The Tastiest Tree Shoot You've Never Eaten

[Music] greetings everyone i'm adam harrington and today i'd like to introduce you to a lesser-known wild food that you can harvest during the spring season now when i say lesser known i have to provide some clarification this wild food is lesser known here in eastern north america and more specifically in the northeastern united states and southeastern canada where the species grows in its native regions in china japan korea and in russia this plant is much more commonly known and utilized as a wild food the woody plant i'm referring to is none other than japanese angelica tree and it is one of the coolest plants that you will ever encounter it's also one of the most formidable plants that you will ever encounter this species aurelia elata is a small tree or a large shrub that contains very sharp prickles which some people call thorns or spines and these prickles are found all over the tree if you grab the tree trunk with your bare hands these prickles will easily puncture your skin now a few plants in this corner of the world resemble japanese angelica tree so you are unlikely to confuse it for too many species except for devil's walking stick devil's walking stick oralia spinosa looks nearly identical to japanese angelica tree it's very prickly it's a small tree or a large shrub and the overall morphology closely resembles the morphology of japanese angelica tree fortunately the edible uses of japanese angelica tree that i'll cover in this video also apply to devil's walking stick and after i briefly discuss how to use japanese angelica tree as a wild food i'll briefly compare and contrast the physical properties of the two species so right here is japanese angelica tree now devil's walking stick is growing in this general area but i'm only going to harvest japanese angelica tree today because its numbers are so much greater in this particular area all these woody trunks that are coming up out of the soil in this red pine plantation this is all japanese angelica tree so i would say that this particular colony is quite aggressive as i mentioned before japanese angelica tree is not native to north america it was introduced to this continent as an ornamental in the 1830s and it soon became naturalized outside of cultivated settings japanese angelica tree spreads through root suckers and it also spreads with the assistance of birds that consume the colorful fruits and disperse the seeds devil's walking stick oralia spinosa is native to the eastern united states and it is a very common species particularly in the southeastern united states but here in this particular ecosystem its numbers are not that high so i'm going to leave it alone today and i will instead focus my attention on japanese angelica tree so the parts that i'm most interested in today are the young shoots and the young leaves spring is the season when the young shoots and the young leaves are the most tender now i realize that spring is a fairly long and diverse season so let me be more specific that way you can time your harvest perfectly right now in my neck of the woods western pennsylvania service berries just past their peak stage of flowering red elderberry is at its peak stage of flowering paper birch is flowering and the young seed cones of tamarack have appeared and are eagerly awaiting pollen deposition when all this is happening japanese angelica tree shoots are at a good stage for harvesting now to be honest with you it probably would have been more ideal for me to harvest these shoots about a week ago many shoots have already unfurled and leaves are starting to develop and it seems that deer have munched on all the shoots that are at their level but fortunately plenty of shoots above their level are still good to harvest so i will focus my attention up there instead so here's what a good japanese angelica tree chute looks like as you can see the leaves haven't unfurled completely yet they're still held tightly together and there are no prickles on the stems this chute is located maybe six and a half feet off the ground interestingly the shoots that are reappearing after having been browsed by deer are very prickly you can see young prickles all over the stems now you can harvest these shoots but you'll definitely want to remove the prickles with your fingernails or with a knife today though i'm more interested in harvesting shoots like this one an easy way to do this is to bend the trunks down and break the shoots right at their base where they become woody now i'm wearing gloves not because the shoots are prickly but because the trunks are loaded with hardened incredibly sharp skin puncturing prickles so here's what a handful of japanese angelica tree shoots look like notice that there are no prickles on any of these shoots if there are you'll want to remove them and you may also want to peel some of the stalks if the outer layers seem tough and fibrous these shoots are still very young and tender so i don't feel the need to spend too much time peeling their outer layers so what do we do with the shoots once we harvest them well you can eat them raw and if you're just looking for a trailside nibble which is often the case for me you can eat them as is on the spot or you can cook them and the cooking technique that i will demonstrate is my go-to technique for most wild young tender shoots blanching now sometimes i will saute shoots after blanching but i'm not going to do that today i'm just going to blanch them so make sure your shoots are clean remove any tough parts but if you kept the shoots clean in the field and if you only harvested tender parts you won't need to do any more work in the kitchen now some people might be tempted to remove the base of these shoots because they are firmer than the leaves but as long as the base isn't woody i'd recommend leaving it there for two reasons first it keeps the shoots connected together so they don't fall apart and second the texture is wonderful it's almost crunchy but not quite add the shoots to boiling water cook for a few minutes i'll cook these for three minutes remove the shoots from the water with a slotted spoon season if you want and enjoy and here i decided to add the freshly blanched shoots to a dish of wild harvested rice now of course there are lots of other ways to prepare japanese angelica tree shoots and a very common way to consume them particularly in japan is to fry them and create a tempura but blanching is good enough for me the taste of a japanese angelica tree shoot is very pleasant it's very herbaceous it has some bitter notes near the end more so when you're eating it raw compared to after you blanched it and it has an ap aca vibe to it and ap aca is the family of plants that parsley carrot celery and cilantro belong to as it turns out the family that japanese angelica tree belongs to a rally aca is taxonomically placed within the same order that apiece belongs to the ap alleys order and the first time i tasted japanese angelica tree i detected a very unique almost terpene taste that seemed very familiar and i initially couldn't figure out where i detected that taste before it eventually dawned on me that the other source of that terpene yet still pleasant taste was from american spikenard fruits as it turns out american spikenard aurelia racemosa is closely related to japanese angelica tree aurelia alada now as i said earlier japanese angelica tree closely resembles devil's walking stick the two species despite opposing names ones angelic the others devilish look nearly identical now unfortunately spring probably isn't the best time to differentiate between the two species you'll probably have more luck during the summer and autumn season when the flowers and fruits are available the flower and fruiting structures of japanese angelica tree kind of sit on top but still within the canopy of the tree they don't extend too far beyond the top the flower and fruiting structures of devil's walking stick often protrude well beyond the top of the canopy and they often droop due to the weight of all the fruits clustered together fortunately devil's walking stick shoots are edible and you could treat them exactly the same way you would treat japanese angelica tree shoots so that's all i got for you today hope you enjoyed the video hope you learned something i encourage you to go out and see if you can find this prickly tree it's not very tall it's not very wide but it's shoot may be the tastiest wild food you've never tried thank you for watching this video i truly appreciate it if you enjoyed it and if you're not subscribed to the learn your land youtube channel i encourage you to subscribe to the learn your land youtube channel you can also head on over to learnyourland.com and sign up for the email newsletter and if you're on social media feel free to give learn your land a follow on instagram and on facebook thanks again for watching i'll see you on the next video

Channel: Learn Your Land

Views: 155,828

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Id: Su6mElk_aOE

Length: 9min 58sec (598 seconds)

Published: Thu May 26 2022