Cooking with wild foraged produce can be tough but rewarding. Wild beach pea plants and pods look like farm stand (domesticated) bought peas. They have the same flowers, the same leaves, the same pea pods and even the same tiny peas inside. They also smell like domesticated peas when you snap one of the pods in half and take a sniff. But this is where the similarities stop.
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| Wild Beach Pea plant on northern Maine coastline Copyright 2018 by Helen A Lockey |
Wild beach pea plants are tough, and I don’t mean their attitude, their stems are more like twigs and their leaves are more like cardboard (even in spring when they are young). And the pea pods are more like little wooden boats than the melt-in-your mouth snow pea style pods you find in grocery stores.
But I guess they have to be tough because they grow along Northern Maine rocky shorelines that are licked and bashed by frigid ocean waters (even in summer). And they have to endure fog that is a common weather event.
Each night of my vacation, in the wilds of the northern Maine coast, I cooked a vegan dinner with at least one wild foraged ingredient. The hardest and yet tastiest were from the beach pea plant.
I harvested the leaves, stems, and pea pods. I chose not to harvest the flowers because I wanted to leave something for the local bumblebees to forage on (they already had a tough life).
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| High heat fried wild beach pea leaves and stems, Northern Maine, Copyright 2018 by Helen A Lockey |
My first attempt of cooking with them involved frying, leaves and stems, over high heat. I thought I could break down their cellulose faster if I shocked them with the temperature of the pan. I also fried green bell peppers, celery, garlic, and a premade brown lentils and quinoa mix.
I was wrong.
The dish was delicious made with beans and other store bought vegetables but the beach pea portion was a more catch and release style of eating. You caught them in your mouth, chewed for more time than you thought necessary and then released them into a napkin or piece of paper towel.
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| Low heat fried wild beach pea leaves with garlic, Northern Maine. Copyright 2018 by Helen A Lockey |
Not one to give up easily, I tried frying them again, with just the leaves. This time I used a medium temperature pan and slowly cooked them, with garlic, thinking they would soften if I spent an hour gently cooking them down into an edible, succulent side dish.
I was wrong.
The leaves were translucent but they were just as tough as in the previous meal and had the same catch-and-release eating experience. Fortunately there were other vegetables like spinach, celery, mushrooms and red onion.
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| Vegan soup stock made with wild beach pea pods, leaves and stems along with kitchen trimmings, Northern Maine., Copyright 2018 by Helen A Lockey |
The next, and last time, I used them was to make a vegan soup stock. I used the stem, leaves and inedible pods. I put them in a big pot of water along with kitchen trimmings (I had been collecting for five days) of mushroom stems, onion outer skin, ends of broccoli, carrot heads...etc. I thought that at least this way I could capture the flavor of the beach pea plant.
I kept stock at a low-boil for 3 hours. At the end, I strained out the vegetables and beach peas and was left with a brown colored liquid.
I was right.
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| Tiny, wild-foraged beach pea plant peas, Northern Maine. Copyright 2018 by Helen A Lockey |
The stock was delicious. And it made such a yummy base that I threw caution to the wind when I made my soup and added some beach pea plant peas thinking they would add a little sweetness.
I was wrong.
They were very starchy and high in tannin, which left my teeth feeling unpleasantly squeaky.
Fortunately the soup had a lot of other delicious ingredients to off set this culinary misstep. I used shredded beets, shredded turnips, shredded carrot, red beans and olive oil to balance out the tastes of the soup. The fragrant, earthiness flavor of the rest of the beach pea plant still came through to turn the soup into a gourmet treat.
Cooking wild beach pea plants is a challenge but making them into a soup stock is the best way to experience their wild delicious flavor.
And now I know what I know, I would use them again.
