How about野菜 outside of 南门.:)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/dining/24forage.html?pagewanted=all

Chefs Look for Wild Ingredients Nobody Else Has

 

By OLIVER STRAND and JOE DiSTEFANO

 

LAST Thursday, Adam Kopels walked into Torrisi Italian Specialties in NoLIta, opened his messenger bag and pulled out Ziploc bags filled with wild greens he had gathered on the North Fork of Long Island, near where he lives. Mario Carbone, one of the restaurant’s chefs and owners, sat with Mr. Kopels and sorted through clumps of baby peppercress and sheep sorrel, red bay and shepherd’s purse. The two picked up some sea rocket, a plant that grows only on exposed dunes, and crunched through the peppery leaves.

“I served this, what, four months ago?” Mr. Carbone said.

“We did an insalata di mare, only without seafood, just plants from the shore,” he added, describing a riff on the Little Italy standard. This late in the year sea rocket is too sharp for the insalata. Later, Mr. Carbone would brainstorm with his staff about what to do with it. A Peconic Bay scallop garnish? A take on oysters Rockefeller with no oysters?

“I want to get it on my menu,” he said. The delivery of wild plants plays an important role in setting the restaurant apart. “It’s invaluable,” he said. “I can get it, and no one else can.”

Increasingly, in an era when truffles are farmed and Whole Foods sells fresh porcini, the ingredients that chefs seek are not the ones anyone can order; they’re the ones that few have ever heard of. They are the most unusual, not the most expensive. And even if they’re plentiful, they’re exclusive: you need either to know where to go and what to gather, or who to call.

While foraging isn’t new — ramps and purslane are becoming as much a part of seasonal eating as tomatoes and corn — this generation of ambitious chefs is finding a new level of inspiration outside the garden. Feral plants with names like toothwort, cornelian cherries, brown jug, creasy greens, sweet cicely, pineapple weed and licorice fern are traveling from the forest floor to the thin porcelain plates of restaurants like Eleven Madison Park, in New York City, and Alinea, in Chicago.

At Toqué!, in Montréal, the bright orange fruit of sea buckthorn, a spiky coastal plant with berries that taste like tart passion fruit, is turned into sorbet. At McCrady’s, in Charleston, S.C., the flowers of Queen Anne’s lace, a cousin of the carrot, are battered and fried.

At Blackberry Farm, a luxurious estate in the Smoky Mountains, Jeff Ross, the garden manager, forages nearly 5,000 acres of woodlands for lambs’ quarter that is puréed into gazpacho, toothwort that is grated like horseradish and lemony hulls of sumac berries that flavor trout. And at Castagna in Portland, Ore., white acorns are shaved over elk loin and root vegetables with a sauce made from vinegar infused with local juniper. The chef, Matthew Lightner, said that the dish presents the elk as it might be in the forest, rooting out nourishment.

“It’s the frontier,” Mr. Lightner said. “The woods are this mysterious area where things grow. You don’t have to tend to it, you don’t have to plant it, you just have to find it. Everybody is used to exotic products you ship in, or the farm-to-table thing. Now people have an interest when we serve them something they spotted when they were out on a hike.”

Many chefs talk of a moment of unguarded wonder when a diner recognizes that some ingredient might be the same as that found in a park or the untended corner of a backyard. Daniel Patterson, the chef and owner of Coi in San Francisco, remembers an “aha! moment” when a friend first introduced him to Douglas fir.

“You really don’t expect to love eating trees,” said Mr. Patterson, who uses the shoots at his restaurant. “It was a green and citrusy flavor that I totally recognized. It was unbelievable, and even though I knew this flavor because I smelled it before, it never occurred to me to eat it. It was powerfully evocative, but more than that, it was just delicious.”

If this movement has a pinup, it’s René Redzepi, the chef of Noma, in Copenhagen. He culls the Nordic countryside for flavors not found at lower latitudes. Other chefs, like Michel Bras and Marc Veyrat, have long used wild plants at their Michelin-starred restaurants. But the bounty that Mr. Redzepi uncovered in the seemingly bleak northern climate sets an example for chefs to pay close attention to the land.

But you need to know what you’re doing, or know someone who does.

Mr. Kopels first started foraging — “wildcrafting” as some in the business call it — 10 years ago when he and Mr. Carbone were both cooking at Babbo and living in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. “I had Mondays off, and I would take these long walks through the parks in Queens,” Mr. Kopels said. “I started to watch these old Korean ladies shuffling through the fields, and I would see they were picking stuff.”

He soon bought a copy of “Stalking the Wild Asparagus,” by Euell Gibbons, a foraging bible first published in 1962.

Now Mr. Kopels would never gather from a public park. He abides by an unwritten code that some other foragers also follow: he harvests only on private land, and he always has permission. (One favored resource is the uncultivated parts of organic farms.)

“Just because it’s a wild product doesn’t mean it’s clean,” Mr. Kopels said. “You can get wood sorrel on the West Side Highway, but you don’t want to eat that.”

Some chefs aren’t interested in foraged plants, even from a good source.

“We don’t really work with foragers, to be honest,” said Wylie Dufresne, the chef at WD-50. “We spend a lot of time working on a dish. If we put four months into developing a dish, we don’t want to serve it for only one month.”

