Fresh Hand Whisked Mayonnaise

Today was the first day I attempted mayonnaise. It came out what looked to be perfect. It made great peaks, it tasted fantastic. We put little dollops on our soft boiled eggs, and sprinkled a tiny bit of Maldon finishing salt over it all, and it was heavenly.

However, by the time we finished breakfast, our mayonnaise looked like this:

I knew there had to be a way to fix it, and sure enough, one way to do it is to start over with 1 tablespoon of water, dribbling in a little bit of the broken mayonnaise at a time and re-whisking it, adding water as needed once it gets too viscous. It worked.

You can see here the broken mayonnaise on the left spoon vs the fixed on the right.

An hour later at room temp the mayonnaise has not budged in it’s form, so I stirred it, and put it in a container in the fridge. Another hour in the fridge, and it’s still good to go.

Time will tell whether it decides to break down again or not, but so far so good.

If it does break down again, I’ll repeat the process until it stays together.

I used an egg yolk, ‘Plochman’s Original Stoneground Dijon Mustard’, water, white wine vinegar, canola oil, lemon juice from fresh lemons from our lemon tree, and kosher salt.

The basic recipe is below, and is Chef Thomas Keller’s recipe:

Fresh Hand Whisked Mayonnaise

Ingredients:

1 Egg Yolk
Dijon Mustard – 5 grams
White Wine Vinegar – 7 grams
Lemon Juice – 7 grams
Canola Oil – 350 grams (Any neutral flavored plant based oil will work, I used canola)
Water – Several tablespoons. Just get a small bowl and put a tablespoon in it, use as needed once it gets thick.

Equipment:

Mixing bowl
Whisk
Damp kitchen towel
Spatula
Cutting board
Paring knife
Glass jar to store Mayonnaise in.

Instructions:

You will be whisking constantly in this recipe, but the end product is well worth the effort.
Dampen the kitchen town, wring it out, then fold it over into a triangle and roll it into a turban shape. Form a crown around the bottom of the mixing bowl to stabilize it.

Whisk the yolk in the mixing bowl, then add and whisk the dijon mustard into it. The dijon mustard helps with emulsification. Continue whisking with your dominant hand as you S L O W L Y whisk in oil. I put mine in a condiment squirt bottle, and it works great. As the mayonnaise starts to thicken add a tablespoon of water. Keep whisking and add the vinegar and the lemon juice. Keep slowly adding oil.

If the mayonnaise breaks aka separates and turns into runny goop, the oil has overwhelmed the yolk’s ability to bind it, and you can do one of two things.

1.) Add more mustard to help it re-emulsify. (This will also make it more mustardy tasting.)
2.) Start in an empty mixing bowl with 1 tablespoon of water and whisk the broken mayonnaise into the water a drop at a time until it re-emulsifies, then slowly mix it back in about 1 tablespoon at a time, adding more water, also 1 tablespoon at a time, whenever it gets too thick and harder to whisk.

I didn’t want it more mustardy and so I chose option #2, and so far so good, it’s holding after an hour+ at room temp and the first time it broke completely after about 15 minutes.

Keep whisking and adding oil until you get to the viscosity you want and see peaks form. Taste and add salt and lemon juice a little at a time to your own personal taste.

Trust me when I say this: Leave it in the mixing bowl for half an hour at room temp. Then come back to it. It’ll be easier to fix if you don’t have to take it out of a jar and put it BACK into the mixing bowl.
If it holds after 30+ minutes, you should be good to go to put it into the glass jar to store it in the fridge.

In hindsight, I think the coarse mustard may have been the source of my emulsification issues, vs a much smoother mustard with more actual ground mustard in it. I will note this and use regular dijon mustard next time.

Wild Muther****in’ Cookery, B****es!

Why hello there foragers, friends, and fiends!

‘Tis been an awful long time since I posted anything in this blog. Not been doing much foraging with 3 feet of snow on the ground.

It’s been the most god-awful winter I can remember in almost 40 years. Brutal, horrible, and nigh-neverending.

I absolutely cannot wait for it to be over and for the Spring thaw to finally take effect. Though I’m not looking forward to the flooding, that’s for sure.

Let’s take a look at my garden…

Hmm… yea, that sucks.

So does that. Ok, no green stuff for me any time soon.

But… today is the 1st of March. This goram winter can’t last forever!

And when Jack Frost finally stumbles and the first shoots of spring pop up, I will be there to collect and nom them!

Wintercress and Wild Garlic will be amongst the first to pop up. Along with Dandelions and Garlic Mustard.

Just thinking about it makes my stomach growl. I’ve been resigned to a diet of ‘people’ food this winter, and let me tell you, there’s nothing worse for someone who’s used to eating wild. I’ve gained weight and feel like crap.

Time for a Spring diet of real food soon, methinks.

