Transcription
This is my all-time favorite species of wild lettuce, and from my experiments, I think that most people are not only using it incorrectly but also completely missing out on where it shines the most. I am making this video because I want more people to know about this.
This species is called American Wad Lettuce, *Lactuca canadensis*. In Sam Thayer's New Field Guide, he refers to it as "good wild lettuce," and as you're about to learn, there is good reason for that. By the end of this video, I believe that you'll be looking at wad lettuce in a completely new way. And I'm going to break down the details that you need to know to distinguish common wild lettuce species in North America and the globe, which is something that a lot of you have asked for. I actually have a key for that. Plus, I'll also tell you about how to distinguish them from other plants.
One of the reasons that wild lettuce is so popular as an herb is for creating a resinous extract from it called lactucarium, and that was traditionally used to alleviate pain or insomnia. We have an idea of some of the compounds that were responsible for this effect; they are called sesquiterpene lactones, and they are quite bitter. So, if we use bitterness as a marker for strength, good wild lettuce is one of the least bitter species, so it may not be the best to make an extract with. Additionally, in the traditional context, for the official preparation that we call lactucarium, species like prickly wild lettuce or opium wild lettuce were typically the ones that were used. I can tell you from experience that they are in a completely different ballpark from American Wad Lettuce when it comes to the bitterness.
But don't write the species off just yet. Its weakness as an extract is its strength for another category. I don't know about you, but I'm a believer in the idea of "let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food." I eat as much wild food as I can year-round, and I believe it's one of the healthiest things that anyone can do. So, why don't we put lettuce in wild lettuce? By the way, though, if you do want to get high-quality wild lettuce extract, my friend Christian at WildLettuce.com is where even I get my extracts from these days. He uses a particularly strong species that we actually cover later in the video. Check out his classic wild lettuce tincture; that one is my favorite.
Okay, so there's a lot of wild plants that people will try to present to you as a really nice salad green, things like dandelion or violet or henbit. And if you ask me, all of them, all of them fall far short of the mark. I know that I say the term "favorite" a lot, all the time, even, but when I tell you that wild lettuce is my favorite wild green, I mean my absolute favorite, number one, pound for pound, 10 out of 10, best wild salad green out there. They have an amazing texture and only a very mild bitterness on top of that. They have something of their own flavor, their own character, you know, that to me, the cultivated lettuce lacks. Honestly, if I could have a garden full of American Wad Lettuce, I would. Actually, next year, I think I will, and you can too. More on that a little bit later.
One thing to know is that not all good wild lettuce plants will be as mild as others. Typically, when you find them growing in rich, richer soil in a more shaded environment, they'll have a better overall flavor. Most of the wad lettuce greens that I harvest are when they are at the basal rosette stage. When they bolt and send up a flowering stalk, they can get a little bit more bitter, but even then, I found that the very top tender growing leaves can still be very good for eating. Unlike its cousin dandelion, which flowers in very early spring, wild lettuce is much later into the year, late spring to early summer. So you have a bigger window of time to get them at their best. And you can use my interactive forager's calendar to get a better idea of the exact timing for wild lettuce and many other wild food and medicinal species as well.
Another thing that you can try is to eat the dense clusters of the unopened flowers. They're kind of like broccoli. I learned about this one from Forager Chef this year. I've tried everything from eating them raw straight off the plant to blanching them and sautéing them, and I think that they're both great. Again, I would encourage you to sample the flavor first, first, you know, munch on a little bit, uh, because it can really vary from plant to plant. If you do find some that are a little bit more on the bitter side, one thing that you can do is to blanch them, which will take away some of the bitterness. And if they're still a bit bitter after that, another trick that I learned from Forager Chef's article is to leave them in water overnight in the fridge. By the next morning, a lot of the bitterness will go away.
There are so many incredible ways to eat this plant, I'm telling you. Good wild lettuce may be one of the most underrated wild edible plants and greens out there. I just want more people to know about them, which is why I'm so happy that you're watching this video. And if you are interested in foraging for them specifically, or maybe other wad lettuce species, then you'll have to know how to distinguish them from each other, which thankfully is quite easy if you know what to look for. I'm going to show you details that you can use year-round.
But before we get into that, I want to address one final thing with American wild lettuce. From what we've learned, does this mean that you can't use it to make a good wild lettuce extract? No, I wouldn't say that. In fact, if we look at the documented uses of American wild lettuce by Native American tribes like the Cherokee or the Iroquois, we can see that it is generally used as an analgesic and a sedative herb, in addition to all the food uses that we just explored.
