Shed chef digs deep to show diners roots of local fare
March 11, produce lovers seeking enlightenment beyond bagged salad mix will slowly canvass a stream bank on a private 5-acre farm in the Dry Creek Valley looking for wild lunch provisions. Lemon balm, cow parsnips, spice bush, Douglas fir shoots, bay laurel, plantain and wild chervil are among the wild edibles that sprout there each spring.
Their guide: Perry Hoffman, the culinary director at Shed, Northern California’s acclaimed locavore utopia. Hoffman, a scion of a deep-rooted Wine Country family (his grandparents founded the French Laundry) and the youngest chef to receive a Michelin star, owes his proclivity for wild foods to his florist mother and gardener father, for whom nature is a way of life. He has led these tours each spring for the last few years — his personal effort to better
connect diners to their food.
“Foraging is a great way to learn about seasonality from the earth,” says Hoffman.
First and foremost, foragers will learn how to properly identify plants. After all, wild chervil, with its lacy white flowers and ferny leaves, is commonly mistaken for hemlock, the poison that famously did in Socrates. Then they’ll sample them. Douglas fir shoots, for example, taste like tart citrus and pair well with a salad of tangerines, creamy avocado and a drizzle of fruity olive oil; calendula, with its pungent, eucalyptus-like essence, tames the funk of game meats.
A snip of a leafy cluster here, a slice of a tender stalk there, and approximately 90 minutes later, the foraging party will decamp to Shed for the big finale. They’ll spill their baskets onto a big marble table, where Hoffman will compose a breathtaking salad of the harvest — a one-of-a-kind communal lunch that could only taste of that particular afternoon in that particular area.
“Nature tells you when seeds are ready to germinate, not some farmer’s almanac or solstice calendar or gardening blog,” Hoffman says.
Miner’s lettuce — that spinachy broadleaf that grows well in cool, foggy climes — is Hoffman’s botanical barometer on the topic. Due to last October’s benevolent rains, the plant sprouted much earlier than its usual springtime debut and will likely succumb to a freeze or two before it has a chance to flower and seed — a circumstance that no farmer’s almanac could have preOn dicted.
As a chef, Hoffman views the landscape as “a table that’s constantly spread.” However, he is gentle with his take, foraging only what he needs, leaving the rest to proliferate. Still, he feels for the picked plants and their fate. “The plants would love nothing more than for no bird, no rodent, no human being to ever touch them so they can sustain themselves,” says Hoffman. “But if we don’t cook and eat them, how will we ever know how special they are?”