It is all about the satisfaction in getting your own food on the plate. When you eat a meal from fished and foraged ingredients or share such a meal with friends and family, the memories of the day come flooding back. Eating wild food is an opportunity to experience a wider range of flavours, some of them great. Foraged wild food can be an economical supplement to the larder and by its very nature you know it’s organic and healthy.
Foraging is all about getting outdoors and immersing yourself in the environment, whether it is collecting seaweeds, mushrooms, wild greens or fruit and nuts. For me fishing is a great opportunity to grab a few foraged ingredients along the way. I am lucky enough to work as a professional forager for esteemed restuarant, Amisfield in Central Otago, so turning a passion into a job has been a bonus!
I will list my top species to forage and share few tips along the way on how to get maximum flavour for minimum effort.
Firstly, for the fisher, seaweeds are an obvious option! We are surrounded by them. In New Zealand we have over 900 species of seaweed and many are edible. Five are certainly worth gathering.
Bull kelp is a great seaweed. Use it to make an oven bag in which to steam fish. At Amisfield we use it regularly with butterfish and stargazer. The kelp imparts a pleasantly sweet flavour to the fish. Simply split the blades of the bull kelp apart, slip the fish fillet inside and bake in the oven. A bull kelp oven bag will keep fish deliciously moist.
You can also use bull kelp to wrap meats, sealing in the moisture when cooking.
Another seaweed, wakame, is now prolific around New Zealand. It was accidently brought here from Japan on the hulls of ships and has colonised our entire coast. When lightly steamed, like many brown seaweeds, it will go an appealing brightgreen colour. It has a tender texture and tastes great.
With a soft texture and rich flavor, wakame is a great seaweed to shred and add to salads. Air dried, the flavour is concentrated and wakame can be kept for ages and you can crush the seaweed to make a powder.
Seaweeds have a rich umami flavour profile that makes them tasty. Umami is the salty-sweet flavour seaweeds share with mushrooms. So, take the time to become familar with our diversity of seaweeds – next time you snag some weed on your line, consider it a catch rather than a hindrance!
Another wildfoods group rich in umami is mushrooms. With literally tens of thousands of species, there is theoretically an ocean of choice.
Over the last year I have calculated that we have over 75 types of edible mushrooms and fungi in New Zealand. For the beginner, there are about 15 species that are easy to indentify and good eating. Learning with confidence, one new species at a time, is the way to go.
Favourites of mine are the inky-black field mushrooms I often find when trout fishing in the high country. Giant puffballs are also great eating – like a mushroom tofu and great for slicing up and serving a range of seafoods on.
Along the edges of gravel roads, the shaggy inkcap is often found. It has a pleasant and intense flavour.
Mushrooms go so well with fish, so I always spend a bit of time looking along road edges or near the boat ramp.
It is important to store each type of mushroom seperately and take time to confirm identification. As the saying goes, all mushrooms are edible, but some only once!
Our coastal edges are easily the most productive foraging zone for a diversity of edible greens, so I often take the time to explore them when fishing. The temperate climate along the coast and its nutrient-rich nature add to its productivity.
Wild fennel is widespread around our coast and has an intense aniseed flavour that goes well with fish. Just grab a fresh sprig of it and place in the oven when you cook some fish.
In other regions wild Italian parsley is another good match with fish – I drool at the thought of a white parsley fish sauce – so grab a few herbs that have been preseasoned by the salt air.
In many areas wild spinach and silverbeet grow, fertilised by seaweeds washed up on the shore. Many of the plants we can forage along our coast are escapees from people’s gardens and I have even foraged feral potatoes – great for homemade, self-caught fish and chips. Believe me, the flavour is better.
In many areas banana passionfruit can be found. Its tangy flavour matches well with seafood dishes. There are also a wide range of cresses, other than the watercress with which many are familar. Twincress creeps along the ground just above the high tide mark in many areas. Twin cress has a hot, savoury flavour that goes well with many dishes and even desserts. Taking time to learn these species is well worthwhile.
There is a bewildering level of choice when foraging and that is the element that keeps it exciting for me. I now have listed and compiled into a database over 6000 species of plants, mushrooms or animals (including insects) that can be eaten in New Zealand.
The best way to learn about foraging options is to go to the local library. Some key books are Simply Living by Gwen Skinner and Find it, Eat it by Micheal Daly.
At present I am working on a comprehensive field guide to the 250 most common species that can be foraged in New Zealand.
Increasingly, social media is playing a useful role in allowing people to share knowledge and assist with identifications. Of course, it is important to also learn the about the poisonous species as well. Among the 25 key poisonous species everyone should become familiar are ngaio, hemlock, bitttersweet and deathcap mushrooms. You should also avoid foraging close to areas that have been sprayed, or to busy roads.
Take the time to learn about foraging. As fishers, we all have access to an amazing bounty of flavours out there for free. Foraging and fishing are just so complementary.
At the end of the day, go for a walk along the coast with the family and collect a range of foods. Kids are great foragers, since they’re closer to the ground, and each child will spot something different.
There’s no doubt foraging increases your observational skills!
Finally, even if you catch no fish but just snag up on some seaweed, you can still bring something back to the table at the end of the day.
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