I hope all of ye are having a pleasant end of winter, and I certainly hope none of ye have to deal with more snow that I do.

All the best!

~Janos

Tabula Rasa – A Clean Slate

A significant change is coming soon to Wild Cookery!

Yes, we’ll continue to be about foraging and cooking up all things delicious and wild.

But we’ll be adding to our ‘menu’ so to speak.

In the past, there have been various other topics covered here, but I still strove to keep it focused primarily on foraging topics and the cooking of wild foods. Times have changed.

We’re going to be going a bit more ‘broad spectrum’ instead of ‘highly focused’.

There is a very important reason for this…Everything is interconnected. The audience for a 100% foraging focus is very slim indeed. In fact most people who prepare for other things unfortunately have learning foraging on the bottom of their list. I mean to change that through cross-exposure by discussing other topics that are important to people.

I’ve heard it many times that I should keep Wild Cookery! strictly about foraging, to the exclusion of most other topics. I disagree.

Here’s why…

Foraging is very interconnected to many other things. Or rather, a ‘lack’ of foraging is. Because most of us no longer forage for our food, we are very disconnected from nature. Nature is something which, to us, exists in isolation of, and removal from, the human condition. By encouraging discussion of other somewhat related topics, we will segue into discussion of foraging with people that would otherwise have not sought out information on foraging. We will reach a much higher number of people than we ever would just by continuing to endlessly ‘preach to the choir’.

The more good people who know the basic skills of foraging, the better off the whole of humanity is. And no worries, we all know that the number of foragers will never exceed a fractional percentage of the population. So fears that people will ‘over forage’ the world en masse if ‘everyone’ knows this knowledge are statistically unrealistic to the extreme.

So, fear not. You aren’t going to be training your competition if you teach a few more good folks how to forage.

There are many valid topics in these tumultuous times that deserve in depth discussion. If all I do is talk about foraging, then the many and varied topics of our time that need to be talked about get completely missed. I think this is a disservice.

I also think that most of the foragers I know personally will applaud this move, as the vast majority of them are very intelligent and dynamic people. They have wide and varied interests. In other words, they aren’t just interested in foraging. They’re interested in what’s going on in their world and how to make a positive difference. They also don’t oft get a chance to discuss these topics as they are afraid to talk about them in other places for fear of being ‘off topic’, or considered ‘fringe’.

I would like this blog, and the corresponding Wild Cookery! Forums to eventually become such a springboard for open and honest discussions.

All legal and lawful topics should be up for discussion in a healthy society. A mutual interest in foraging should be the start of an intelligent conversation, not the end all be all of a conversation.

NYC School Unveils Toxic All Vegetarian Diet

I like to call things as I see them, as the title above highlights.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/02/health/new-york-vegetarian-school/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

New York (CNN) — Asked which school meals were their favorites, students at a public school in the New York borough of Queens don’t say chicken fingers or meatballs. Instead, they name rice and kidney beans, black bean quesadillas or tofu with Chinese noodles.

“Whoever thought they would hear a third-grader saying that they liked tofu and Chinese noodles?” asked Dennis Walcott, New York City schools chancellor.

Walcott was at the Active Learning Elementary School this week to celebrate its move to all-vegetarian meals five days a week. The school of nearly 400 students, from pre-kindergarten to third grade, was founded five years ago on the principle that a healthy lifestyle leads to strong academic achievement.

“We decided on a vision where health and nutrition would be a part of educating the whole child,” school principal Bob Groff said.

Epic fail.

That’s what we need, more effeminate males. Made so by gobbling down estrogens from that toxic junk known as unfermented soy.

Oh, and it also states that ‘rice’ is a staple of many of these student’s home foods.

This is where I have a problem. Absolute rot like this being promoted as ‘healthy lifestyle’, when it’s the total and absolute opposite.

And what’s linked in the middle of this ridiculous article? You guessed it… ‘Study: Too much red meat may shorten lifespan’

http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/12/health/red-meat-shorten-lifespan/index.html

Eat the Weeds videos now available on DVD!

After a long struggle and many hurdles, the world’s most watched foraging videos are now available on DVD!

As many of you know, these videos are put together by my friend, and mentor, ‘Green’ Deane Jordan of Eattheweeds.com

Current pricing is very affordable at $1 per episode, with 15 episodes per DVD, shipping included. You can’t beat that deal with a stick!

The DVDs can be acquired here:

The Modern Voodoo of Nutrition, Part II: The Cholesterol Myth

Everyone knows that high cholesterol and eating saturated fat cause heart disease, right?

Just ask almost anyone. Ask your friends, co-workers, parents, siblings, neighbors, and medical ‘professionals’.

They’ll likely all tell you that, yes, saturated fat is the prime cause of heart disease, and eating a bacon cheeseburger is a heart attack waiting to happen! It’ll raise your cholesterol, and then you’re just moments away from a fatal myocardial infarction.

