Saskatoon sauce is just the thing this time of year to dress up a scoop of good vanilla ice cream. Or you can add some vinegar and herbs to make a savory sauce. Most of the recipes you'll find online are too sweet and use corn starch as a thickener. Don't follow the herd! The berries are plenty sweet on their own, and they'll thicken into a nice sauce with a little extra simmer time and whisking. For a dessert sauce I also like to add a little lemon zest in addition to the juice. Remember that these berries have noticeable seeds. The seeds add a nutty dimension to the flavor, but if you're picky about your texture, you can cook this sauce down (with more time and water) and run it through a food mill or strainer.

2 cups Saskatoon berries
1 cup water
1/4 cup sugar, or to taste
2 tbsp lemon juice
lemon zest, to taste

Bring the berries and water to boil in a sauce pan. Reduce heat and simmer for several minutes. Whisk in sugar, lemon juice, and zest. Continue to simmer and whisk until sauce is thickened to taste. Add more water if necessary.

Thinking Outside the (Recipe) Box

When friends from out of town come to visit, I often take them to Lark, John Sundstrom's Seattle restaurant, which is celebrating a decade of good food this year.

I've been eating at Lark since it opened in 2003. The launch party for my first book, Fat of the Land, was at Lark. John made a porcini crostini (photo here, at top) that night that continues to be one of my go-to apps for dinner parties: sliced baguette rubbed with garlic and topped with a mixture of ricotta cheese and roasted porcini mushrooms, with a sprinkling of sea salt. That simple dish in many ways encapsulates John's philosophy: a fresh ingredient foraged locally and allowed to shine.

John has now put this philosophy on paper (or your device screen, as the case may be) with his new book, Lark: Cooking Against the Grain. It's a big, beautifully photographed book, with many of John's signature recipes from the restaurant, such as his Farro and Wild Mushrooms and Geoduck Ceviche. The focus is unabashedly Pacific Northwest, with an emphasis on local producers and wild foods.

The book is organized around three "seasons," which John refers to as mist (November to March), evergreen (April to July), and bounty (August to October). During the mist season you might want to be acquainted with Scallops Choucroute with Ham Hock and Pickled Mustard Seeds. Evergreen brings forth Sunchoke Soup and a hearty dish of Rabbit with Morels, Favas and Emmer Pappardelle. And bounty is a colorful Sockeye Salmon with Corn, Bacon and Lobster Mushrooms followed by a Black Fig Tarte Tatin, among many other treats of the harvest season.

John admits in his introduction that some of the recipes included aren't dumbed-down versions, so he's also produced an inexpensive iPad app that includes color, step-by-step photos to go with each recipe.

This is food that celebrates a sense of place. If spot shrimp or spiced apple cake make you swoon, you'll want to dig into Lark: Cooking Against the Grain. As John says, the book is "about living the good life in the Pacific Northwest."

To learn more about chef John Sundstrom and his food, see his talk "Thinking Outside the (Recipe) Box" this Friday night at Seattle's Central Library, 7 p.m., presented in partnership with Elliott Bay Books.

New Web Site

Dear Readers: Please visit and bookmark my new web site, LangdonCook.com.

The site, though still in its first iteration and without any fancy design, is a big improvement on the blog in several respects. It now gathers together in one place information on foraging and cooking classes, writing workshops, talks and lectures, books, and other stuff—plus it has a complete archive of the Fat of the Land blog.

I've also been putting together photo galleries to highlight images from a variety of wild food preparations; my popular shellfish classes; and a sampling of photos that will accompany slideshow presentations for The Mushroom Hunters.

You can subscribe to blog posts (click link and see right column) and in the future I plan to add a newsletter with updates about classes and events.

I'll continue to cross-post all blog entries at both LangdonCook.com and Fat of the Land in the near future, but the web site will be the dedicated web address for the long haul.

Hope to see you over there!

Marvelous Morels

It's been a good year for morels throughout much of the country, though your own mileage may vary. I picked my first "naturals" in the third week in April and the action in Washington State hasn't slowed since. 

Mushroom hunters across North America have had a chance to put new names to several familiar faces this spring. Last year, in the September-October issue of Mycologia, Michael Kuo et al proposed a revision to morel taxonomy that added a number of new species to the lineup. (An identification key can be found here.) For the first time, those of us in the West could reliably identify our beloved natural black morel as Morchella snyderi, with its habitat in unburned forest, lacunose stem, and black ridges on the cap. Another not-so-scientific identifying feature that I use, especially in areas where naturals and burn morels are in close proximity, is feel: naturals are noticeably cool to the touch.

We've also seen fair numbers of that confounding morel, the "mountain blond," found in unburned western montane forests of mixed fir and pine (a commercial hunter I know insists that ponderosa must be present nearby to find this mushroom). Some years we get very few, for reasons that are not readily apparent, and their fruiting tends to be in scattered locales. Mountain blonds have the same coloration as yellow morels (i.e. Morchella esculentoides), but their morphology is more akin to black morels; turns out they're part of the black morel group (or clade), a taxonomic revelation that didn't surprise anyone who works with these mushrooms from year to year. While they're one of our most beautiful morels, sadly, their flavor in the pan is less than striking. In the new classification, they carry the apt name Morchella frustrata.

