fermentationmissionary-blog

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Wild Pickled Milkweed Pods

I love it when places where the earth have been treated unkindly are reclaimed for wildness and beauty! There’s a place like that near my home and it’s one of my favorite hidden spots for foraging! The site was a former strip mining operation where enormous bucket-wheel excavators tore into the soil searching desperately for lignite and coal. Fortunately there was not much of either and the operation was given up many years back. The surface area that had been stripped was converted to several lakes and the entirety of the expanse that had been used was given back to the weeds and the wild crawling things of this wonderful world and the spot remains a hidden, rustic paradise with poorly maintained, bucolic, twisting trails that go deep into the forest and act as host to many different useful plants and fungi! My dilemma as a forager is always this: the plant friends and healers that I work with more often than not have only very short blossoming times, so how do I preserve their large harvests and enjoy their strong tastes and vital medicines deep into the deep dark winter months when I seem to need and crave them the most? The answer that I often turn to when I’m working with wild edibles that have a large surface area is very simple: wild fermentation, more specifically, I pickle them! Today I’m going to detail how I made a wild pickle out of milkweed pods, but this technique could be utilized for mushrooms, cat-tail shoots, burdock roots and all manner of edible roots, pods and tubers, so feel free to experiment!

What you’ll need:

A wide mouth quart jar

About 2 or 3 cups of Spring Water

A medium sized stock pot

25-30 Milkweed Pods

A Tbsp of non iodized Salt

Whatever spices that you find complimentary to Milkweed Pods. I find that just the salt does the trick for me!

The first step is, of course, identifying the milk weed pods and being 100% sure that you’ve gathered milkweed pods! Cross reference several foraging books, ask a seasoned forager and/or join one of the many facebook groups dedicated to foraging. Here’s a pic for your reference, but don’t just use this one! Learning to identify plants by touch, sight, smell is a wonderful, truly sensual way to enter into deeper relationship with them, and I assure you this will enrich your life! 

The Milkweed Pods typically form a couple of weeks after the flowers have dropped off and I find you can usually get about a half a dozen per plant while still leaving plenty for our insect co-conspirators and for the plant itself to reproduce. Once you’ve gathered a nice harvest (I find that about 25-30 fits in a quart jar very well) you’re ready to prepare them. Milkweed plants secrete a latex that contains a bitter toxin that is mildly poisonous (but has been used as a folk remedy for warts for centuries when used topically! Just goes to show you that almost anything in this world can be useful if we honor the plant and ask to learn its secrets!) so it’s necessary to boil the milkweed in a couple of changes of water. I will typically add the milkweed to a stock pot, fill it up about halfway with water and boil for ten minutes. Then I will strain the pods with a colander and repeat the process. You’ll notice long, rubbery flecks of white foam emerging from the milk weed, that’s A-OK! The toxins are being neutralized and your pods are gonna be tasty, mild and most importantly: edible! After the second boil I strain again and run cool water over it for a few minutes to make certain that the internal temperature has cooled to about 70-75 degrees. That’s the temperature that our bacterial friends seem to like it and we’re doing our best to invite them to form a colony on these buds so that our harvest can be preserved indefinitely! While they’re cooling, prepare a brine by adding a Tbsp of sea salt or Himalayan Pink Crystal salt to about a cup of Spring or distilled water in your quart jar. It’s important that you don’t use tap water or “table salt” as they contain fluoride and iodine respectively, which are bacteria inhibitors. Thus they kill off the very microbial life that we’re trying to “harvest” to preserve the milk weed pods and improve their flavor and nutrition. Mix the salt and whatever spices you want to use into the water well and once your pods have cooled, add them to the brine that you’ve prepared in the quart jar. Stack them until the jar is about 75-85 percent full, then add enough spring water to cover them and add some sort of weight to keep them submerged. This process, plus time, equals milkweed pod pickles infused with trillions of bacteria!!! How much time? You’ll probably notice some bubbles after a day or two in the summer months. That’s a good sign! That means the bacteria and yeast are present and are feasting! The bubbles are carbon dioxide, one of the by-products that’s produced during a wild fermentation. After that happens, I suggest you start tasting pods every so often until you get the taste that you desire and then pop them in the fridge, where the fermentation process slows down to a crawl and your taste will be preserved almost indefinitely! Thanks for taking the time to read this! Please feel free to send me any questions or feedback! Are you working with milkweed? How are you preparing it? Would love to hear about it in the comment section below!

