From celery growing in a gutter, to Illawarra plums on a construction site, Australia's cities are rich with wild foods
Mike Eggert was recently asked about a garnish on one of the dishes he cooked. The chef had foraged it himself, picking the young, tender dandelion leaves from the grounds of an old, abandoned mental asylum where they don't spray pesticides, and everything is left to get a little wild: no cars, no chemicals. One lady at the dinner, it turned out, regularly walks her dog there. "Oh!" she said. "Isn't it going to be covered in dog piss?"
Every table in the restaurant stopped eating. Eggert found himself thinking: are you guys kidding? With the way most food is produced these days, piss is the least of your worries. Instead he said: "Everything is covered in piss. I don't want to eat anything that hasn't had the opportunity to be covered in piss by something. Do you really want your food to come from such a sterile and plastic environment that it's never had the chance to be exposed to a living animal, whether it's a fly, a bee, a dog, a bird? That should be your barometer. If it's had something urinate on it, it's good to eat."
Eggert is the type of fellow who's always posting pics of strange-looking mushrooms and piles of weeds on Instagram. If he could wrangle a wild swarm of bees to wear as a beard, he would. He, fellow chef Jemma Whiteman and host Berri Eggert (also Mike's sister) run a collective called Pinbone, and often do guest dinners at Sydney restaurants such as Three Blue Ducks and the Wine Library. And the three of them often go foraging together.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Eggert and I are taking a walk when we spot a bunch of celery growing out of a gutter. "I walk past it every day and it makes me really happy," he says. But how does European celery find itself growing in a gutter in Redfern? "I have no idea. That's what I love about it."
He explains that foraging in Sydney isn't so much about filling a trolley, but it's rewarding in other ways. Namely, it's really fun. "Like, you'd never eat that celery." It could be kind of interesting on a menu, I venture. Gutter celery could move a lot of plates with the right crowd. "Interesting, says Mike, "but it might kill you."
Before he started cooking for a living, Mike Eggert was an ecologist, studying threatened and endangered marsupials in Australia. "When I left school, I had a conscience. I wanted to save the world. But it all became really depressing. So I moved onto working with wallabies and bandicoots." The job, it turns out, mostly involved looking at a lot of poo. "You've got to know what they're eating. By trying to figure out what animals I was looking at, I learnt about plants."
Few things, in fact, make Mike happier than walking around looking at things mysteriously growing out of nowhere. Manicured parkland, for him, is a big waste of time. "See that?" he says, pointing to a family sitting on a stretch of level green grass in Centennial Park. "I hate that". He wants to see parks full of long grass, weeds and animals.
Tromping through the bits of the Eggert-approved park, he picks wild nettles and native violets, points out dangerous fungi and an impressive fort made of old logs. There's a wild, scrubby other-worldliness to it all. You're in the middle of the city, cars careening past, standing under a swarm of wild bees that have made a long, drooping hive in an old pine tree.
Eggert picks a dark green plant with leaves about half the size of a pinkie fingernail. It's called slender celery. The leaves look pretty much the same as a regular celery plant only darker, and on a diet. It even smells similar. "I don't ever show this one to people because there are poisonous things that look a lot like this, like hemlock. Rare in Australia, but you do find it."
It strikes me you need to be pretty vigilant if you're out to do a bit of plant plundering. "There are a lot of plants that could hurt you," says Mike, as he picks some nice, harmless dandelion. "What people don't know is you can send almost anything to the botanic gardens and they'll ID it for you."
What of the young chefs who have read a few books, maybe had some work experience foraging for some of the more famous restaurants around the world (your Nomas, your Mugaritzs), and want to apply the same ideas to Australia?
"Apart from it being dangerous and a little silly, those chefs are also missing the point. If you've eaten weeds and herbs in America and in Europe, they've got these lush beautiful countrysides and the weeds are endemic to the region. They taste good. Australia is a really harsh country. Things taste like shit here." In Sydney the year-round sunshine and lack of seasonality brings its own problems: "If you're not cold, the plants aren't cold. And if they're not cold, they don't stop growing."
We stop by a construction site in Redfern to pick some Illawarra plums. One of the site workers wants to know if he can pick them and eat them. Eggert shows him which bits of the fruit are best to eat ("the soft under bit"), which bits to avoid ("the top part of the fruit is horrible") and when to pick them ("a month ago they were beautiful - now it's just the nuts that are left").
I want to know if what he finds on his adventures motivates him to change the flavours he might otherwise use on the plate. "It's like gambling," he says. "The thrill of finding something you've been looking for out in the wild, but then having that work it into something that's delicious or unique is amazing. If you're really honest with yourself as a chef you always want to get a leg up on everybody else. If I find a little patch of Illawarra plums that nobody else has, it drives me harder."
Eggert and his crew have made seaweed vinegar, loquat hot sauce, kurrajong nuts and wild persimmon with acorn puree, wild plum tarts, smoked and fermented pine mushrooms with a buckshot hare tartare and wild nettle beer.
Not that it can't backfire. "Dianella berries were in season - they're this little grass tree that puts up this really beautiful plump purple fruit. And it's delicious. We came across this little shrub. I grabbed three, and put them in my mouth. It was like eating rotting sphincter.
"No one had water, and it was a really hot day. For the next hour I couldn't get the taste out of my mouth. I don't know what had happened or why but it was the worst thing I've ever eaten. My friends thought that was the greatest thing they'd ever seen. Dianella berries, man. They kill me." Reported by guardian.co.uk 17 hours ago.
