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Copenhagen’s Noma restaurant may have introduced foraging into fine dining, but the concept was hardly a new one: Every culture has its own tradition of gathering wild ingredients, from bamboo shoots in Bhutan to lingonberries in Sweden to gemsbok beans in the Kalahari Desert.
The next frontier in foraging for some chefs is both more prosaic and in some ways more radical: weeds. Weeds are typically fast growing, quick to spread and unwanted. But what qualifies as a weed is subjective, says the New Jersey-based forager Tama Matsuoka Wong, who supplies some of New York City’s top restaurants with ingredients like bedstraw, staghorn sumac and American burnweed — all species that you might see growing along a highway median. “We think of weeds as trash, yet many have come here from other places where they’re considered highly desirable,” she says. On her property in Hunterdon County, for instance, Wong often finds galinsoga, or quickweed, which she sells to the Manhattan chefs Emma Bengtsson of Aquavit and Eddy Leroux of Daniel, as well as to Victoria Blamey of Blanca in Brooklyn. Though considered an invasive nuisance by many gardeners and farmers here, the plant is an essential flavoring in traditional South American dishes like the Colombian stew called ajiaco. Blamey, who sears it a la plancha and pairs it with eggplant, describes its taste as full, fruity and almost cucumberlike.
While some chefs (and diners) love the novelty of weeds, they’ve also become popular for those concerned about foraging’s environmental impact. The practice has long been considered inherently eco-friendly, but there’s now debate about whether harvesting large caches of trendy but more ephemeral vegetation — such as fiddlehead ferns in Maine or wild mushrooms in southern England — is actually sustainable. “With spring ramps, I take only one leaf from each plant,” Wong says, “but with quickweed, we see six generations over one season. It grows right up until frost.”
According to the regenerative land steward and chef Katrina Blair, the author of “The Wild Wisdom of Weeds” (2014), the prolific nature of such plants — and their nutritional value — makes them ideal for an era marked by instability. “Weeds offer a path to sustain us through uncertain times,” she says. Historical examples abound: The foliage of charlock, a yellow-flowered weed, became a food source for some in Ireland during the 18th- and 19th-century famines there. In Scotland, the seeds of the same kind of plant were used to make bread during times of scarcity.
At her Turtle Lake Refuge Cafe in Durango, Colo., Blair adds purslane — a succulent so scrappy that it often pokes out of city sidewalk cracks — to guacamole, dandelion greens to pesto and thistle to both lemonade and chai. The wild amaranth seeds in her carrot-ginger crackers, she notes, are a complete protein and require no fossil fuels for planting or harvesting. At a time when highly processed faux meat and powdered microgreens are being marketed as plant-based health food, says Wong, going back to the land feels almost revolutionary. “Weeds,” she points out, “are all around us.”
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