The conventional wisdom is that the 3 B’s of ‘Butter, Bacon, and Bovine’ will be the death of you! It’s enshrined dogma now.

It doesn’t matter one lick whether or not any of it is true or not. Or if in fact, it’s just absolutely and totally 100% pure bullchips.

It’s engrained in the public consciousness now. It’s now ‘fact’, even though it’s absolutely and patently false.

But why are saturated fat and cholesterol so demonized by the medical media? (Saturated fat found in coconut oil notwithstanding.)

To answer this, we must take a look at cholesterol.

Cholesterol is a very misunderstood thing, even by many very educated people. Most doctors I know do not even understand it. You try to have a simple conversation with them and most of them look at you like you’re crazy. The fault does not lie with them, per se. They are just perpetuating the myth and regurgitating what they were taught from rote memorization. I do not think that this is by accident. Just like there is no profit in ‘cures’ for anything, but rather in the treatment of ‘disease’, there is no profit in an educated public. The individual doctors are not to blame. But they do have some responsibility to bear for continuing to be the banner men and women for something that was long ago proven to be flat out incorrect.

The confusion in all of this comes with LDL, or Low Density Lipoproteins.

When your LDL level goes up, everyone freaks out. This is the ‘high cholesterol’ that your doctor typically talks about. High cholesterol isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom. You don’t fix something by absolutely ignoring the cause and trying to ‘fix’ the symptoms instead. But that’s exactly what the medical industry does at large. (Because it’s not really trying to ‘fix’ anything!) In order to address the cause, we must first ask why the cholesterol is elevated in the first place. In other words, what function does it serve that is causing your body to have this response? The answers may prove instructive.

It is also important to note that most of the time when someone goes in for a cholesterol test, that the office doing the test largely do not inform you of the difference between LDL and HDL (High Density Lipoproteins) They just say you have high cholesterol and that you have to bring it down. If you don’t ask, they typically won’t even tell you which of your cholesterols are high.

As everyone knows, LDL is labelled as ‘bad’ cholesterol. It’s not ‘bad’, it has a function in your body, and is there for a reason. Bringing your LDL way down is just as dangerous as having it be too high. Your body needs it’s cholesterol. Without cholesterol, you’d be dead as a doornail, as your cells would not heal themselves or replicate. They also do not typically test for LDL particle size. It’s the smaller ones that tend to get ‘stuck’ in places where you don’t want them to be and eventually cause a build up if there are too many of them. And they get stuck there in the first place because they’re doing what they’re designed to do, and that’s repair damage.

And focusing solely on high LDL counts are why we have such things as statins on the market. They are prescribed with frightening regularity. They are also present in municipal and city water supplies as they tend to not break down during the ‘purification’ process and get cycled back into your drinking water. Yum! Everyone wants their infant girl on statins, right? Statins do have limited use, in theory, for a male if he has a prior history of heart attacks. But under no circumstances should females be on these drugs. They are far more harmful than helpful to women. (For further study, just do a net search on the terms ‘Statins harmful to women’. You’ll have plenty to read.)

As Dr. Joseph Mercola says:

Statins are the world’s most-prescribed class of medications. A staggering one in four Americans over the age of 45 now take cholesterol-lowering drugs such as Pravachol, Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor, Crestor, and others. A majority of them are taking these drugs for primary prevention of heart attacks and strokes.

However, mounting research suggests this could be a critical mistake.

Most recently, two separate studies have concluded that progression of coronary artery calcification, which is the hallmark of potentially lethal heart disease, is INCREASED with statin drug use.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/10/15/statin-drugs-on-coronary-disease.aspx

The pharmaceutical powers that be of Big Pharma and Big Medica want you to be mostly ignorant of cholesterol. They want you to think of all of it as ‘bad’, so that you’ll buy more of their statin drugs and pad the bottom line. And why shouldn’t they? They’re a business. It’s called the medical industry after all. It’s a for-profit organization, not a philanthropic braintrust. They want to sell more statins. You are a consumer to them, and you need to be as ignorant as possible to consume as much of their product as they can possibly sell you.

But wait, you say. My Dr. says that I need to lower my cholesterol! How can I do that without statins?

Here’s a real question that folks need to pose to their doctor. “Why do I need to lower my cholesterol?” So many people I know are afraid to question their primary care providers and ask the simple and basic questions. They think that they’ll look like a fool, or a weirdo, or whatever, if they simply ask the doctor questions that challenge their recommendations.

If you were to say… “Ok, doc, you want me to lower my cholesterol. Why do I have to lower my cholesterol? What negative health effect is my cholesterol having? Is it my LDL or my HDL that is causing the problem?”

