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Ivan Tisdall-Downes and Imogen Davis co-founded Native as a street-food stall way before a sustainable ethos became cool ¨C making the most of the UK¡¯s wild and wonderful ingredients. Now their bricks-and-mortar restaurant in Borough has a mission to champion foraged ingredients in creative ways, and to avoid food waste by using kitchen off-cuts in the daily-changing menu of snacks. Here, they give us their top foraging tips, in partnership with Victorinox.
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¡®Foraging is a great way to see the world ¨C even London is an edible larder and not just a concrete jungle as people might think. On the way to work, sitting on a train, you can probably see elderflowers or three-cornered garlic, and it just makes the world a happier place. Foraging is something everyone can do; there are heathlands and woods, even forests, all over the city that are full of edible berries and herbs. It only takes a small detour and you could probably be walking through a beautiful, lush green park where there¡¯s everything from dandelion leaves and sorrel to cherries on the trees. Start picking them to see the whole world in a different way ¨C it feels like a deep breath in this kind of busy city life.
Foraging is an opportunity to get lost in the woods, and not be contactable ¨C putting your phone away and getting back to the primal instincts of things. It¡¯s very hard to have an adventure in the world at the moment because everyone is just looking at their phones, but wandering in a forest is a wonderful way to escape city life.
We go out foraging once a week, often to the south coast to get our sea vegetables. And one of our chefs cycles in from Essex ¨C he will often jump off the cycle path to forage wild cherries and more and often comes in with scratches all down his arm.
We truly let the land dictate what is going to be on the menu at Native, so instead of calling up our suppliers and saying we want 100 sirloins of beef we ask them what’s available to us. If we have a deer shot, then that goes on the menu ¨C the whole animal instead of ordering one piece and likewise with the fruit and vegetables. We have to be on our toes, changing the menu as frequently as we need to.
Every day is like an episode of Ready Steady Cook. We open the cupboard, see what there is and create a menu. The younger chefs love it too ¨C there¡¯s a section on our menu called Wasting Snacks where we try to create small dishes from things people would normally throw in the bin such as cauliflower leaves, broccoli stalks etc. It¡¯s a great way for them to be creative and get some stuff on the menu, and ensure that no perfectly good ingredients are discarded.
We have been concentrating on being super-sustainable since day one. Our target is to be 99 per cent zero waste ¨C but it¡¯s about so much more than the restaurant itself. You have to have your whole network, supply chain and waste-management systems on board too, so it will take a little time. It¡¯s about giving as much respect to the produce as you can and not wanting to waste any part of an animal.¡¯
IVAN AND IMOGEN¡¯S TOP TIPS AND TRICKS FOR FORAGING IN THE UK
The idea is to leave enough of the plant to rejuvenate and grow next year. The number-one rule is not to destroy the plant for the years to come.
People don¡¯t really see blackberry picking as foraging, but it¡¯s a really great place to start. You can move from blackberries to sloe berries ¨C sloe gin is a great gift. Jams are another way to get into foraging. Just keep a Swiss Army knife in your backpack on every walk; you¡¯ll find all sorts of things. We started off making jams and chutneys because it¡¯s a wonderful way to learn about flavours and if you add a lot of sugar they last forever.
And they make great teas. At the moment we have yarrow tea on the menu, which we make by infusing hot water with forest herbs and a wee bit of honey. A lot of wild herbs have a natural bitterness to them ¨C it¡¯s a defence mechanism against animals grazing on them ¨C so many need a bit of sweetener. You can do that with medaseed, mayweed, chamomile or yarrow.
If you twist the stem between your fingers, you¡¯ll see it is actually square, so it¡¯s an easy way to identify something as part of that family. Be warned: that doesn¡¯t strictly mean it is edible, but it¡¯s a good test.
It grows through gravel and pavement cracks all over the place ¨C you will have seen it, even if you don¡¯t know what it is. Obviously, we wouldn¡¯t recommend you pick it where people have been traipsing over it, but it grows in so many places. It¡¯s a member of the chamomile family and if you rub the buds between your fingers, it smells like pineapple ¨C it has the most unbelievable scent. At Native we turn it into a Pineapple Weeda Colada, which consists of a rum we make ourselves, a syrup and a pineapple-weed-infused cream to enhance of the tropical flavour.
Not only can you forage the leaves, but the peas are delicious too. There¡¯s so much you can do with them: just slice and eat them raw, make sea-kale kimchi, or mix into a warm salad with peas and broad beans. And you can use the leaves as you would any type of cabbage or kale leaf ¨C they go exceptionally well with miso.
Foraging is incredibly seasonal and we have to pick things when they¡¯re ready. Traditional methods of preservation such as fermentation and pickling are crucial to store fruit and vegetables. We need to pick things at their absolute freshest, but we also want to have food to cook in January when there¡¯s not much around, so we plan for the future using old methods of preservation.
There are all sorts of ingredients out there ¨C chickweed was something people used during World War II instead of spinach ¨C and there are so many different leaves that have become a little bit less mainstream.
There are great apps out there for checking pictures, which is a good way of gaining that extra bit of confidence, especially with easily identifiable plants that we know are edible. But don¡¯t ever take the information as 100 per cent correct. Always smell what you¡¯ve gathered, look at the surroundings, take lots of pictures, because things look different throughout the year. We have a mountain of books we use to cross-reference in the restaurant. I think we probably pick an item seven or eight times before we actually try it ¨C you have to be especially careful with mushrooms.
This feature is in association with Victorinox, the Swiss family-run company whose founder invented the Swiss Army knife. Along with this famous outdoor tool, Victorinox has other useful products, including kitchen knives, travel gear and watches ¨C all of which come in extremely handy for everyday adventures. Victorinox.com
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