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London Wild Fruits, London (2026)

28/05/2025

Made a good few batches of cider last year, and to my surprise this natural one is the best. Never quite trusted brewers who say natural yeast is best, but this 5 litres was already fermenting when I got round to it so went with it. Not wanting to make bland cider I was sure include crab apples in each brew, for interesting tannins. But for a random experiment in this one I added a few spruce cones, for ‘bittering’. And it’s worked very well, warm tannic bitter rounds off the apple sharpness nicely (they were just in there for a few days, it could be overdone I guess)

Quality of bubbles is best as well. There’s a lot of different ways bubbles can be in a bottle it turns out. For another batch I added a few grains of commercial yeast to each bottle, with sugar, to make absolutely sure there would be bubbles. And it’s bubbly, but somehow cheap

So I’m a convert finally, to the natural brew, at least for cider 🥂

24/05/2025

Chilli n lime 🍋‍🟩🌶️ Chicken of the Woods
One of my favourite dishes of the year. Chickens are famously hard to get, and keep, in prime condition, but with this method it is remarkable how much a bit of a dried chicken can be rejuvenated

First of all chicken with life left in it will have at least some yellow still inside the flesh. Even if wind dried a bit, flesh colour is the acid test. Outer bits are the most tender. This time I fermented the inner for later. Lots of hot fat in a frying pan, and the chicken steaks will soak it right up. Season and sauté until well browned both sides and turn in time to absorb fat on both sides. Then add in a sauce - my favourite is a balance of lime, stock, soy, chilli n sweetener. Simmer away and reduce down til it’s sticky 👌. Sea coriander and wilted sea purslane went very nicely with this

This whole insta thing now just feels a bit off, posting pictures of food while our so called ally Israel deliberately tries to annihilate the people in Gaza by starvation. Actively assisted by our own government. Public life in this country has become a sickening lie. But this is how I do what I’m doing, so. Free Palestine. It’s entirely possible to get Keir Starmer, David Lammy and all their genocidal pals behind bars for the rest of their lives where they belong, put messianic ideologies firmly in the bin of history etc. so here’s to building a revolution in this country ✌🏼

̇ne

09/05/2025

Chicken-like Schnitzel, in wild boar crumb with fermented rosehip. Thanks Alex for your mighty food works to give us these rare ingredients, and for the idea

#95%wild

01/05/2025

Bamboo Shoots. A fun ‘invasivore’ to hunt out. One of those crops that the more you look the more you see. Even quite long shoots, before they get hard, are tender to eat. Amazing! 🎋🎋🎋

Not all bamboo seem to make shoots, the regular garden variety don’t, you need the big invasive ones

26/04/2025

Was going to make a video but no time so - the Silverberries have an edible seed inside. If you toast the husks in a covered pan they’ll start to explode like chestnuts, at which point you can break them out with your fingernails and they taste very much like little chestnuts

The seed case is very fibrous and tough to open, so to get the seeds out whole I’ve roasted them (long n low perhaps is best) until the cases are brittle. Then crack off one end and squeeze the seed out with the other hand. This gives you whole seeds which are a very nice little ingredient to use, been steaming them with feral chard as a side dish. But to be fair it is a chore to work through them

More efficiently blasting them very briefly in a blender breaks out the cases into cottony fluff. Then you can put them in a jar of water and fish out the floating fluff. Sieving what’s left and drying yields a meal of seeds as the last photo. Looks very much like bulgur wheat and I guess could be used in similar ways. I’ll be doing the rest of my berries like this

It must be possible to get the seeds out whole by mechanical means with the right machine I reckon, an agricultural engineer would be able to work it out. Not a huge crop of starchy goodness compared to say, chestnuts, but with the co-crop of tangy fruits they’re certainly worthwhile

24/04/2025

Silver berries are back 🍒. Heads up to all the travellers for a treat - head to the most rubbish industrial estate you can find, and amongst the incomprehensible planting in the borders you’re quite likely to find the eleagnus tree, some replete with these little fresh Easter eggs

Worth it just for the delight of eating fresh fruit from the tree, in April, and they taste amazing. Like sweets is the only way I can describe them. To process them I found it easiest to squeeze through muslin, to get this delectable fruit pulp. What to do with a pulp like this? Soaking the dregs in water and a second press yields a tasty fruit shake - I made this into a granita

But that’s just the start of the fun - inside each berry is a his and inside that a little starchy seed…
Feels good to bring the re-birth of indigenous land use into the industrial landscape