Mike Eggert was recently asked about a garnish on one of the dishes he cooked. The chef had foraged it himself, picking the young, tender dandelion leaves from the grounds of an old, abandoned mental asylum where they don't spray pesticides, and everything is left to get a little wild: no cars, no chemicals. One lady at the dinner, it turned out, regularly walks her dog there. "Oh!" she said. "Isn't it going to be covered in dog piss?"
Every table in the restaurant stopped eating. Eggert found himself thinking: are you guys kidding? With the way most food is produced these days, piss is the least of your worries. Instead he said: "Everything is covered in piss. I don't want to eat anything that hasn't had the opportunity to be covered in piss by something. Do you really want your food to come from such a sterile and plastic environment that it's never had the chance to be exposed to a living animal, whether it's a fly, a bee, a dog, a bird? That should be your barometer. If it's had something urinate on it, it's good to eat."
Eggert is the type of fellow who's always posting pics of strange-looking mushrooms and piles of weeds on Instagram. If he could wrangle a wild swarm of bees to wear as a beard, he would. He, fellow chef Jemma Whiteman and host Berri Eggert (also Mike's sister) run a collective called Pinbone, and often do guest dinners at Sydney restaurants such as Three Blue Ducks and the Wine Library. And the three of them often go foraging together.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Eggert and I are taking a walk when we spot a bunch of celery growing out of a gutter. "I walk past it every day and it makes me really happy," he says. But how does European celery find itself growing in a gutter in Redfern? "I have no idea. That's what I love about it."
He explains that foraging in Sydney isn't so much about filling a trolley, but it's rewarding in other ways. Namely, it's really fun. "Like, you'd never eat that celery." It could be kind of interesting on a menu, I venture. Gutter celery could move a lot of plates with the right crowd. "Interesting, says Mike, "but it might kill you."
Before he started cooking for a living, Mike Eggert was an ecologist, studying threatened and endangered marsupials in Australia. "When I left school, I had a conscience. I wanted to save the world. But it all became really depressing. So I moved onto working with wallabies and bandicoots." The job, it turns out, mostly involved looking at a lot of poo. "You've got to know what they're eating. By trying to figure out what animals I was looking at, I learnt about plants."
Few things, in fact, make Mike happier than walking around looking at things mysteriously growing out of nowhere. Manicured parkland, for him, is a big waste of time. "See that?" he says, pointing to a family sitting on a stretch of level green grass in Centennial Park. "I hate that". He wants to see parks full of long grass, weeds and animals.
Tromping through the bits of the Eggert-approved park, he picks wild nettles and native violets, points out dangerous fungi and an impressive fort made of old logs. There's a wild, scrubby other-worldliness to it all. You're in the middle of the city, cars careening past, standing under a swarm of wild bees that have made a long, drooping hive in an old pine tree.
Eggert picks a dark green plant with leaves about half the size of a pinkie fingernail. It's called slender celery. The leaves look pretty much the same as a regular celery plant only darker, and on a diet. It even smells similar. "I don't ever show this one to people because there are poisonous things that look a lot like this, like hemlock. Rare in Australia, but you do find it."
It strikes me you need to be pretty vigilant if you're out to do a bit of plant plundering. "There are a lot of plants that could hurt you," says Mike, as he picks some nice, harmless dandelion. "What people don't know is you can send almost anything to the botanic gardens and they'll ID it for you."
What of the young chefs who have read a few books, maybe had some work experience foraging for some of the more famous restaurants around the world (your Nomas, your Mugaritzs), and want to apply the same ideas to Australia?
"Apart from it being dangerous and a little silly, those chefs are also missing the point. If you've eaten weeds and herbs in America and in Europe, they've got these lush beautiful countrysides and the weeds are endemic to the region. They taste good. Australia is a really harsh country. Things taste like shit here." In Sydney the year-round sunshine and lack of seasonality brings its own problems: "If you're not cold, the plants aren't cold. And if they're not cold, they don't stop growing."
We stop by a construction site in Redfern to pick some Illawarra plums. One of the site workers wants to know if he can pick them and eat them. Eggert shows him which bits of the fruit are best to eat ("the soft under bit"), which bits to avoid ("the top part of the fruit is horrible") and when to pick them ("a month ago they were beautiful - now it's just the nuts that are left").
I want to know if what he finds on his adventures motivates him to change the flavours he might otherwise use on the plate. "It's like gambling," he says. "The thrill of finding something you've been looking for out in the wild, but then having that work it into something that's delicious or unique is amazing. If you're really honest with yourself as a chef you always want to get a leg up on everybody else. If I find a little patch of Illawarra plums that nobody else has, it drives me harder."
Eggert and his crew have made seaweed vinegar, loquat hot sauce, kurrajong nuts and wild persimmon with acorn puree, wild plum tarts, smoked and fermented pine mushrooms with a buckshot hare tartare and wild nettle beer.
Not that it can't backfire. "Dianella berries were in season - they're this little grass tree that puts up this really beautiful plump purple fruit. And it's delicious. We came across this little shrub. I grabbed three, and put them in my mouth. It was like eating rotting sphincter.
"No one had water, and it was a really hot day. For the next hour I couldn't get the taste out of my mouth. I don't know what had happened or why but it was the worst thing I've ever eaten. My friends thought that was the greatest thing they'd ever seen. Dianella berries, man. They kill me." Reported by guardian.co.uk 17 hours ago.