14/04/2025
Wild Biscuits - been thinking about these for a long time, since the first in 2023. At the time a famous forager came up with a wild biscuit, and I had the pleasure of trying a re-make of it at a wildbiome meet-up. Being in the thick of working out how to survive on only wild food this was a precious wonder to behold and to eat. It had sea buckthorn in it - interestingly tangy, like no other biscuit I’d tried, sweetened with birch syrup
Hosting some of the 2025 cohort for a meet-up last week was a joy and got me back into the fully wild mindset; giving the inspiration to make these - my first wildbiome compliant batch I rate
Crunchy, sweet and moreish. Made with pendulous sedge, deer tallow and service fruit/apple sugar. Getting the sweetness right with foraged sugars isn’t obvious and it transpired these had to be 50:50 flour:’sugar’, and they still needed some apple syrup to hit the spot. Been trying with chestnut until now, to use their natural sweetness, but has trouble with it not being fine enough flour using just a blender
Pendulous sedge is one of the best wild staples as it’s simple to process. Making this work with fruit sugars is pleasing as they’re much easier to make than birch syrup, which takes so much processing that what you get out is so valuable it’s hard to decide when to use it. The other option of course is honey, allowed in moderation if well sourced for the project. But for me to be fully foraged, fruit sugar is the best option
Could even make them into custard creams using some leftover hazelnut cream courtesy of Gemma’s epic wild cake creations. This predilection with wild treats is perhaps against the ethos of the wildbiome project - our hunter gatherer ancestors I don’t reckon would have been so bothered; they’d have been focused on getting fat from the land I think. Perhaps it’s a product of a palate corrupted by easy rewards in an industrial food system, but it’s certainly a fun diversion to keep the spirits up on a wild diet
