Foraging feasts from the land
Mike King scours the wilds of Ka¯piti, fossicking and foraging wild and flavoursome produce for restaurants. He talks to Sharon Stephenson.
In dense bush, in the backblocks of the Ka¯ piti Coast, Mike King is tearing a handful of leaves from a magnolia tree. He crunches them between his palms, waves them under my nose, and asks if they smell of bay leaves. They do. They also taste of them.
So far, we’ve plucked and nibbled chickweed, wood sorrel, golden elm seeds, and the spindly fronds of water celery that, weirdly, taste like parsnip. Still to come are ginko berries and delicate purple princess tree flowers, which couldn’t look more different from mushrooms, yet taste of mushroom soup.
King, 37, is a professional forager, who scours Ka¯ piti’s lifestyle blocks for wild edible vegetables, herbs, fruit, and flowers for restaurants such as Paraparaumu Beach’s 50-50, where chef/owner Helen Turnbull incorporates King’s foraged goodies into her inventive menu.
‘‘Helen’s wish-list for this week includes barbary flowers, bamboo, watercress, and lemon wood flowers,’’ says King.
The pair met a year ago when King was growing oyster mushrooms in an insulated shopping container on the lawn of his O¯ taki home.
‘‘I was supplying local restaurants with mushrooms, and Helen asked if I knew where to find green walnuts that she wanted to pickle. I did but asked if she’d ever tried Japanese walnuts or black walnuts, which I also forage locally.’’
Before long, King was stumbling across other edible plants and flowers such as loquats, tı¯toki berries, mountain pawpaw, and staghorn flowers, which taste like sumac.
‘‘I started to read everything I could about exotic and native plants, to see what was and wasn’t edible.’’
Foraging, of course, isn’t new. Our ancestors knew how to identify and prepare wild plant foods, a skill that was essential to their survival. While some of this knowledge has been passed down through generations, much of it has been lost along the way.
A few years ago, the trend of plucking wild plants from the countryside was spearheaded by chef Rene Redzepi, who foraged for his $500 tasting menu at Copenhagen’s Noma restaurant.
Around the same time, sustainability became more than just a buzzword and, as people seek to fill their plates with locally sourced, low-impact, seasonal food, foraging is becoming more popular.
Six months ago, King got more serious about his part-time job (he’s an arborist by trade). He gained a food safety certificate and became licensed with the Ka¯ piti District Council.
These days, he’s also the go-to forager for a Paraparaumu florist and a couple of gin distilleries. The first, The National Distillery Company, was established in an art deco building in Napier by a pair of Ka¯ piti restaurateurs.
‘‘They wanted to use native botanicals for their gin, so I sent them samples of seeds, berries and bark.’’ The distillers settled on flax seeds, which King continues to source for them.
He’s also been working with Marlboroughbased Elemental Distillers, foraging gorse flowers and kawakawa berries for its gin.
King recently started selling boxes of salad and stir-fry foraged greens at Wellington’s Sunday market and Paraparaumu’s Saturday market under his Finders Eaters brand. Recent boxes included wild fennel, pine pollen catkins, beach spinach, and abutilon and calendula flowers.
‘‘People are really interested in what’s out there, and the different flavours they can add to their food.’’
It’s a long way from the kindergarten teaching role King originally trained for.
But when love intervened, in the form of German social worker Nina, King moved to his now wife’s homeland for a decade.
‘‘We lived in Germany’s Black Country, about 11⁄2 hours from Stuttgart and, while Nina completed her social work and art therapy qualifications, I changed career and took on a landscape gardening apprenticeship. ‘‘
That morphed into specialised arborist work, and King had his own business for six years. The couple moved back here in 2014 and settled with their daughter Maia, now 2, on the Ka¯ piti Coast, where King started his own arborist business.
Next up, is another collaboration with Turnbull, selling ready-to-eat meals that will showcase the fruits of King’s foraging labours.
‘‘We’ll probably start selling them at markets, but I’m really keen to get a food truck.’’