Transcription
In 1994, researchers at a dig site in Northern Spain uncovered a k system with fossilized human remains. And among them was mineralized seeds from the fruit of a tree called Hackberry. This is one of, if not the earliest known pieces of evidence of humans consuming fruit from a plant. And for Hackberry, it isn't the only one. Across the entire continent of Eurasia and places like Georgia and Northern China, we also find evidence of humans consuming these same hackberries dating back to not hundreds, not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of years ago.
So what is this strange fruit and why should you be interested in it in the way that our early hunter-gatherer cavemen ancestors were? When I first started working on this video, I thought hackberries are pretty cool, like more people should know about them. But now that I've done all this research and all this experimentation, I'm thinking, no, Hackberry is amazing and everyone should know about them.
To start off, I think that there are two really big benefits that you should know about. Number one, hackberries are ridiculously nutritious. They contain loads of essential minerals like potassium, calcium, iron, manganese, copper, selenium, molybdenum, and all of them in really significant amounts. Number two, from a survival perspective, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better survival wild food than Hackberry. They're very filling. This little fruit coating on them is really loaded with sugars and carbohydrates. The seeds are really high in fats and it's all really low moisture, so they store really well for a long period of time and you don't need major energy requirements, technology, anything like that. Oh, and did I mention they grow on every continent in the world? They can be found well into the winter when there isn't much other wild food available. And literally, the sugar on top, they taste delicious. The flavor is kind of like a rich mix of squash and dates that has these multi-flavors with them too. They're really, really amazing.
The one trick with them is that they can be kind of tedious to gather in really large amounts. That is, unless you utilize some of the new methods that I spent many hours figuring out that I'm going to show you today, making Hackberry not just a little survival food you can get little bits of here and there, but a true staple wild food that you can rely on for years and years.
Here is our agenda today. First, we're going to learn how to find hackberries, and I'm going to show you how to distinguish them from any look-alikes. Second, I'm going to show you how to gather them 20 times faster. Third, I'll show you how to process and store them so that they don't go bad. And finally, I will show you incredible ways of actually consuming them other than just eating them straight up, because they do have kind of a hard shell. Still really good. Wow, delicious. I usually just spit the seeds out. So one of the ways is kind of like a granola energy bar, and the other one makes a really amazing drink. Let's begin.
So, we've talked a lot about hackberries, but what about the actual tree that they come from? Here's one that's actually growing in my yard right now. Hackberry trees collectively are from the group or genus called Celtis. They are found quite literally all over the world. And from what I can find in my research, most of them can be found in about the same way, but make sure to consult with local sources when you're looking up the actual species that are in your area. For this video that we're doing today, the ones that I'm covering are the Hackberry, which is Celtis occidentalis, and then another one which is more common to me closer down in the South, uh, which is called Sugarberry, Celtis laevigata. I've eaten both of those and they can both be used exactly the same.
Here's one of the fruits. And the first important thing to know about them is that the actual, like, fruit part, uh, is actually really thin on the outside. Most of the volume of these berries, uh, is made up of the seed, which has a really tough inner shell. But all those minerals that we talked about before, those come from only the really thin fruit part right here, making it quite possibly one of the most mineral-dense foods on the planet. And we're going to get around that tough seed on the inside in the cooking section. Anyway, hackberry trees, like this one behind me, they usually grow between 40 and 60 feet in height, uh, and they have simple alternating leaves that are about 2 to 4 inches long with toothed edges, except for Sugarberry with leaves that have mostly untoothed edges, but there might be a little bit of serration. Both of them are usually found with an asymmetric base as well.
Without a doubt, though, the most iconic and distinctive feature of Hackberry is that they produce these really extra corky ridges on the outside of the bark right here. If you look really closely, there's a bunch of tiny ridges in between them as well. I like to think of them as a bunch of little canyons that are running along through the tree. Once again, though, Sugarberry is a little bit different, as those prominent ridges aren't found quite as regularly across the bark of the tree. There will still be some, you can see there's little bits right here and over here. They're going to have a bit more of a warty appearance and they're going to be way more sparse. So a big thing to look for for the bark of both of them is that they have a very distinctive kind of light gray color to them.