The doctor would likely answer: “Why? Well because everyone knows that high cholesterol causes heart disease and plaque build up in your arteries, which leads to heart attacks and strokes.”

Oh really?

Almost as dangerous as the totally ignorant, are those who are just educated enough on a certain topic to be intolerant of any other view. These doctors largely fall into that category.

I refer to these folks as having a ‘militant mindset’. Whether that be in regards to science, beliefs, religion, politics, or their diet. They get a certain mindset and become very rigid, often ignoring and failing to incorporate any further research into these topics. They also do not tend to research the topics very well at all. But they don’t need to be a doctor to have this mindset. Your average Joe or Jane has it as well. They’ll just order one book on something and all of a sudden they’re an ‘instant expert’, and look down their snout at anyone who doesn’t toe the line 100% in accordance with their current beliefs. Which may change with the next new and hot ‘trend’.

On the flip side most of our doctors tend to be mired in the quicksand of the dinosaur age dogma of rabid Keysism.

It’s only through a small number of medical practitioners who are fed up with nearly half a century of bad medical science, and with an informed and proactive cadre of individuals that are taking their health into their own capable hands, that any of this information is surfacing at all. If it were up to the mainstream medical mafia, none of it would ever see the light of day in a million years.

The purpose of this article isn’t to give you all the answers. It is to get you looking for answers of your own.

A good place to start when you are done with this article, is the movie ‘Fat Head’ which can be viewed free, here: http://www.hulu.com/watch/196879/fat-head

There are also things that all of us need to be aware of that will affect each and every one us, such as the new ruling by the AMA that declares obesity as a ‘disease’.

Be on the lookout for all the new and invasive ways that they try to control our lives in order to combat this newly classified ‘disease’. The effects will be as far reaching as they are detrimental.

And what will the medical mafia recommend as a solution to this new ‘disease’? More of the same that got us there in the first place!

Low fat, high carb, diets with plenty of grains. That’s what they’ll recommend. And that’s what’s been killing us for decades. Oh, and exercise. You can’t forget that one. Just burn more calories than you take in, and you’ll lose weight, right? What a joke. You’ll never exercise yourself from obese to thin. And nothing positive will happen if you don’t get your sugar and carb intake under control. It’s simply not physically possible.

Since obesity is now classified as a ‘disease’, I guess folks like me better watch ourselves and protect every simple truthful statement we utter with a disclaimer. You know, because only the FDA is allowed to say what can and cannot be used to prevent or treat a ‘disease’.

So saying something so simple as ‘Excess sugars and carbs can make you fat’ would be a borderline revolutionary statement now.

Well, you know what I think about that?

In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act. – George Orwell

Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional, and none of what is stated in any of my writings or articles should ever be taken as medical advice. I simply write about things I do, and what has seemed to work for me personally. This article is for entertainment only, and nothing herein is intended to cure or prevent any disease. For example, should you cut out sugars and ratchet your carbs way down, I have no idea why you might suddenly be in better health in short order, or why your Type II Diabetes might suddenly vanish. Please get your medical advice from a competent and professional medical provider, should you be able to actually find one. The reader takes it upon him/herself to be 100% accountable for following any information, suggestion, or research in this article and agrees to indemnify the author of all responsibility in regards to any ill effects (or health benefits) that following anything written here may engender. That, and don’t bother suing me, it’s not worth your time, I’m poor. 😉

Forage! Episode III: Proper Identification

Ever wonder what happens to all those cavalier folks who think that nature is just another harmless and safe grocery store?

Forage! Special Edition: Green Bean’s Garden

This Special Edition of the Forage! comic strip is in honor of someone who’s given back tremendously to the foraging community through his tireless work, incredible foraging videos, and hands on effort.

Through his passion for many of our favorite hobby, he has taught and touched many people’s lives. Some through his foraging classes, which he still offers, and some through his incredible videos.

To that end let the roasting… err… the honorary cameo in Foraging! begin! 🙂

And in case you’re quite new to foraging and don’t know who we’re talking about here, he can be found at www.eattheweeds.com

Forage! Episode II: Latin Love

Forage! Episode II: Latin Love is now live! 🙂

Forage! Episode I

As a bit of a spinoff from my other comic strip, but with the intent of being a standalone project, I am pleased to announce the first episode of Forage!

Forage! uses the same cutting edge graphics and stunning artwork as ‘The World According to Bob’.

And yes, that’s ‘Forage!’ with an intentional exclamation point, carrying on in the tradition of Wild Cookery! 😀

The comic strip will cover non-political topics, focusing primarily on, you guessed it… foraging.

And also on the plethora of misconceptions and misperceptions that people have regarding foraging in general.

It covers the daily adventures of one Frank the Forager, and his well meaning (and as of yet unnamed) neighbor.

So without further ado, here’s the first episode. (You may click on the image below for a larger version.)