Cooking Yucca -From Field to Fire- Desert Survival

hey guys so it's early spring out here in South Texas everything's greening up nicely what I want to show you is back off there in the distance a little bit of white now that is something truly amazing and if you live out here in the southwest perhaps you visited the right time of year you've seen these things they're all over town all over the country but I guarantee you most folks have no idea what they're missing out on this is your yucca and bloom now you see me make soap out of the roots cordage out of these beautiful spiky leaves but if you show up out here in the spring you're gonna encounter these giant towers of flowers these pillars and blossoms if you can get to those especially when they're fresh without getting stabbed which is the trick each one of these flowers is very crisp very edible and it's a treat how they kind of remind me of cucumber they're very fresh very crisp and you can eat those raw but definitely check them for bees and moths insects on the inside before you pop that in your mouth that's something everybody ought to try you can saute them up as well not only will you get all these flowers if you show up at the right time but inside of this pillar you have a structure that's holding it all up it's at a big stalk up to 3 inches in diameter which is a lot of food it's kind of like a squash analogue you can bake that in the fire kind of like ear of corn or dice it up and saute it however you like your squash this will cook up about the same way you want to try a yucca blossom puck okay it's definitely a carnivore I called these little guys yucca asparagus they're still young a few more days and they'll blossom out but this is all you can find you're hungry you can harvest these dice them up cook them a little bit they taste great as they are now this next part requires me to get a little cozy yeah this is the one I've chosen you can take these even before they bloom out look like asparagus let's cook up real nice there's got some young flowers on it see something to snack on all my yucca stem it's cooking the goals this is what we're after a good 10 15 pounds like closer to 15 check out the size of that stalk it's absolutely massive it's gonna be good eating it's time to go ahead and get a fire started get this on to cook there are a few things that we can collect along the way don't make this meal even better one of which is wild onion see down here these little white flowers popping up everywhere out here the onions were here before it makes it really easy once you get these tiny white flowers appearing everywhere dig them up takes a little bit of work but their calories and they taste really good make all kinds of things taste good one thing to remember when you're messing around out in this part of the country white Bowl right there and clean it up is that onions smell and taste like onions so if you're not sure wild garlic wild onion taste and smells like an onion you have an onion and a lot of folks get these confused with what's called crows poison which is right here next to another onion and if you break the stem let's talk the Leafs smells like chemicals nasty nasty stuff this is wild onion this is crows poison again taste it smell it this smells and tastes like onion this does not you might think you've hit onion Gold but you need to make sure that what you have is actually onion before you go chop it up throw its food and waste your meal for the evening mesquite that I want to go ahead and collect make utensils that up gonna make cooking a lot easier home sweet home 25 would suck some stuff to get that fire started and get shook it y'all wanted to know how I did this part I use an ugly stick which is a piece of wax jute take my striker feather out my Juke I placed that directly behind the striker so as it goes down the Ferro rod all my sparks go exactly where I need them our fire started nicely when you go ahead and do some food prep before our coals are ready to cook on now first step is gonna be taking these blossoms off now I told you earlier that they are super edible now without being cooked just kind of but they kind of look like up close absolutely gorgeous flower it kind of tastes like rose petals or cucumber very crisp but much thicker than a rose petal and that's ER just absolutely gorgeous beautiful awesome no discoloration as the blossoms get about three or four days old they start to discolor and the taste turns bitter but you could enjoy them all day long sorry I'm going to go ahead and eat while we're doing this but the idea here is that it's food on the go if you want that and you can always pull off the blossoms you want from the yucca without taking the whole stalk if all you wants a snack now what we're gonna do a little bit differently here as if you've seen this I've got some cast iron and I'm gonna add some butter know I'm cheating some wild onions and a whole lot of blossoms so we're gonna have a yucca saute along with yucca stalk bacon so go ahead and open up each of these blossoms take the leaves off this is not just for making sure portion sizes are small but you want to make sure that there aren't any bees or insects inside of each one of those blossoms because you only make that mistake once at this point we're running out of skillet room which is not a bad thing you still have lots of flowers left we'll go ahead and cut those away from the stalk put them off to the side so we can get this thing baking it go ahead and cut this into three sections so we can lay it down in the coals once those are ready that's true pretty nice though I set these over the side I'll wait for our fire steel up here finish up a spatula huckleberry coyotes are fine leave them alone still a little rough not bad for a five-minute Bush bachelor made a time mesquite that ought to work all right burn down got a few coals we can push around and make work go taking our yucca move them where we want them mesquite it's very very hot getting on the heat 10 minutes on a side level baked like a potato like a squash little easier than a potato crisp up real nice cleaned up good to go take them off add them to our meal few chives work and a little bit of butter a lot of butter depends on where you're from welcome to Texas what that they're just about letting ya right quit good [Applause] we're good but here's the point cooking that sound smells amazing it's looking real good we're to brown up just a little bit still a little crisp bloody butter though I imagine a few of you are wondering if I made a mistake by putting a larger rock back here in the