In addition to the naturals, mushroom hunters in the Pacific Northwest have benefitted from the region's fire ecology, with a number of last year's burns producing decent—if not epic—morel picking across eastern Washington and Idaho. So far the biggest of them all, the 45,000-acre Table Mountain complex, has proved something of a bust. Never have so many footsteps yielded so few mushrooms. This burn is getting stomped by a stampede of both commercial and recreational pickers, and the lower elevation habitat never had a chance to take off with so much pressure. Hopefully the crowds will thin as more ground becomes available in Idaho and elsewhere and we'll have a decent pick on top at higher elevation. Meanwhile, the mushroom hunter using strategery has done well in a host of smaller burns.

Anyone with experience picking burn morels knows there are lots of different looking species that emerge from the ash, especially in the greater Pacific Northwest. How many of these are different enough in their DNA to warrant species status remains to be seen. So far we have Morchella sextelata and M. septimelata, which are apparently impossible to separate without a microscope, plus M. capitata, told by its chambered stem, and the visibly distinctive "gray" or "fuzzyfoot" morel, M. tomentosa. The latter is perhaps the most coveted morel by chefs in the know; large and beefy, it's one of the last of the burn morels to show and is just getting started where I've been hunting. There are others. A morel that looks just like the mountain blond, M. frustrata, appears sparingly in burns as well. And then there's the banana...and the greenie...

Morels pair especially well with seafood. The dish pictured at top and bottom is pan-seared sea scallops with fingerling potatoes and sautéed morels in a green pea sauce. A simple and elegant way to enjoy one of the fleeting culinary treasures of spring.

Salmon Head Curry

A hard-won spring chinook salmon is so tasty it would be a crime to leave any scraps of meat uneaten. This spicy Indian curry will have you reconsidering what you do with those leftover salmon heads. Crab bait? I think not...

Salmon heads of all species have plenty of choice bits, including the cheeks and collars. Soup is a popular way to use them. Like whole spot shrimp in the shell, salmon heads can both flavor a stock and add a surprisingly large amount of meat to the meal—and with the help of a fine mesh strainer, you don't have to stare your catch in the face. But you can also simmer the head in a curry and then lift it out before serving to your more squeamish guests, returning all the fall-off-the-skull meat to the dish, with nary an eyeball in sight.

Fish Head Curry is a popular dish in southern India and elsewhere on the subcontinent and Asia. Recipes for fish curry powder are as varied and fought over as red sauces for pasta. You can mix up your own or use a prepared blend. If the latter, make sure you choose a reputable brand with fresh, pungent spices (it won't be cheap).

I picked a middle path, using a ready-made curry powder but also spiking the dish with fresh turmeric, fenugreek, black mustard, chili powder, and cumin seeds. I encourage my readers to try this curry. You'll never toss another salmon head. And the crabs can eat chicken gizzards!

1 medium to large salmon head, gills removed and cut in half
1 tsp black mustard seed (or yellow)
1 tsp cumin seed
1 tsp fenugreek seed
3 tbsp peanut oil
1 tsp red chili powder
1/2 tsp turmeric
2 - 3 tbsp fish curry powder*
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 thumb ginger, peeled and minced
2 sweet onions, thinly sliced
1 tbsp tamarind paste, mixed with 1/2 cup water **
2 Asian eggplant, cut into 3-inch pieces
1 zucchini, cut into 3-inch pieces
3 tomatoes, cut into sixths
1 cup coconut cream
1 tbsp brown sugar, or to taste
2 tbsp fish sauce, or to taste
cilantro for garnish

* Make your own fish curry powder, or visit an Indian grocery or spice shop for a prepared blend.
** Available at Asian market or Indian grocery.

1. Mix chili powder, turmeric, and fish curry powder with a little water to make a thick masala paste.

2. Heat oil in heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat. Add mustard seed, cumin seed, and fenugreek seed and sauté until they begin to crackle and pop, about a minute.

3. Add masala paste, stirring, until fragrant, another minute or so. Add garlic, ginger, and onions, and cook together until onions are soft.

4. Pour in tamarind mixture and bring to boil. Add tomatoes, eggplant, and zucchini. Cook a couple minutes before adding both halves of salmon head. (Add more water if necessary, though note that the vegetables and fish will add to liquid as they cook.) Spoon curry over salmon, reduce heat to medium-low, and cover for 5 minutes.

5. Stir in coconut cream, brown sugar, and fish sauce, careful not to disturb fish. Cook another couple minutes until fish is done yet still tender. At this point, if you're serving squeamish guests, you can separate the salmon meat from the skin and cartilage. Maybe leave in one eyeball for a lucky diner. Garnish with fresh cilantro.