Chokecherries (Some Wild Foods Are Just Out the Door)

By Hklbrries

Some Wild Foods Are Just Out the Door

Posted on October 6, 2011 at 11:57 am.

Not all wild foods are beyond reach.


I moved here from Seattle for a taste of the wild. Back-country skiing and topping out on the ridges of our 10,000-foot peaks was what I had in mind at the time. When it came to food, I felt that I was giving up the good life of the city. Sure, I’d grown up fishing and clamming on Cape Cod and I joined Seattle’s first CSA, but the store was still my food main source.

It didn’t take long that spring in 2001 before I got the full taste of the wild: morels, trout, huckleberries and elk. The whole experience was captivating, from the mushroom hunting and elk butchering to the cooking. And the profound pleasures of eating foods directly from the land, lake, river or sea surpasses that of any meal, bar none. It must be primal.

There’s good reason more people are turned on to wild foods as witnessed by the interest in Hank Shaw’s Hunt, Gather, Cook and Langdon Cook’s Fat of the Land. Though some may have the impression that you have to travel far, carry special tools (or weapons) and suffer physical discomfort, none of this is universally true.

Sometimes finding wild foods–or even feral foods, such as horseradish, plums and dandelions–is easily within reach. Such was the case with the wild chokecherry trees growing along the ditch in Kit Phelps’s wheat field.

A few days before we picked, Kit fed me vanilla ice cream topped with chokecherry syrup. The color of raspberries, the syrup had a distinct cherry taste perfumed with rose and orange with a pleasing bitter edge like rhubarb. Yup, this was the amazing, complex and tantalizing taste of wild food, qualities impossible to cultivate. We made our plan for picking.

Loaded up with an orchard ladder and picking buckets two days later, Kit, my dd Cece and I bounced in the bench seat of her flatbed truck (ranchers have all the equipment you need for most jobs like this) to survey the trees. “These are really wild,” Kit said and we reached the first willowy stand to check for ripeness and abundance. The trees were loaded with chokecherries, but curiously, some were the color of cranberries while others were the color of red plums. We tasted until we found the sweetest, though that isn’t saying much because these are so tart, they make your tongue tingle.

Chokecherries are appropriately named because they have a pit that makes the avocado look like a generous fruit. Imagine eating a cherry pit tucked inside a blueberry and you get the idea. The flesh was like a “skin” covering the pit. No wonder the birds had left so many for us.

Later, I sweated over getting the juice from those chokecherries. As I boiled, food-milled, mashed and squeezed them in succession, it seemed like I was trying to squeeze water from a stone. From one gallon of berries, I got 3 cups of juice–and it was so worth it.

Combined with loads of sugar (I used a ratio of 2 cups sugar to 1 cup juice), I got 5 half pints of viscous chokecherry syrup (For a detailed how-to, go to www.make-it-do.com/cook-it-bake-it/making-chokecherry-syrup/). With other fruit syrups and jams, I often add a bit of lemon juice, liqueur, ginger or spice and a pinch of salt to make the flavors more interesting and developed. When I dipped a teaspoon into this pot for a taste, I discovered that chokecherries didn’t need a thing from me.

I gave one jar as a thank you to Brenda Crow who runs the great site Foodshed (www.ourfoodshed.com), the source for artisanal ingredients direct from the producers. Aside from an ice cream topping, I recommended she try it as a sauce for seared duck breast.


If I get any wild duck, pheasant, grouse or chukar this winter, I’ll have to give this wild foods combination a try myself.

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About Rural Eating:
Welcome to my blog, where I share stories of food at the source. I’m a city transplant and professional cook living the good life in rural America. I love warm pie, hearty greens and anything homemade--not to be fussy but because that’s the best food I know. Sharing it all with others is the best part of all, isn’t it?
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Cook Angel
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Eating from the Ground Up
Fat of the Land
Food in Jars
Girl Interrupted Eating
Home on the Range with Bunchgrass Beef
Hunter Angler Gardner Cook
Leek Soup
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Lynne is a freelance writer, professional cook, mother and adventurer who can’t stop thinking about food. Drawing on her experiences and insights using homegrown and whole foods—sometimes wild—she crafts stories of people, place and culture. A curious cook and baker, Lynne shares her creative, user-friendly recipes with the goal of bringing more people together around the table. She has published food articles in major newspapers, national magazines and websites and blogs at Rural Eating.

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Preparation

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