Transcription
Over the past decade, I've spent thousands of hours meticulously exploring and documenting the wild food species in North America. And in this video, I'm going to show you the top five that you need to know to keep you and your family from going hungry if, for whatever reason, food became a little more difficult to acquire.
Right off the bat, we need to address a common misconception when it comes to what makes a really good long-term survival food. I'm not talking about little things that you can find here and there to give you a bit of extra emergency calories if you're like, lost in the woods or things like that. No, today I'm showing you wild foods that you can rely on to give you an abundance of calories, providing you with sustenance year after year, even for a lifetime. I call these staple wild foods, and we humans have been eating them for thousands and thousands of years. These are foods that are easy to gather and process in very large quantities, and they're viable to store for long periods of time without major energy requirements. The ones that I'm showing you are concentrated in Central and Eastern North America, but collectively, they can be found across the continent and other parts of the globe as well. And don't worry about memorizing all this information. There is going to be a lot of it, because I've made a full guide that you can download with all the important details covered.
And the first wild food that we're going to take a look at is Hickory nuts, which have largely been overlooked due to a misunderstanding in the efficient way to process them. But ignoring Hickory is a huge mistake, because their nuts contain over 650 calories per 100g. To put that in perspective, wheat flour has just about 350 calories per 100g. In addition, Hickory nuts are extremely nutritious. They are a rich source of essential minerals like manganese, copper, and zinc, and they are loaded with B vitamins as well. You may be familiar with pecan, which is actually just a particular kind of Hickory itself, but it's a little bit more well-known because you can get them from grocery stores. Because the shells of pecan are quite thin compared to its cousins, it has been spread far out of the main range of Southeastern North America.
There are two problems with all the other hickories from a food perspective. Number one, the shells are much thicker, but more importantly, for a lot of them, the inner shell and the nut meat, they really wrap into each other. So if you try to use something like a nut pick to get that out, you would have an exceptionally difficult time of it. So forget about getting whole pieces of the nut meat out. We're just going to pound everything, nut meat, shells and all, into a powder and use it to make the greatest nut milk in the entire world. And this can be achieved very, very easily with a powerful blender like a Vitamix.
There are many different species of hickories out there, but the ones that you are interested in in particular for food are mainly Shagbark Hickory and then Pignut or Common Hickory. Hickory nuts come in husks that will split, unlike their more distant cousin, Black Walnut, which we'll talk about a little bit later in the video. That one is holes that do not split. With some of them, like Shagbark, if it's difficult to open up the hole and get them separated from the shell, just throw it away. That is a bad nut. With other ones, like Pignut, that's what I'm holding right here, the husks do usually remain completely adhered to the shell, and if they look like that, they're still completely fine.
One thing that is very important to do that you do not want to skip is to test the nuts that you're gathering before you get a whole bunch of them. There is nothing worse than spending a bunch of time gathering a whole lot of them only to get home and float test them and realize that 90% of them weren't even good. You can see here that I was clearly in a rush and I did not follow my own advice.
So once we've gotten them, now we get to cracking. You need to crack them at least in half at first to inspect the nut inside before throwing them in with all the others to make hickory nut milk. A rancid hickory nut is not something that you want to eat. Rancid nuts are usually discolored. They'll be kind of a darker yellow or sometimes even have blues in there too. You can also look out for nuts that are moldy on the inside, nuts with a weevil exit hole, that's not good, or shriveled up nut meats. Those are all bad as well. Good nut meat is one that fills the inner shell completely, and it should be a nice, even beige color on the inside.
When you're cracking them, I try to break them into smaller pieces and just in half to go a little bit easier on the blender. And I find this much easier to do with my grandpa's goodie getter right here, which has a small nut ram attached to it. Plus, with some hickories like Shagbark or Shellbark, I can even get whole nut halves out. Those ones I save, I put aside. And then with the more difficult ones, I just leave them for making nut milk with. And then in order to at least attempt to go a little easier on my Vitamix blender, I'll usually soak my nuts in water and then I'll freeze them to break up the integrity of the shells just a little bit. And then after that, I'll put them all in my blender with water. Don't use the plastic container like I am in the footage right here. You really want to use stainless steel for this application. I blend them for about 45 seconds.
