Preserving Wild Foods: A Modern Forager's Recipes for Curing, Canning, Smoking & Pickling

Description

The Artisanal food movement is exploding, drawing on old-world preserving methods such as curing, pickling, and smoking to create a new world of specialty meats, jams, cheeses, fish, game, and preserved vegetables. Chef Matthew Weingarten taps into this enthusiasm and brings a taste of the wild to the home table with "Preserving Wild Foods". His inspired recipes use a wide range of ingredients from the sea, fields, forest, fresh water, and gardens. Adventurous home cooks, farmers' market fans, hunters, foragers, and preserving enthusiasts alike will delight at the chance to create these uniquely flavoured preserves. Weingarten brings a sense of place to every taste with his personal stories of foraging and harvesting many of the ingredients in their natural environments. Evocative photography and narrative text communicate the specialness of each food and how to best bring out and appreciate its unique flavours. Clear instructions make small-batch preserving techniques easily accessible to the home cook, from smoking fish to putting up jam, pickling vegetables, curing meat, and making candied preserves. The results are one-of-a-kind tastes and meals that carry within them memories of the wind, water, woods, gardens, and fields.

Raquel Pelzel's work has been featured in Saveur, the Wall Street Journal, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Shape, and Epicurious, among many others. Formerly an editor at Cook's Illustrated and the senior food editor and test kitchen director for Tasting Table, Pelzel has written more than 20 cookbooks and has judged Food Network shows including Chopped Junior and Beat Bobby Flay. Pelzel lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her two sons. Matthew Weingarten is the executive chef at Inside Park at St. Bart's in New York City, where he brings a strong sense of place and seasonality to his professional cooking. He was previously chef de cuisine at Savoy and Quilty's, both in SoHo. At Inside Park, Weingarten fosters strong relationships with the farmers and purveyors who have become part of his food family. Interested in lost culinary techniques, he practices the art of curing meats, pickling vegetables, and preserving fruits. He enjoys giving back to the community that he has helped shape by peer-mentoring in the workplace and introducing others to a world of place and season at the dining table.

"New York chef Matthew Weingarten and TT's senior food editor, Raquel Pelzel, prove that delicious wild ingredients are abundant if you know what to look for and where to find it, even in Manhattan's concrete jungle. But the book is hardly just a guide to picking plants: Find great instructions for making everything from maraschino cherries to oil-cured anchovies." --Library Journal "But while the book is about smoking, curing and otherwise preserving wild edibles, you can make these recipes without day-tripping upstate or getting arrested for picking lamb's-quarters in Prospect Park, because the techniques work just as well on chanterelles hunted at the Greenmarket or Union Market. Our advice? Buy yourself the book now and next year you can give everyone on your list a jar of handmade Maraschino cherries." --Zester Daily "A serious book for the committed forager who sallies undaunted o'er beaches, hedgerows, fields, forests and wetlands. With lovely photos and detailed recipes, the authors offer a range of pickles, preserves, smoked, brined, fermented foods." --thekitchn.com "New York City chef Weingarten doesn't let his urban base get in the way of his passion for scavenging edibles; even sidewalk cracks are fair game when it comes to sourcing herbs. In this encyclopedia of all things cured, canned, smoked, and pickled, he shares his favorite ways to preserve the bounty." --Tasting Table "A must read for preserving enthusiasts" --Edible Brooklyn "Will delight those looking for a new experience ... Weingarten and Pelzel take readers beyond their backyard gardens to landscapes and waters many home cooks may not have considered using to fill their pantry. A great reference for those who want to try their hand at recipes outside of the "fruit preserves box." "Weingarten uses his sensibilities as a chef to both wake up standard recipes and introduce new flavor combinations ... a valuable book for aspirational foragers, preserving geeks, and people who forage regularly and [are] serious about preserving their finds." "Preserving Wild Foods is a recipe book as well as an expression of the 'wonder and joy' that comes from a connection to the seasonal, natural world. ... A great book for beginning foragers, as the authors interweave foraged foods with those you might find in a cultivated garden or farmers' market."