ye7 Weeds Are Everywhere. Why Aren’t We Eating Them More?
T Introduces highlights the debut of a singular personye7, place or thing.
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.”
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.ye7