And once we have everything broken up, we can put them into a pot with water. We can add a little bit more if we need it, and then we're going to get that going on a low boil. I stir occasionally, which helps some of the shells to sink and some of the nut meat to float. But the real thing that we're after here is the liquid. And I'm telling you, just the aroma of hickory nut milk simmering on the stovetop is like none other. It is rich and nutty and buttery, and just making it is completely uplifting to the spirit. It'll make your day so much better. I hope that all of you watching get a chance to experience this. It is truly amazing.
From here, after you've boiled it, all you need to do is ladle off the top liquid and optionally, you can add in a wild sweetener like maple syrup and enjoy. Sometimes I do a few extra steps at the end to filter out all the shells and I clarify the liquid, and you can even get a little bit of oil this way. But I'll talk about that more in a future dedicated video if you guys are interested in that. Hickory nut milk can be frozen for future use, and good nuts that are cured in the shell can last for a couple years if stored properly. Any extra cracked nuts that I have that I'm wanting to make nut milk with, I'll leave those in the refrigerator. But the ones that are in the shell, I just keep them inside in a room temperature environment.
There's one more tree nut that we're going to cover a little bit later in the video. But for now, instead of looking for food above the ground, we're going to go below. Now I would like to introduce you to wild yam, which produces large edible tubers. But not all of them do this in North America. The two that you're looking for in particular would be Dioscorea opposita, poly-stomia, and Dioscorea bulbifera. These can both be easily distinguished from other wild yams that don't have starchy edible tubers, like American Wild Yam, Dioscorea villosa, because the ones we're looking for have little air potatoes that grow above ground on the vines, and the American ones do not. Those air potatoes are not only extremely distinctive, but they are also edible as well.
For Dioscorea bulbifera, which primarily grows in the far south of the United States, the air potatoes can actually get quite large and are a really meaningful food. But with the common Chinese yam, they're a lot smaller. So we want to go underground to find the real food for this one. This is a Chinese yam tuber, and they can get pretty large, as you can see. The one that I'm holding right here is my current trophy wild yam. You can find this plant throughout the year, but like with any tubers that you would gather for eating, they really get a lot larger and they have a lot more calories in the dormant months. Thankfully, even when the leaves have died back, those aerial potatoes will still persist on the plant, allowing you to find them very easily. By the way, the timing for all the species in this video, as well as dozens of other wild food species, can be found in my interactive foraging calendar.
I usually look for wild yam around creeksides where they often invade in extremely large numbers. This is an invasive plant in North America, and it grows very aggressively. You may start digging around and only be finding really small ones. So here's a few tips for getting the big boys. You want to look for them in areas that have looser soil, and you want to look for plants that are much larger that are getting a lot of sunlight. Usually, this means that they'll start to have climbed up on the vegetation around them. The tubers can grow pretty deep, so I really like to use a trenching shovel for this, and I'll start about 6 inches back from where the plant meets the ground. You want to try to lift up the ground around them, and then you can dig around and pull out the very bulbous tubers that you have lifted up.
You'll know if you have found the right one because they should be visibly starchy in any areas where you've cut into them. You can see here how many I was able to gather in just half an hour, and I probably could have gotten a lot more. But this was the trip where I discovered that I really needed to be digging with a deeper shovel than just a standard size. If you have accidentally cut into any of them, you want to use those right away. But for those that remain whole, you can store them in an open container in a well-ventilated area for about a season or so. You don't want to store them with things like onions or other things like that. They have very similar storage properties to potato and sweet potato.
Also, fun fact, though the names are often used quite interchangeably, yam (Dioscorea) and sweet potato (Ipomoea), those two could not be further apart taxonomically. They are very, very distantly related. You must cook wild yam before eating them, and they don't really taste that good if you try to eat them raw anyway. After getting home, I'll rinse and clean them really well, and then I'll put them in a pot to boil for at least 8 minutes or so, and a little bit longer if they are extra thick tubers. After that, you can just take them out and basically eat them the way that you would eat potatoes.