center as opposed to this shorter Rock right here that's actually for a really good reason has to do with heat dissipation that heat comes up it travels on out and away from me if you spend enough time around a campfire you find ways to not bake yourself so even though those handles right here and in this metal I can still put my hand on it works out really well you know your skillets only have so much versatility and they work really great for a lot of things but this also allows me a heat gradient so down here low how much heat mid-tempo on top and you also have a grease catch there on the bottom lots of little regions tricks are good no yucca blossoms just about ready that Brown up just a little bit longer take our first bit of yucca still and is ready in a way that I knew that because I felt of it just a moment ago it'll actually be a little squishy yeah that's baked nicely fish the other ones in the gold a little more they ought to all be done in just a moment looks done to me want to wear another and it's time to eat take it off the heat put our two stocks still on the fire off and let them cool down for a little while our taste testers here and I wish I could smell this these stalks these yucca stalks baked up in the fire smelled just like walking into the fair the sweet corn they don't bake on the cob within the husk smells identical to that over here with the sauteed yucca flowers it smells like pretty much popcorn buttered popcorn from the movie theater maybe buttered noodles definitely butter in there but we have a lot of food it's time to go ahead and see if Huck approves you ready all right so we're gonna try the noodles first is you're gonna be the flowers covered in butter do you want some of these okay didn't even he didn't even smell him he just ate them it's a mess out here but what is it tastes like cabbage sautéed cabbage asparagus kind of like egg noodles a little bit slimy texture buttery crisp maybe spinach as well so this is really awesome to go with all kinds of stuff those legs in there make eggs rancheros a liver picante would not go awry this is definitely some trail food that I would eat a lot of one more bite hmm I'll put this to the side so we can dig in to those stalks I can get away for a little while not yet not yeah all right we have three pieces of stock right here obviously the ones that are thicker take a little bit longer to cook I'm gonna try the mid-sized them right now I've got a little bit of give on it and we'll slice into it now I baked these a lot of times we'll dice them up and we'll cook them like squash either baked in chips or fried or put into a stir-fried how easy that is to cut through all right pretty easy cut some slices off you already try this and this has not been seasoned at all sugary sweet this time okay not gonna do it sure I'm gonna do it this time he likes that butter butt mmm this is neat because this is the sweetest one I've ever had this is almost like candy baked sweet potato butternut squash very sweet a little bit of crunch crisp kind of like a not sure I bite into a squash that has a lot of sugar in it or syrup on it I have never had them this sweet before now one thing that's interesting with these stalks and it's taken a while to figure out is that all the sugar is in those stalks all the energy that those flowers need is pushed into the stalks immediately within a week a few years ago to actually cut several these when we were pickling and doing all kinds of stuff one of the socks got set aside I don't like to waste things but it went - it went to waste the flowers had already been opened up and pollinated on it nothing else was done the stalk was just there the entire thing off on the side we came back three weeks later and the flowers had actually matured and the entire pods had been developed seeds and all without the plant know without any roots no vascular system just the stalk and the flowers that were left and that was that was absolutely fantastic to find so kind of neat if you have animals that eat the pods eat the flowers if you're out there surviving and really competing against nature might be an option to go ahead and collect the flowers up while you can and do with them as you can so there's a lot to do with yuccas as they develop and we make the pods as the paws dry out and they make all the sugar we may get some cool desserts with that and eventually at the very end in a few months the idea is to go ahead collect a bunch of the seeds grind him up and make some truly Texas native bread which ought to hit the spot okay it's better than cornbread in some ways it depends on how much cornbread you've eaten but - I certainly hope you've learned something in this video today excuse me eating while I'm talking but please like subscribe share videos like this if you like the channel check it out tell your friends if you love Huck he knows be too cute for that but thank y'all so much for watching and until next time oh but you'll come back for more of this will you okay I've got to work on this champagne lifestyle make sure you're eating your greens okay that's about it that's all you get butter and some of the other stuff in there is not good for puppies glad you like it though a hidden benefit to these yuccas are that they're one of the first things to flower out each spring and there are a large flower which means all the bees that have been living off their honey all winter long the stuff that they've got last summer are gonna be ready for some fresh food as they come in as they leave start watching you'll see a pattern you track those bees back you're gonna find yourself some wild honey and beeswax for those are you wondering about wild bee hives from wild honey we've got a hive right back here and then out of that dead old tree now it's full of bees right now we're starting to wake up move around a couple of weeks in the spring and it ought to be overflowing with honey now we're gonna show you how to get at those how to smoke them out how to get the honeycomb the wax and all that sweet stuff without all the tools and hopefully without getting stung we'll see you

Channel: Bob Hansler

Views: 329,561

Rating: 4.9312954 out of 5

Keywords: Bob Hansler, Survival skills, Wilderness survival, Survivalist, Bushcraft, Foraging, Primitive survivsl, Catch and cook, Field to fire, How to cook yucca, Eating yucca, How to eat yucca, Desert survival, Yucca flowers, Edible yucca, Yucca rope, Yucca soap, Yucca cordage, Yucca fooyucca recepie, Yuca cassava

Id: UCt1q6kPcrs

Length: 27min 1sec (1621 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 28 2018