As we've learned, hackberry trees produce hackberries, which start off as a green color before maturing into that deep maroon. If you break into the fruit coating just a little bit, it will reveal a vibrant bright orange color on the inside. And that's a really great way to scout for them. You'll often find them on the ground when they're freshly fallen, and that orange coloration will really jump out at you. Another great thing about it, there's only really one look-alike that I can think of, which is a tree called Basswood. It has fruits that are kind of similar looking to Hackberry. However, the bark between the two of those is completely different, and Basswood fruits are more of a brown color overall and they attach to a distinct leafy bract, whereas hackberries attach directly to the twigs. There are a few other trees out there that have leaves that do look similar to Hackberry, but for our purposes of foraging for the fruit, they look nothing alike, so you don't really need to worry about those.
But where should we actually be looking for them for foraging the fruit? Hackberries grow in a bunch of places, but some are better than others. They are not really picky about where they grow. They thrive a lot of the time in kind of moist land ecosystems, but not so wet that they're actually swampy. So you can find them by creek sides and places like that. But hackberries are also very common in urban areas and suburban areas, like parks and backyards. As you can see, for your purposes, you want to be looking for them in more open areas where, as you can see right now, they get a lot of sunlight. That is what they need to fruit well. And I've also found that in more open areas, they're less likely to be hit by diseases that affect them in the fruits and kind of turn them black into something that we wouldn't want to be gathering.
When you are looking for them, I want you to pay attention to one feature in particular, which is low-hanging branches. You're going to find out why in a second. In terms of what time of the year you should be looking for them, the fruit ripens in mid to late fall, depending on your location, but they can hang onto the tree well into the winter. This is what that would look like on my interactive forager's calendar, which has the timing window for dozens of other wild food species on it as well. Some people like to look for and gather them when the leaves have fallen and it's just the berries that are hanging on. But for me, I actually prefer to get them in this window where the berries are still on and the leaves are still attached. And to understand why, we really need to get into gathering them.
This is what made me so excited to make this video. A lot of people will tell you to go through and pick them out just one by one, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just going to be very, very tedious. For me personally, I like to be more efficient, and I think that you do too. I spent a lot of time experimenting with this, and there are two main methods that I came up with for gathering them quickly. Each of them have different pros and cons. The first one is to still gather them by hand, but not one by one. Basically, what you'll do is you'll take your hand and you'll reach above a cluster of berries and then you'll just strip down along the branch, taking everything off and then throwing it into a bucket. Yes, you're going to end up with, you know, twigs and leaves and stuff along in your bucket, but don't worry, we're going to sort all that out very easily in just a second. I actually prefer trees that still have a little bit of their leaves on them because then the twigs are going to be a little bit more flexible and it's easier to pull off the berries without getting the twigs that are still attached to them. When it gets a little bit older, they're really brittle and they all just snap off very easily. When you're doing this, make sure to avoid picking berries that look like they're blackened or they have, you know, a moldy surface or things like that. A little of them is okay, we're going to pick them out later, but we'd rather have fewer to deal with in our actual harvest. This method is very quick and I found it to yield the highest quality berries, but it does require you to find, you know, trees with nice low branches, which can be a little bit difficult.
