FORAGING FOR YOUR DINNER: Chefs and local experts on finding wild foods
- Cinda Chavich
- Oct 6
- 8 min read
Updated: Oct 14
There’s no food with more local provenance than the wild plants you can find growing right here in BC on a walking tour with a local expert.
Words and Photographs
By CINDA CHAVICH
Even in mid-winter Chef Tom Kral can find an array of edible delights along a woodland trail, and we’re here for today’s wild harvest.
Kral — a.k.a. Nature’s Chef — specializes in the art of foraging and serving wild foods, with his regular workshops and dinners. And though January may not be prime foraging season, our plant walk through a mixed coastal forest down to a rocky island beach uncovers something edible around every bend in the trail, whether salmon berry bushes about to bloom, Indian plums and rosehips, wild carrots, tasty new shoots of Himalayan blackberries or citrusy spruce tips, maple blossoms and horsetails.
“I love this ecosystem of meadow, forest and coastal plants,” says Kral, prying a woody bracket fungus from a dead tree, something we will later enjoy a mug of his earthy medicinal chai.
Tromping into the underbrush, with his typical infectious enthusiasm, Kral whoops at the sight of new blackberry leaves and licorice fern roots to add to his “tea basket”, and collects pepper cress for salad and gobs of gummy orange “jelly fungus”. He is teaching us about everything edible that the earth has to offer, from mushrooms, miner’s lettuce and purslane to sea salt, chickweed and kelp, but also warns us to avoid the parsley-like buttercup leaves and pointed needles of yew trees that are both toxic, even potentially deadly.
“Food and medicine is all around — we just need to wake up to it,” he says, describing how careful and respectful harvesting can actually help wild plants and stimulate growth, while feeding foragers.
“The First People had a relationship with this earth — hunting and gathering and cultivating — a relationship that was about taking but also giving back.”
WILD CANADIAN CUISINE
There’s no food with more local provenance than the variety wild plants you can find growing right here in BC, literally in your own backyard and into the fields and forests beyond. There are 3,400 different species of mushrooms in BC alone — more than any other corner of Canada — and the forests and seas are brimming with wild edibles.
With our new commitment to celebrating Canadian cuisine and local ingredients, there may be nothing quite as patriotic as a feast of fire morels, a pasta infused with healthy wild nettles or a dessert topped with glistening pink salmon berries.
Foraging is a hot topic in restaurant circles, too, with chefs relying on local foragers to bring wild ingredients to their kitchen door.
Whether it’s electric green nettle pasta with lobster mushrooms at Wild Mountain in Sooke or locally foraged winged kelp flavouring Sheringham Seaside Gin, wild foods add true local provenance to our meals.
The hyper-local foraging trend means more people are keen to explore the world of wild foods but you can’t approach the topic with a cavalier attitude.
An afternoon outing to search for edibles in the woods can be fun, but it’s incredibly complex, too. Some tasty plants are easy to identify while others can make you sick, or even kill you.
Foraging is a fascinating hobby, but one that requires study and diligence, alongside an experienced guide.
And like Chef Kral, there are several local foragers offering educational tours and tastings for the culinary curious.
EXPERT HELP
Chefs have professional foragers who they call on throughout the year for delicious wild ingredients, especially mushrooms.
At a recent six-course Wild Mushroom Dinner — part of Tourism Victoria’s Intention Series, a new initiative to position the city at a “wellness destination” — chef Brian Tesolin created an innovative wild food menu while author and mycologist Richard Winder offered diners insights into the chanterelles, turkey tails, morels, shiitakes and other fungus on the plate.
Tesolin leans into wild foraged ingredients for his Pacific Northwest menu at The Courtney Room, where his homemade pasta might be tossed with nettle pesto and the duck drizzled in a rosehip jus. It's a restaurant where you can always expect to taste something seasonal and hyper-local — dishes created in Tesolin's creative style.
But this special menu was all about locally foraged mushrooms — from his Fanny Bay oyster starter with pickled winter chanterelles and a cashew fritter topped with jelly tooth fungus jam, to a foie gras parfait with turkey tail mushroom and lamb salad roulade with matsutake (pine mushroom) jus, it was a celebration of the wide variety of wild mushrooms and edible fungus that thrive in our west coast ecosystem.
Winder, a retired forestry research scientist, has written four books about mushrooms (four volumes of Mushrooms for All Seasons) which are all deep dives into the topic.
And there are other local experts and books to help anyone understand where to find wild edibles and use them in everyday dishes, whether The Deerholme Foraging Cookbook: Wild Ingredients and Recipes from the Pacific Northwest from local chef Bill Jones; or The Science and Spirit of Seaweed (and a companion guide for kids) from marine biologist Amanda Swinimer of Dakini Tidal Wilds.
Both local experts offer hands-on workshops and tours to learn about foraging for wild foods, too.
EAT YOUR WEEDS
Beyond the Michelin chefs and the off-the-grid survivors, the average eater can dabble in wild foods, by augmenting everyday dinners with some strategically placed weeds and wild shrubs in the back yard, the kind of plants that always grow, despite ongoing neglect.
