The Forager Chef’s Book of FloraRecipes and Techniques for Edible Plants from Garden, Field, and Forest
From root to flower—and featuring 180 recipes and over 230 of the author’s own beautiful photographs—explore the edible plants we find all around us with the Forager Chef Alan Bergo as he breaks new culinary ground!
In The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora you’ll find the exotic to the familiar—from Ramp Leaf Dumplings to Spruce Tip Panna Cotta to Crisp Fiddlehead Pickles—with Chef Bergo’s unique blend of easy-to-follow instruction and out-of-this-world inspiration.
Over the past fifteen years, Minnesota chef Alan Bergo has become one of America’s most exciting and resourceful culinary voices, with millions seeking his guidance through his wildly popular website and video tutorials.
Bergo’s inventive culinary style is defined by his encyclopedic curiosity, and his abiding, root-to-flower passion for both wild and cultivated plants. Instead of waiting for fall squash to ripen, Bergo eagerly harvests their early shoots, flowers, and young greens—taking a holistic approach to cooking with all parts of the plant, and discovering extraordinary new flavors and textures along the way.
The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora demonstrates how understanding the different properties and growing phases of roots, stems, leaves, and seeds can inform your preparation of something like the head of an immature sunflower—as well as the lesser-used parts of common vegetables, like broccoli or eggplant. As a society, we’ve forgotten this type of old-school knowledge, including many brilliant culinary techniques that were borne of thrift and necessity. For our own sake, and that of our planet, it’s time we remembered. And in the process, we can unlock new flavors from the abundant landscape around us.
Chef Alan Bergo is one of America’s leading culinary authorities on mushroom hunting and foraging. A veteran of the restaurant industry, he spent nearly two decades as a professional chef specializing in local and wild foods at St. Paul’s fabled Heartland Restaurant, The Salt Cellar, and Lucia’s Restaurant in Minneapolis. He’s best known for his blogs, recipes, and photography, all featured at his site, foragerchef.com—the web’s largest resource on wild-mushroom cookery,
“You see a sunny meadow. Alan Bergo sees a salad: all blue violet leaves and wild carrot tops. This accomplished chef cooks the wilderness. As he grinds flour from tree nuts, makes black walnut honey, braises sunflower heads like artichokes, and invents ‘green electricity,’ a magical lovage sauce, Bergo turns nature into food. With such stylish recipes and extraordinary photographs (Bergo’s own), The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora encourages a whole new world of cooks to explore the wild.”—Dorothy Kalins, founding editor, Saveur; author of The Kitchen Whisperers
“In this remarkable new cookbook, Bergo provides stories, photographs and inventive recipes.”—Star Tribune
“With a passion for bringing a taste of the wild to the table, [Bergo’s] inspiration for experimentation shows in his inventive dishes created around ingredients found in his own backyard.”—Tastemade
“[An] excellent debut. . . . Advocating that plants are edible in their entirety is one thing, but this [book] delivers the delectable means to prove it.”—Publishers Weekly
“Alan Bergo was foraging in the Midwest way before it was trendy.”—Outside Magazine
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