So what if we can't find any around us that have those low branches? Initially, I tried out the old tarp and throw stick that I use for things like muscadine or that I use for mulberry, and it does work, kind of. It's a little bit tedious, and if it's windy, then, you know, the tarp is going to keep on blowing. The fruits are really light, they get all over the place, it's kind of a little bit of a frustrating time. So I had to go back to the drawing board and I realized that under a really productive hackberry tree, there could be thousands and thousands of good berries that were on the ground. And I thought, you know, I forage for American persimmons off the ground, why not Hackberry as well? The first thing that I imagined was a nut roller, kind of like what I use for black walnut, but one that was extra fine that could catch hackberries. Obviously, these are going to be too large right here. Unfortunately, at the time of making this video, that tool does not exist. But I also noticed that there was a bunch of places where the hackberries would fall that were kind of on bare ground or pavement or smooth things like that. And I had this other thought, what if I just literally use a broom and I just sweep them all together into a pile and then transfer them to the bucket from there? I tried this and I couldn't believe it. It worked well. It worked really well. At some of my better spots, I was approaching getting more than a gallon of hackberries per hour, which is a really, really good efficiency for hackberries. And that's completely clean hackberries at the end. When you're doing this, you want to be looking for areas where you know you'd be comfortable gathering some greens from that same spot as well. And what you're looking for is a spot where there's a bunch of nice purple berries on the ground, not one where you're mostly just seeing seeds. If you do get a few seeds, don't worry, because there is a way to efficiently remove them a little bit down the line. I am hopeful that one day I can maybe talk to Nut Wizard or I can talk to Garden Weasel and I can get them to make that extra fine nut roller, because I think it would be even more efficient than what I found. Um, but I will let you all know when that day hopefully arrives. For now, I can imagine what you're thinking, yes, both of these methods are going to end up producing a ton of debris along with the berries that we need to remove. But thankfully, hackberries winnow beautifully. Well, winnowing is where we use wind or airflow to remove lighter material that we don't want, like leaves, tiny twigs, things like that, but then keep in the heavy things that we do want, in this case, the hackberries.
This is another part that I'm very excited to be sharing with you. Basically, all that I do for this is I take everything in the bucket and I'm going to pour it back and forth from one to another in front of that fan until what I end up with is just 95% of the berries. And it really doesn't take that much to get there once you get the hang of it, maybe four or five passes or so. That's it. However, for the ones that we swept, I will do a few extra steps with my foraging filters before I get to winnowing, just to make everything go a lot faster because there is going to be a lot more debris. I don't want to delve too much in depth in that in this video, it would be a lot longer, so I'm just going to put it in my detailed workflow guide for you guys that you can download for free if you're interested.
Once we get those berries mostly separated, the rest of the steps take place inside. So I'll meet you guys there. Once I've gotten everything inside, then I will dump my entire harvest into a bowl of water. This is going to achieve two things. Number one, it's going to clean the berries really well. But then two, it's actually going to be able to help us separate any of those bad fruits that ended up in our batch, because I found about 65% or so of the bad ones will float. A few of the good ones will float as well, um, so you still have to sort through them. But because a greater amount of the bad ones float, it will make going through them just a little bit easier. And you know, I like to clean them anyway. Of course, with the berries that I gather from the ground, I make sure to get those extra super clean and I'm going to wash them in water, you know, multiple times until it runs completely clear.
Now with them clean, we're getting into storing hackberries. And here is when we find out why they are one of the best survival foods, and now with our new gathering method, one of the best staple wild foods in the world. Once they're clean, you're going to want to dry them. You can either let them air dry outside, you can use an oven at the lowest setting, or you can use a dehydrator, whichever one you prefer. And that you have here is what they look like once they are nice and dried. And once you get them like that, you're going to want to store them. And if you get them completely dry, you can store them for for you know, many months, if not years, if they're in a nice sealed container. That high sugar and low moisture is the perfect recipe for good, dependable, long-term storage. For me personally, I like to keep them in glass jars, and I mean, look at them, they are really, really beautiful too. Uh, you just want to make sure that you generally keep these out of the sun.