I do want to note that some people may experience a degree of irritation when eating wild yam. In my own experimentation, when I ate a significant amount of it completely on its own, I did have a bit of that mild irritation in my throat. But then when I actually like mixed it in with other foods, as I would normally eat it, it wasn't really that noticeable to me. I've heard that the more you eat over time, the less that you experience this. So check back with me in a couple of years, and I'll let you know how it's going.
At this point, you might be thinking, you know what, this looks like a whole lot of work. Is any of it really worth it? Like, why wouldn't I just grow my own food? Well, to answer that question, first, the answer is yes, it is more than worth it. There is something really important to consider when weighing the cost-benefit of foraging for wild food. We can't really compare to the food at the grocery store, right? Because you aren't actually seeing the huge amount of input and work and labor required to actually get that food onto the shelves in front of you. But if we are comparing it to actually growing all of our food, we need to account for the fact that we need to prepare the land, we need to sow the seed, we need to water the plants, we need to tend them, maybe we need to save the seeds, and you know, a whole lot more. And with wild food, all that we need to do is show up, gather, and process.
I'm not saying at all that you should do one or the other, or that one is better or anything like that. In fact, it was actually a gardening video by Mark on the Self-Sufficient Me channel that really kicked off the idea for me putting this video together and sharing it with all of you today. What I am saying is that both of them together will provide you with a tremendous amount more than just one or the other alone. And you can do really small bits of work here and there, like thinning out the canopy around a nice Hickory tree, that results in a massive boost in nut production for years and years to come. What I really want to emphasize here is that nature is filled with abundance. You just need to know what to look for.
And we're going back to a tree for the next one. This one is kind of a a hybrid, a little bit of a true survival food, a little bit of a staple, and a little bit of a traditional herbal medicine as well. It's called Slippery Elm, and the food part is the inner bark, which is filled with starch and mucilaginous compounds. If you're in a pinch, if you're actually lost in the woods in the wintertime, you can find it and peel and chew the inner bark raw to get a pretty good amount of starch out of it. Seriously, you don't want to overlook this one. There are over 300 calories per 100g of the inner bark of Slippery Elm. And you can easily dry it and store it for a very long time.
In the wilderness survival context, where we're having it raw, if you haven't eaten it a bunch before, you might get a little bit of an upset stomach from it. But in the long-term survival context, as a staple food where we're actually going to be cooking it, it's kind of the opposite. It can be really soothing to the stomach. To gather Slippery Elm inner bark, cut into the outer bark in a long vertical strip, and then peel it upwards until you get your desired amount, and then break it off from the rest of the trunk. You really want to get a vertical strip and not a horizontal one, because, well, for one, it's much easier to peel it vertically, but two, it minimizes the harm to the tree so you can return to it in later years and be able to gather more bark from it if needed.
After removing the bark, you can then scrape off the outer corky bark. We don't really want to be eating that part. We'll then take our inner bark strips and we'll boil them in water to extract the beneficial compounds that we're after, and then we'll just strain all the bark fiber out. This produces a drink that is really sweet and, to me, very, very delicious. But another benefit with this is that if you are having digestive issues or things like that in a survival context, that can be a major issue. So Slippery Elm can be a vital tool to provide you with calories and mitigate that problem.
Some people are worried about Slippery Elm being endangered, but it is worth noting that that is completely a myth. Slippery Elm is not endangered. But in addition, its cousin, Siberian Elm, which has a much larger range, can be used in the exact same way. I really encourage you to look for Siberian Elm because it's a much more aggressive grower and you can gather a lot more of it. And let me know if you'd like me to cover other important wild herbs for a long-term survival situation. It's really important subject, and it's a nice parallel for this one that we're looking at here.