But there is an aspect to responsible foraging that comes into play here that benefits not just you, but the native ecology of North America as well. Being a native plant to North America, we would want to promote the population health of American Wad Lettuce over non-native species. Despite being non-native, prickly wild lettuce, *Lactuca serriola*, is by far the most prolific species in North America and the world as well. I recommend to most people to use prickly wild lettuce for extract because one, practically everyone can find it, and two, it is super bitter, so likely stronger.
A funny aside, if you want to nerd out with me for a second, despite prickly wild lettuce being one of the toughest, spikiest, and most bitter species in the world, it's actually theorized that it is the wild progenitor for our grocery store garden lettuce that we have today. This was done through selective breeding in ancient Egypt over many generations. In North America, though, selective cultivation wasn't really needed, as it came with a great off-the-shelf option with American Wad Lettuce. I've always, always wondered how lettuce today would be different if ancient Egyptians started off with something like American Wad Lettuce instead of prickly wild lettuce. Would they have had to do selective cultivation at all? I don't know. What do you guys think?
Anyway, if we gather prickly wild lettuce for an extract, it is a major triple win. We'll be removing an invasive species, we'll be getting a high-quality extract from it, we'll be promoting the native species, and as a bonus, we'll be spreading around amazing wild food. In fact, I believe in this so much that I'm giving away thousands of American Wad Lettuce seeds that I personally wildcrafted myself to my Patreon community members. I still have a lot available, so check out the description if you would like to receive them from me. They are super easy to grow, by the way, and we're going to be doing that together.
Okay, so this will set us up perfectly to learn how to distinguish different common species in North America. And if I've convinced you about how amazing American Wad Lettuce is, there is one key detail to know that will single it out from all the others. There are about four species in North America and Europe that you are most likely to encounter. I'm going to use scientific names here so that I can be precise, but you can always pause the screen to screenshot the common names as I read them out. We have *Lactuca serriola*, *Lactuca canadensis*, *Lactuca biennis*, and *Lactuca floridana*. And it'll also throw in *Lactuca virosa*, opium wild lettuce, as well. A variety of *virosa* is one of the species that Christian from WildLettuce.com uses for his wad lettuce products also. So, I'm not saying *Lactuca* a thousand times over and over again; I will just refer to them by their species name: *serriola*, *virosa*, etc.
First, we will talk about the flowers. All of these species, except for two, have small yellow flowers. The two that don't are *floridana* and *biennis*, and they have purple flowers, also small, all of them usually at or below half an inch across. But the flowers are only out for part of the year. So, let's learn more details, especially because we'd usually want to be foraging for the greens for eating when they're much younger. By the way, around the flowering time is when I suggest you gather the plants for making an extract, and the flower timing is also on my interactive forager's calendar.
So, for the vegetative parts, in terms of form and texture, *serriola* is quite different from all of the other ones. Its leaves and its midrib hairs are far more robust and stiff than all of the other species. The leaves will feel more tough in the hand compared to *canadensis*, where they are a lot softer. When we get into the characteristics of leaf shape, things get pretty interesting. We have some that are usually deeply divided, kind of like a dandelion leaf; those are *serriola*, *canadensis*, and *biennis*. Then we have *virosa*, which usually has unlobed or undivided leaves. And finally, *floridana*, which I think is the cool one, that has kind of these arrow-shaped looking leaves. They are top-heavy at the end. And you know what? You don't have to worry about remembering all of these details. I have all of them in a simple key that you can find in my foraging knowledge base, which connects to the calendar that I mentioned earlier.
But what was that key detail to single out good wild lettuce, *canadensis*, from all the others? Let me show you. Cut into the stem or leaf of your wad lettuce plant and see if the sap that oozes out remains white or oxidizes to a yellow color almost instantly. If it oxidizes to the yellow color right away, it is good wild lettuce. If not, it's one of the other ones, and you can use that key to figure out which. I've tested this detail with every single species except *biennis*, but from the photos that I've seen, I believe that this will hold true for that one as well.
However, that trick will only work if you know that you're dealing with a wild lettuce species. There are other similar-looking plants with sap that will oxidize quickly that aren't wad lettuce at all. So, to learn how to distinguish wad lettuce from all of them, check out my new wad lettuce identification and lookalike guide. It is exactly what you're looking for, and I hope to see you there.