Okay, so let's talk about actually cooking them now. This is the fun part. I'm going to show you how to make a drink and then I'm also going to show you how to make a kind of candy bar energy bar kind of thing. This one is my personal favorite. The first one is the drink. I kind of think of it as Hackberry nut milk, and it's very easy to make. Uh, you're just going to pound or blend them up into smaller pieces, and then you're going to take everything and dump it into a pot and add water. I usually add about three-ish or so times the amount of powder that I have of water. So if I had one cup of powder, then I would start with three cups of water. Then we'll turn the heat on, we'll bring the liquid up to a boil, and then we'll let it drop down until it's just simmering. And I'll leave it like that for about 20 minutes or so, maybe a little bit longer. After that, you're going to give them a taste. If the flavor seems a little bit weak to you, you can just let them simmer for a little bit longer. Once for you, it's reached a good concentration, I personally prefer to filter mine to get a smoother finish. Uh, a simple mesh strainer works really well for the most part. If you want it, you know, really extra silky smooth, then you can also use a nut milk bag. After that, uh, just make sure that you don't, with both of them, you don't squeeze everything through, you're going to get more bits into your drink if you do that. It should have a nice kind of mild inherent sweetness to it, but you can always add honey or maple syrup, things like that, if you want it sweeter. And for a really nice, fun holiday twist, add in a dash of your favorite spices like cardamom, allspice, cinnamon, all the things that you love for the holidays for an extra festive feel. One thing that we found is that you can also add a little bit of milk or nut milk to give it a bit more of a creamy finish. Even when I pre-roasted them, the flavor of Hackberry milk really brings out more of the fruity tones of hackberries to me. It doesn't have that kind of deep malt flavor. Instead, in many ways, it's almost a bit more like, I'll taste it right now for you, it almost has this, um, cider flavor to it, which I think is really good.
But if you want that really rich flavor, then you're going to want to make these things right here. These are going to be your very own Hackberry energy bars, or I guess in my case here, energy spheres. These are an adaptation of a recipe that I got from a story from Euell Gibbons, the author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus. You do want your hackberries to be nice and roasted for this application. To do that, you can either put them in the dehydrator at the highest setting or in an oven at the lowest setting, around 170 degrees, and leave them there for about 3 to 4 hours or so. What we're trying to do here is we're trying to really dry the outer fruit coating. If you don't do that, they're just not going to blend and powder out very well. And I do recommend that right after they've roasted, you go ahead and do the blending. After that, you have a couple of choices here. If you want to allow some of the crunchier pieces to remain in your little energy bars, then you can skip the step. Uh, but for me, the Sugarberry shells are a lot more on the tougher side. So what I do is I use my foraging filters on an extra fine one, and you can see right here all the bits that they've caught. So those are just like really much larger, chunkier pieces that I can reblend if I want to, too. And all it's going to get through is really fine, delicious, incredible Hackberry powder.
The next thing that I'll do is I'll blend up some wild Shagbark Hickory nuts. If you don't have those, you can totally sub them in for pecan or something like that instead. For the bars to hold together really well, I found that I needed to double the amount of hickory that I had compared to the Hackberry powder. If it's a little bit on the dry side, you can always mix in more. Another thing that you can do is you can add in a little bit of liquid sweetener, again, like honey or maple syrup. You're going to mix everything together and then form them into these little balls or squares or whatever shape that you would like. I find these to be really similar in consistency to products like Lara Bar or things like that. So here we go, let's try it. It's very filling. The flavor is very rich. I think all the, like, kind of roasted, caramelized flavors of Hackberry come out with this variation. But my wife had one incredible suggestion to make this look a little bit better. So let me show you that. That is a chocolate-covered Hackberry energy bar. I haven't got a chance to try this yet. Here we go. Oh man, it's perfect. It's perfect. That is so good.
And if you want to learn to make them just the way that I did, you'll need to know how to forage for hickory nuts, and I'm going to show you a bunch of tricks for actually getting them nuts out, and to make another delicious drink as well in this video right here. It's exactly what you're looking for, and I hope to see you there.