Others like the improv.

This summer, the Momofuku restaurants started working with Evan Strusinski, a Maine forager who also supplies Gramercy Tavern and Vandaag.

“As much as they like new things and getting new things,” he said, “I like having something new to look for.”

Using wild food is like pressing a reset button, explained Ryan Miller, the chef at Momofuku Ssam Bar, who serves a fruit leather made of tart, floral Russian olive berries with a roasted porcini and duck liver mousse. “It gives you a creative boost,” Mr. Miller said. “For me it was like rediscovering the first time I cooked a piece of fish.”

The staff at Momofuku Ko cooks what is delivered no matter how unfamiliar. Lily-pad shoots? Toss in a salad. Cucumber root? Turn into vichyssoise. Even if the flavors can be challenging, and the plants so seasonal they disappear quickly, it’s worth it. “It’s a very hard thing to ask that we get one product when he’s finding them in the wild — it’s not like buying a Volvo,” said Peter Serpico, the chef at Momofuku Ko. “Those things are priceless because no one else in New York is getting them.”

Wild ingredients do have prices, but Mr. Strusinski said that more sought-after items like chanterelles fetch more than lichen and Russian olive berries.

Mr. Lightner’s go-to guy is Lars Norgren, whose company, Peak Forest Fruit in Banks, Ore., made $400,000 in sales last year. Mr. Norgren, who picked his first morel at the age of 7 and began selling wild mushrooms to restaurants door to door in 1984, said foraged plants cost the same as comparable organic plants. The watercress that grows wild in a stream fetches the same price as greens cultivated on a farm.

But the wild plants at Torrisi are literally priceless. All that Mr. Kopels asks from Mr. Carbone is money for gas and train fares. “I deeply love him like a brother, and that’s why I do it,” Mr. Kopels said. “And frankly, it’s arrogance. I have the power, and I’m going to decide who’s worthy. I believe Mark Ladner” — the chef of Del Posto — “is worthy, and I believe that Mario is worthy for no other reason than I said so.”

The professional kitchen isn’t known as a sentimental place, but foraging seems to stir these kinds of passionate feelings. “It taps into something emotional — you’re nourished by the place where you live,” Mr. Patterson said. “Trends come and go. This is different.”

While the foraging season is tapering off in the Northeast, it picks up in California during the rainy fall and winter. This time of year Mr. Patterson will serve a salad of wood sorrel, miner’s lettuce and chickweed, three greens that grow abundantly in the wild.

Mr. Patterson and his staff supply Coi. But even home cooks can have access to wild ingredients.

Wild Gourmet Foods, a Vermont company, sets up a stall every month or so at the New Amsterdam Market in Lower Manhattan. Last month it offered pepperwort, white acorns, ginger, wild Jerusalem artichokes, black walnuts, watercress and an array of tinctures and mushrooms. Over the course of the year, Nova Kim and Les Hook, the partners behind Wild Gourmet Foods, will gather more than 150 kinds of roots, greens, nuts, barks and berries.

Judith Jones, a vice president at Alfred A. Knopf, subscribed to a regular delivery when she was in Vermont this past summer. Every box contained ingredients worthy of an “Iron Chef” challenge. One time, it was milkweed.

“I made a pasta with the baby buds and greens and wild garlic and olive oil,” Ms. Jones said. “It was so delicious and had a flavor that’s hard to describe. The milk was a binder and the flavors were assertive, which is good in a pasta because you need that.” Later in the season, Ms. Jones fried more mature milkweed in beer batter.

Ms. Kim and Mr. Hook carry liability insurance and certify the scientific and common names of their plants. According to the New York City Department of Health, it is legal for restaurants to serve wild plants provided that they are obtained from an approved source that follows regulatory guidelines.

“I’m confident in my forager,” said Phillip Kirschen-Clark, the chef at Vandaag in the East Village. Mr. Kirschen-Clark infuses oil with sweet cicely, an anise-scented herb, which he drizzles on fish. “He’s up on the subjects, up on his reading. I’m confident that he tastes all the items himself and won’t sell me anything unservable.”

But not every item makes it to table.

For a recent dinner, Mr. Strusinski helped supply the chef David Chang with three types of lichen — rock tripe, lungwort and reindeer lichen — for a soup of matsutake mushroom broth with fir essence, roasted seaweed and chestnuts.

He also sent Mr. Chang’s Momofuku Ssam Bar some brain-shaped orange jelly fungus, which grows on decaying hardwoods. Mr. Miller, its chef, said it had a “very light citrusy flavor” and was “very clean, not that earthy.”

But he’s still not sure how he’ll use it.

And chefs do need to be cautious.

“We had a guy come in off the street two months ago and announce, ‘I’m an urban forager, and I found this spinach growing around the corner,’ ” said Mr. Dufresne, of WD-50. “There’s no way I’m going to serve something that grows out of a crack in the sidewalk.”

 

所有跟帖： 

• 那是N年前的中国农村，现在成高楼大厦了。 -南门野菜- ♀ (0 bytes) () 07/18/2012 postreply 16:34:03