All right, we have two more, and I have saved the best for last. Between the two of these, I could easily talk about them for hours and hours. I go back and forth between them on which one is really the best staple wild food in the world. The first one is acorns, the fruit of oak trees. Acorns, like Hickory, are extremely misunderstood as a staple wild food. I think the general sentiment that I see a bunch of the time is that they aren't worth it, but really, nothing could be further from the truth. Oak trees with acorns can produce somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 million calories per acre. And yes, I'm talking about calories that you can consume. That is in the ballpark of the caloric productivity of some major agricultural root vegetables, and you don't even need to water them.
The one strike against acorns, the one strike, is that they do contain a substantial amount of tannins, which you wouldn't want to consume in large amounts long-term. They'd also be really astringent and a bad eating experience. So we need to leach those out. When people first get started with acorns, maybe they do a tiny batch and they go through all of this effort to get, you know, about a cup or so of flour, and then they decide, well, that was not worth it. And you know what? That probably wasn't. You really need to be doing much larger batches because there's kind of like a base upfront amount of work that you need to do in order to process. But no matter how much more that you do in a batch, the work doesn't go up that much beyond it. So to help out all my fellow nerds out there, the work required increases logarithmically, not linearly.
Now, I've already done a whole series on foraging and processing acorns into flour that you can watch right after this, but that was a while ago. So for now, I would like to add a few bonus details that really makes acorn processing more efficient and really, really worth it. A quick overview for all of you: with acorns, we need to gather them. We want to look for them in nice, open, sunny areas. And then we need to dry them. Dried in shell, they can be stored for years without a major loss in quality. Then we crack them, then we leach them, and then we blend them into a flour.
Here are the things that I want you to know:
1. Gather your acorns with a nut roller. This one's for black walnut, but you can find them in smaller sizes that will pick up acorns like a dream. In a good mast year, where the trees produce a much larger crop than average, I can gather literally thousands and thousands of calories worth of acorns in minutes with no effort whatsoever with a good nut roller.
2. Water testing your acorns is vital. This will help you to sort out 90% of the bad nuts in mere moments. However, make sure that you actually test the ones that float to ensure that most of them are actually bad, because if they've dried too much, that may not work. It isn't foolproof.
3. You do not need a dehydrator to dry them, and you don't want to use an oven. A simple box fan works really great at the initial stage, and then after that, I keep them on open, large, flat racks to passively dry over several weeks. Do not use high heat to dry them. This will only scorch them and make them go bad very quickly. If you don't get them dried all the way, also do not try to freeze them to kill the bugs on the inside. Why? Because this will kill the bugs on the inside. You want any bugs on the inside to become bugs on the outside, where they'll also leave a little exit hole that you can use to easily tell if a nut is a bad one.
4. Pay attention to this one. The most important part of acorns from a caloric perspective is the starch. Most methods you read for leaching acorns will result in you losing most of the starch. Here is what you do so that doesn't happen. When you go to leach them, initially pour all the blended material into a flour sack and then squeeze all the liquid through. Individual starch particles are extremely fine, and they're going to pass right through the rag, while the flour fibers, those will be left behind. And then you can leach them separately because starch will leach way, way faster because they're way tinier. And you know what? If all you care about is the calories, you can just throw away the rest of the fiber and just use the starch. Here's some starch that I have right here, and then here's some of the fiber flour. And this small amount probably has way more calories in it than all the rest of this does. But if you do want to bake with acorn flour, then you can recombine both of these at the end.
And finally, don't expect when you're using acorn flour, which doesn't contain any gluten at all, to give you nice, risen, fluffy bread. That isn't really what acorn is for. However, that is not true for the next wild food that we're going to take a look at. But with acorns, where they do really shine is for making things that are flatter, like cookies, pancakes, things like that. If you cook it right and you use it correctly, it can be really, really delicious.
All right, that's all that I've got for now. Like I said, check out my Acorn series where I'll fill you in with all the rest of the details that you need to know. Before we get to the last one, I did want to say, uh, if you're still watching this right now, then I'm guessing that you probably do actually care about learning this subject, and I just want to say thank you. My hope with this video is that it's going to help people to build more food resiliency. I mean, if a situation did develop where we did actually have to rely on this information, can you imagine what it would be like if instead of everyone panicking and wondering, you know, oh my gosh, like, where are we actually going to get our food from now? That we all not only knew what species to look for to get food, but that we've all already been actually practicing it? That we're all already getting a meaningful amount of calories from the land? That we're already tending to the land to maximize the productivity of the wild around us? That is a world that I want to live in. That's a world that I really want to see. And the more people that are around you practicing this, the better for you, for your family, and for your loved ones. So please, please share this with your community. Teach this to other people. This is the kind of knowledge that you only really get richer the more that you share it. So thank you for taking part in that with me.