That’s where edibles like dandelions, chickweed, blackberries and sprig spruce tips come into play. If you have the space, you can also add wild foods to your menu by including them in your landscaping plans. Plant some wild blueberry or gooseberry bushes, seed a shady spot with miner’s lettuce and ostrich ferns (to eat when they emerge in early spring as fiddleheads), and plan to harvest the blossoms from maple trees for tasty fritters. Seed wild leeks (ramps) or grow wild onions (Allium vineale or “crow garlic”) to add an intense garlicky punch to any dish.
As long as you don’t use pesticides or herbicides on your lawn, add the young dandelions you dig up to your salads along with other wild greens.
Nettles, wild mustard greens, sheep sorrel, wild fennel fronds — all of these “weeds” can go into classic old-world cooking, whether French cream of dandelion soup or nettle pesto. In Greece, wild spring shoots and greens of all kinds (horta) are added to salads and rice dishes, used to stuff spanakopita or simply sauteed with olive oil and garlic.
Wild greens are loaded with nutrients, whether vitamins, minerals or antioxidants, and traditionally consumed after winter ends as a nutritive tonic. Our modern domestic greens pale in comparison to wild plants for their nutritional value.
It’s always fun to go out in the woods to
forage, but anyone can visit one of Victoria’s public “food gardens” — little parks and patches of greenery, planted with edible wild perennials and tended by volunteers. They're open to all — whether the corner of Banfield Park where you’ll find nettles, goji berries, cardoons and huckleberry bushes, or KinPark Youth Urban Farm in downtown Duncan, filled with berry bushes and herbs.
Spring Ridge Commons in Fernwood is Canada’s oldest public food forest and permaculture garden, a half-acre of urban edibles, with nettles, seabuckthorn, damson plums and Desert King figs to pick. It’s where I caught up with Mikaela Cannon to talk about her new book, Foraging as a Way of Life.
SELF SUFFICENCY THROUGH FORAGING
Mikaela hails from Sweden but now lives the “wildcrafting” life on her acreage near Armstrong, in the north Okanagan. She “facilitates classes and workshops and hikes, focussed on responsible foraging and wildcrafting” and her new book, Foraging As a Way of Life is a field guide of edible wild plants you can find in BC. Broken into seasons, with illustrations, scientific descriptions and information about using each plant, it represents a year of wildcrafting from her farm, with a focus on self-sufficiency.
As a recent immigrant, she was surprised to discover that even with all of its wild spaces, it can be difficult to find places to forage in Canada, as most parks are public spaces do not permit foraging. But when foraging anywhere — in a food garden or a forest — Mikaela says its important to understand how to harvest responsibly, with sustainability in mind.
She follows indigenous First Nations protocols for harvesting wild plants — a spiritual connection to “seek permission” from the plants and taking only what you need.
“When reciprocity is your guiding beacon, the forest becomes your community and you become supported by it,” she writes. “Your neighbors (the plants, animals and water) become friends.”
To be certain about any plant you plan to forage for food, Mikaela recommends observing it in all seasons, making detailed notes and drawings, and reading everything you can to learn about it, her methodology for writing about wild edibles.
“I am not a herbalist, a nutritionist, a botanist or a doctor so I cannot tell you how you should use any of the plants for food or medicine,” she says of the detailed information and advice she shares in Foraging as a Way of Life.
“I can, however, explain how my family and I use them.”
THE WILD TABLE
Tasting wild foods is the first step and if DIY isn’t your thing, you can also add some wild foods to your pantry with the selection of botanicals from Forest for Dinner.
This company, based in Port Alberni, harvests a wide variety of wild ingredients in BC and then dries or preserves them for products ranging from dried mushrooms and mushroom powders to pickled sea asparagus and spruce tips; wild blueberry, huckleberry or Oregon grape jelly; and dried botanicals such as rose hips, nettles, elderflowers and Nootka rose.
All products are available from their online store or at farmers markets and local retailers.
Attending a wild food dinner is another great way to hone your wild foods palate. Try one of the regular farm dinners with chef Bill Jones at Deerholme Farm in the Cowichan Valley. Or sign up with Chef Kral for his foraging walks, private dining and catering services.
Our walk in the woods culminated with a muti-course wild dinner created by the foraging chef — an impressive meal that started with a deconstructed seafood chowder, with alder-smoked mussels and clams, plus braised Cowichan beef ribs with chanterelles and his fermented juniper and kelp sauerkraut, finishing with a dessert of pale celadon green grand-fir needle infused crème brulee with salal and blueberry compote.
We sipped his golden plum, wild ginger and rhubarb mocktails and an aromatic tea made by steeping mint with grand fir needles, and finished with a mug of earthy chai, infused with the medicinal bracket fungus he knocked off a dead tree in the forest earlier in the day.
Kral tackles a new topic every month in his walking workshops — whether making flakey sea salt or tapping a big leaf maple to explore wild sugar. Our event was part of Tourism Victoria’s new Intention series, shining a light on wellness experiences in Victoria and environs.
It's just one way for food lovers to taste our local flavours, while learning to appreciate everything nature provides!
©CindaChavich2025
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