*the dusty hairs on the eleagnus leaves can be irritating especially if breathed in

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

07/03/2025

Three wild alliums in the garden - the two schedule 7 invasive I planted, the other arrived by its self or with me somehow. And we’ve got proper wild garlic planted in the allotment. You can really see how ancient foragers would have started gardening

Watching them grow over years is interesting. After years wondering how invasive these two really are, this spring it was looking like maybe we’re at the point of exponential growth where it suddenly becomes obvious things have gone too far. So, time to dig them up 😸. Some edibles really come into their own when you use the whole plant - Dandelion is one, and maybe these Three Cornered Leek are too. Here we have massively abundant bunches of spring onions, which can be used in cooking as cultivated onions. Could the answer to the march of this invasive onion simply be to eat them? I found myself grading out the littler bulbs and replanting, to keep the patch going 🌱

23/02/2025

You don’t need to know a lot about to spot these cheeky characters popping up in your flower pots and veg beds. Hairy Bittercress - a persistent w**d and excellent to eat. As a salad I chop the whole rosettes, shown here with wild lettuce and chickw**d. And the little leaves make an excellent garnish. This littlest of cresses is at its very best right now, at the beginning, and trying to eke it out later in the season it really loses its buzz. Like all wild crops it is just a moment in time, seize it! 🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱

11/02/2025

Not sure who needs to hear this but it’s entirely doable to make baked from purely acorn and other foraged flours. There was a time when I needed to hear that - a majority of recipes out there have the acorn cut with wheat flour, usually 50/50. Can’t help but find that disappointing

The exciting potential of acorn flour it’s always seemed to me is that we can go out and forage to sustain ourselves with carbohydrate, fat and protein, from the wild and bio diverse landscape, without doing any farming. And that people in the past may well have done that for long stretches of time and even pre-dating agriculture entirely as a staple crop

These are half n half acorn and chestnut flour. Nut Flours have no gluten but the starch sticks them together as biscuits no problem. Acorn is beautifully dark brown and delicious when baked, with a strong and distinct flavour. Without a little mill I do have trouble getting the flour fine and smooth enough. It doesn’t seem to matter for cakes but you notice it in biscuits so still work to do on these

My February foraging walk with has some spaces left : Sunday 23rd Feb , north London. And I’m running a walk at Forty Hall Estate this coming Sat 15th Feb see

09/02/2025

Eating with the seasons is elemental to a foraged diet - you eat what’s there. And it’s interesting the seasonal themes across the year. Spring is the season of leafy greens and it will soon be time to chomp them down them like a hungry diplodocus 🌱🦕

This Miner’s Lettuce is one of the great wild salads - mild and light, and can be found in enormous abundance in random urban corners. Imbolc, the turning between winter solstice and spring equinox, has passed and the fresh young greens show they’re ready to go despite the winter gloom. Foragers know the spring greens get going in February and by what some might regard as springtime in May the majority of them are done

14/01/2025

Lembas mk.2

Made with the raw ingredients this time - Hazel and chestnuts

Realised they should be big, as in the 3rd pic, big enough to feel substantial in a fully fledged dwarf’s hand. But thin like a water. Will have to wait for the leaves to grow again to find ones big enough to wrap these. I have become aware of actual Mallorn trees though for this purpose, and fittingly they’re native to west lands over the sea but I have high hopes of finding guests of the species living around here

Tolkien geeks claim the lembas to be made from sacred corn, created by Yavanna herself and given to the elves who first travelled west over the sea to join the Valar in Aman. If so I may have to part ways with Tolkien on the lembas. Though maybe these could be the waybread of the Sylvan elves who stayed, and made their domains in the woodlands of middle earth

These were sweetened with apple, which does make them much more tasty. At first I was looking at making these as sweet wild biscuits but realised I’d imagined them only slightly sweet, but wholesomely delicious and sustaining. One of the most interesting things about the wildbiome project though was seeing how much our palate can change - most of us reported an enhanced sense of taste. So I do wonder whether just the sweetness of pure tree crops made into crackers would taste fantastic on their own to a hobbit who’d never had refined sugar in their diet, trailing through wild lands pursued by Ringwraiths

These are gluten free, sugar free, and of course compliant

London Wild Fruits

28/05/2025

24/05/2025

09/05/2025

01/05/2025

26/04/2025

24/04/2025

14/04/2025

07/03/2025

23/02/2025

11/02/2025

09/02/2025

14/01/2025

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