Okay, we've arrived, arrived at the final wild food. But keep in mind that I had to really, really pair this list down. There are a bunch of others that we can learn about. So let me know if you find this subject interesting, and I'll be sure to make another list. But also let me know which one of these in this video that is most important to you, because I want to make dedicated videos for each of them, and you can decide which one that comes first.
All right, now we get to learn about American Lotus. This is simultaneously one of, if not the greatest wild foods in all of North America, and one of the most underappreciated. I mean, many of you might be thinking right now, that's funny, I didn't even realize that we had a native wild Lotus species. We do, and it's incredible. When people think about Lotus, they picture an Asian plant and Asian culture, but I'd argue that there are few things more American than American Lotus. Every single part of this plant can be eaten. But today, I'm going to show you two of the highest calorie components: the tubers and the nuts. And we'll start with the tubers.
This one right here is from a batch that I gathered just the other day, and I think that these are probably the better wild known food for Lotus, and you can definitely find and forage them. But in the wild, they can be a little bit tough to gather. Lotus likes to grow in slow-moving water, and it likes to anchor itself in a really, really mucky bottom. In Alabama, where I forage a lot, our lakes are dam controlled, and they lower the water level in the colder months in the winter. So those kind of lakes create a really amazing situation for digging Lotus tubers. Sometimes to get them, I feel along the rise, and eventually they'll terminate in these large ones right here. Other times, I just dig in an area with a bunch of them until they pop up. This does take a fair bit of skill, and it can take a lot of energy.
And if you ask me, I would say that the true staple wild food when it comes to wild Lotus comes from the nuts. There's a bunch of them right there. They're really, really pretty. This is the only food that I know of where legitimately I could gather them and store them to give to my great-great-grandchildren. Mature Lotus nuts have a nearly impermeable shell that keeps the nuts fresh for, and I'm not exaggerating here, literally hundreds and hundreds of years. You can gather them from the shore or with a canoe, and you can get thousands and thousands of them in just a couple of hours.
For processing out the actual nut meat, I like to use a Dave Belt to crack them very efficiently, but a hammer can work as well. After that comes a series of sorting and winnowing to get the nut meat completely separated from the shells. Lotus nuts are one of the greatest foods in the world, wild or cultivated. The texture is amazing, the taste is incredible, and nutritionally, it is one of the best sources of protein from the wild. You can roughly blend them up and cook them for a short period of time in boiling water to make something that is somewhere between oatmeal and grits in terms of the taste and the flavor. Oh, and I forgot to mention, you can even eat the immature nuts as well, and they taste like sweet corn but have an even better texture. And my wife has developed some pretty amazing recipes for them that we're rolling out on the Forage Forward website.
But my my favorite use with the mature Lotus nuts is to grind them into a flour and make Lotus bread. Okay, Lotus bread is one of the best things that I have ever eaten in my life. It's kind of like cornbread, kind of. However, if you're making cornbread, corn flour doesn't work so well as a bread, so you'll have to substitute in 50% with wheat flour. Lotus bread is made with 100% clean wild Lotus flour, and it is amazing. The recipe for that one is on my website right now. I really think it's time for America to rediscover this vital wild food. It really is, and you have an important part to play in that.
So don't forget to check out my guide with all the important details that you need to know. Lotus is actually a really incredible source of protein as well, but gram for gram, it is beat by Black Walnut. Black Walnut is another wild food that is overlooked for all the wrong reasons, and I'm going to show you everything that you need to know to forage and process it in large quantities in this video right here. I really think you're going to enjoy it. Thank you so much for watching, and I hope to see you there.