FORAGING:It is a bumper autumn for free food – you've just got to get out with your basket and pick it, writes CATHERINE CLEARY
IT MAY BE strange to think of 2010 as a year of plenty, but for wild food foragers that’s exactly what it’s turning out to be. “I’ve never seen a year like it,” says Evan Doyle, joint-owner of the BrookLodge Hotel near Aughrim in Wicklow. The chef puts it down to the hard winter and warm summer that accelerated the growing and ripening of wild food. “The frost tightened up the whole season. We have unbelievable wild food crops at the moment.”
Every year he competes with the chefs at his Strawberry Tree restaurant to see who can pick the most wild mushrooms. “I’m winning it hands down. Last week I picked 30 kilos of ceps.”
All this wild bounty is all very well for folks with orchards and fields, but Doyle is hoping city dwellers will come and get a taste of it at a foraging event at BrookLodge tomorrow. The event is limited to 100 people (details below). Participants will also visit the organic Gold River Farm, where they’ve just started rearing organic pigs, and round it off with a spit-roast and picnic.
Doyle’s apple orchard is bursting with fruit and he has ambitious plans. An email from his friend, pork butcher Ed Hick, prompted Doyle, who is a founder member of the Slow Food Sugar Loaf Club, to plan an apple-pressing event next weekend. Hick told him about a man who owns a traditional apple press and is based in west Wicklow. The apparatus will be dusted down for a community apple-pressing afternoon.
“We’re telling everybody to rob granny’s apples and bring them here. We’ll press juice for the kids and make cider for the adults.” Won’t the cider take time? “Don’t believe the ads. Cider takes 12 days to make,” he says.
People will need to bring apples, buckets, clean bottles, some muslin, citric acid or lemon juice and some demi-johns with corks. They’re also advised to bring a knife, peeler, a corer, some labels and a pen. Knowing the names of the apple varieties they are bringing to press will get them extra points. (See Rosie Sanders’ book, left.)
Doyle has seen massive crops of sloe berries this year and is hoping to get some sloe-gin started at the apple event. The end result should be ready for Christmas.
Sloe gin is easy to make at home. Doyle advises using a large glass bottle and basing your quantities on the size of the bottle. Sterilise the bottle with boiling water and then fill it quarter full with sugar. Fill another half of the bottle with sloes (prick them to release their flavour or put them in the freezer for 24 hours and they will burst). Then top up the bottle with “the best gin you can find”. The gin has to be more than 40 per cent proof. Then comes the shaking (and there is a ritualistic element to this). For the first two weeks shake it every second day. Then for the next two months shake it once a week. “You get a wonderful, pink-coloured liquid. Strain out the sloes and put them aside. You can use them in stuffing or in a game gravy.”
Euro-toques autumn food foraging, BrookLodge, tomorrow, noon. To apply for tickets, send an email to info@euro-toques.ie by 4pm today. Confirmations will be sent out at 6pm. Adults €15, children €12, family ticket €45. Apple pressing, Sunday, October 10th. Free, but places are limited. To book, email aislingnicra@gmail.com. Mushroom hunts take place at Longueville House in Co Cork next Sunday, and on October 24th, see www.longuevillehouse.ie