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How do you eat fermented Queen Anne's Lace?

Hi there! I eat it a number of ways, but my favorites are to make the flowering head into a medicinal beer or wine or to pickle the first year roots in the fall or the second year roots in the spring before it gets too woody. The leaves are decent in a sauerkraut as well! I also use the seeds to make a tincture that works as a natural birth control! It's truly a heaven sent plant/healer!

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This is great! Please post to our FB groups! Great stuff! Please join and post to our FB at culturesgroup! ありがとう! Ken 麹

I definitely will! Thanks and nice to meet you!!

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Sumac Wine

 The story of most of my fermentation experiments/adventures (or perhaps, my life) begins in a wild, overgrown place off of the beaten path. I’ve always found myself drawn toward weedy, overgrown gardens, unused service roads that wind forever into an untamed wilderness, unofficial dumps where kudzu and Japanese Knotweed curl around the exposed engine of a speedboat that has made its last voyage on a nameless lake. I love the faithfulness of “wild” plants, sprouting year after year in the same place without being planted or sowed.  This blog is a chronicle of my dual adventures with two of my deepest passions: foraging and fermentation. In addition to providing recipes with foraged flowers, leaves, roots and shoots, I intend to highlight things not typically even thought of as “food”: dried leaves, moss, tree bark, insects and dirt. I truly thank you for coming along with me on this journey!

I began this sumac wine on a Sunday morning. All of the ingredients (save for the water and sugar and some other accidental insect ingredients) were foraged on my dear friend Morgan Garrett’s property. Since he and I will be parted for several months,  I gathered these ingredients with the specific intention of having a wine ready that he and I could share when our paths next veer together again! 

On to the recipe!

10 medium-large Sumac clusters

25 Queen Anne’s Lace flower clusters

8 blackberry leaves

3 large pieces of Sassafras bark

1 whole Yarrow plant (save for the root)

2 whole wild mint plants (save for the root)

25-30 small black ants (incidental ingredient)

1 Gallon Spring Water

1 and a half gallons of Sugar

I began by quickly soaking the sumac clusters in a cold water bath to get rid of the bugs (but not too long, because water quickly diminishes the  malic acid, citric acid, fumaric acid and ascorbic acid present in Sumac that gives it it’s distinct lemon-y taste!) and roughly peeling the berries from the stems (but some stems got in there, and that’s OK! They don’t have much of, if any taste.) into a gallon glass jar. I wouldn’t use plastic for this (even “food” grade plastic) as the acids that develop during the fermentation process cause the plastic to leach out toxic chemicals. Then I layered the Queen Anne’s Lace flowers, blackberry leaves, sassafras bark, yarrow and mint in the jar. Then I dumped in about a pound and a half of white sugar in the mix. For sugar, I prefer Organic white sugar that is fair trade certified, so that I can be certain that my sugar isn’t coming from the labor of a 10 year old child working in the hot sun for the equivalent of $3.50 a day.Then I added the water (which incidentally was “foraged” from the naturally occurring spring near the Serpent Mound in Adams County, OH!) Tap water will not work with any sort of fermentation, as the chlorine and fluoride inherent in most of our municipal water supplies inhibits the growth of the bacteria and yeast that we’re trying to attract and harvest with these sorts of experiments! And viola! The natural yeast that saturates and lives on most wild plants will do the rest of the work for you, so you don’t need to add any commercial yeast. Yeast is naturally attracted to sugar and ever present in all of our environments, so those little buggies will colonize this experiment soon enough! Just stir vigorously several times a day. After a few days,you’ll notice bubbles creeping up into your drink! This means that the wild yeast are awake and actively devouring the sugar, acids and tannins and producing the desired result:  I will typically wait a couple of days after the vigorous bubbling begins and then transfer it to a carboy and put a balloon on the mouth of the carboy to make sure that air doesn’t get in. I don’t age my wines all too long, as I’m always a bit anxious to taste them, but once you have some sort of airlock in place then you could age this drink for years, if you wanted to!  I had some ants invade my primary ferment, but as most ants are edible and sort of taste like peppery vinegar, I just shooed them away as best I can and stirred the drowned ones in and considered them another ingredient.

Thanks for reading and encouraging my passions, don’t hesitate to send me a message if I wasn’t clear enough about one of the steps!