Happy February, food & foraging friends!
Normally I would talk about wild foods encountered on a trip, but to cover my Japan journey, I’ll instead talk about five farmed ingredients in traditional Japanese dishes that you can find growing wild right in DC.
I cannot begin to express how delightful Japan is, from its mindfulness and manners (I’m a sucker for a quiet car) to its craftsmanship both traditional (see: calligraphy and ceramics) and modern (see: custom cat nail and latte art). From experiencing snow-covered temples in the Kyoto mountains to the Tokyo cityscape from the world’s second highest observation deck, my breath was taken away so many times I’m surprised they didn’t have to resuscitate me. You can check out more detailed posts about my travels on Instagram.
But we’re here to talk food. I had a Japanese food bucket list that grew every day with every new dish I learned about. At final count, I think I tried 29 of the 50 listed in this guide. Even the convenience store food was world-class (10/10 for the 7-11 curry bread).
My favorite discovery may have been Obanzai cuisine: local, seasonal zero-waste cuisine specific to Kyoto, with an emphasis on vegetables and fish. This $10 breakfast menu was a four by four grid of beautiful glass bowls filled with yummy bites like braised fish, brothy kabocha, mizuna greens, mushroom pickles, shredded bamboo shoots, and tofu skins, with a miniature mochi skewer (dango) for dessert. Obanzai has five core spiritual principles, including shimatsu (not creating waste), deaimon (encounter), omotenashi (hospitality), ambai (balance) and honma mon (genuine things). It’s soul food in the truest sense of the word.
Read on for a deep dive into a few Japanese ingredients you can find growing right here in the DMV!
Shiso, otherwise known as Japanese mint, perilla or beefsteak, is a common invasive but delicious weed I find annually in my community garden and Rock Creek Park. While it’s sometimes called Japanese/Korean mint or basil, it packs a much bigger punch than either herb. It’s a versatile ingredient I spotted everywhere in Japan — as a rice cracker flavor, as tempura, as sushi wrapper, fresh on a Wagyu burger, as udon topping and more. I shared my love of shiso with a Japanese guide and she hipped me to shiso juice, which I found later at an onsen (see pink drink photo above). Her recipe inspired me to make a shiso syrup this summer.
Gingko is perhaps better known in DC as stinko trees for the vomit-like aroma of its fruit, but our area Asian residents know that culinary gems are buried under the odiferous flesh. I’ve gathered them a few times, an admittedly messy and long process that culminates with yummy gummy pale green nuggets that have a slight bitterness and look like little pieces of jade. I saw them roasted in shell in Tokyo’s fish market, as well as as a fancy packaged snack in Kyoto, dried and fried with shichimi, a Japanese seven-spice blend that features sansho (Japanese pepper) among other ingredients, including sometimes shiso. Gather these in fall in DC!
Sakura: yes, you can have your cherry blossoms and eat them too! I gather them from my community garden in spring and preserve in salt. This traditional Japanese method of preservation is generally used for tea, but I’ve ground them and used them to flavor rice. I found many things flavored with sakura here – in furikake seasoning, the leaf and flower wrapped around sweets or in a roasted green tea, and even in bath salts. Other sakura sightings, like soft serve ice cream or overly girly pink desserts, I suspected were probably faux flower. (You can find a Le Croix cherry blossom seltzer in season that also is more marketing than it is sakura, but still a cute can.)
While I intentionally skipped sakura season as it is the busiest time to travel to Japan, I was there for the gorgeous fuchsia plum blossoms, which smell like honey.
Mugwort, which grows right in my NW DC alley and can be found popping up wild throughout our area, is a personal favorite, with its bitter, herby flavor and its witchy allure. If you’ve been on one of my walks, you may have tried my mugwort salt and olive oil crackers. My couchsurfing host in Tokyo bought me a yomogi mochi filled with red bean paste upon learning of my love for the plant. Yomogi (Japanese name) is used in Japan for tempura as well. I glimpsed mugwort growing wild on Kyoto’s streets as well as in a packet of fancy bath salts. The local Japanese species is Artemisia princeps whereas the common variety stateside is Artemisia vulgaris – little appreciable difference to a chef, however.
Mushrooms are a beloved ingredient in Japanese cooking, and many of the favorite species cultivated on the islands you can also find growing wild in the DMV. I saw maitake (aka hen of the woods, fall mushroom) used as tempura and sold in the grocery store, and as a background flavor for dashi stock. I also enjoyed cloud ear shredded as a ramen topping. This is another common fall to winter mushroom you can find growing on small sticks right in our city parks.
Two other ingredients you can harvest wild in DC, albeit with some advanced skill and planning, are bamboo shoots and burdock root (gobo). Fresh bamboo shoots have a delicious flavor, slightly woodsy and sweet, and can be found in Japanese markets as a fat little chonk you may not recognize if you’ve only had the canned kind. I enjoyed this in Tokyo in a curry bowl and as a side dish shredded with carrot. Harvesting shoots from the aggressively spreading bamboo growing in our area is guilt-free foraging, though you will need to catch the shoots early in spring. Bamboo requires a long cooking time to remove any toxins; I’ve not yet done this myself but know some local foragers who do. Click here for pics of Kyoto’s most famous bamboo grove.
Burdock root is another well loved ingredient in Japan and other parts of Asia. It’s a long, skinny fibrous root with a mild and almost sweet flavor . I had this slow cooked in a delicious curry with 20 other veggies; deep fried and breaded as a side dish; and cooked with wagyu beef and chrysanthemum leaf in sukiyaki, a kind of Japanese hot pot. I also saw it flexed in a savory cocktail in Tokyo.
The pinnacle of my culinary adventures was a night in a ryokan (traditional inn) exploring kaiseki cuisine. This traditional Japanese haute cuisine that is as much a delight to the eye as it is to the palate, showing off the finest local ingredients and clever food styling through as many as a dozen courses. My meal took over two hours just to serve! I unsuccessfully used iNaturalist to try to decipher some of the herb garnishes, many of them falling into the grouping called sansai, or wild mountain vegetables, gathered from late winter on. There was ferny kimone leaf pressed into one dish, spicy magenta benitade sprouts (Japanese watercress) peppering my sushi with a pop of color, and what did I spy with my little tongue but a branch of purple shiso flowers on my sashimi board!
I know that was a lot to read, but it was a lot more to eat. Hopefully that inspires you to know that even if this isn’t your time to travel to Japan, you can recreate some of its signature flavors with wild harvested ingredients right at home.
Spring is almost upon us, and I’ll be soon announcing a garden walk to introduce you to some of the first-of-season edibles. I know that we are facing difficult times right now that foraging cannot solve, but it can at least provide some joy and a free source of food. I’ll be offering some free spots on my upcoming walks to any federal workers affected by the layoffs so please spread the word and reach out for a discount code to register if you fall into this unfortunate category.
Last but not least, if you missed the “Matt About Town” WTOP feature on my adventures in evergreen foraging, check out the video here!
Wildly yours,
April
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Image block 2: Sakura season is coming, both here and in Japan, but its essence is beloved year round in everything from ice cream, tea, liquor and wagashi, a traditional Japanese sweet. It’s now plum blossom season (see fuschia flowers) and that also gets incorporated into foods.
Image block 3: Mugwort, gingko, bamboo, burdock root and Obanzai cuisine.
Image block 4: Featured dishes from one kaiseki feast!