Foraging for Wild Food with my Dog | TAOutdoors

Description

I decided to get out into the woods to scavenge around for some Chestnuts. Eventually (with the help of my dog!) I found a chestnut tree. Thought I would bring you along on the adventure and show you how I cook and prepare the chestnuts before I eat them. Hope you enjoy the video and please subscribe, comment and share the videos if you did :) - Mike

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Tags: foraging,wild food,forest,woods,woodland,forest food,chestnuts,how to cook chestnuts,cooking chestnuts,roasting chestnuts,roast chestnuts,nuts,wild edibles,bushcraft,fire lighting,dog,jack russell terrier,puppy,jrt,wild camping,wilderness,cute puppy,totally awesome outdoors,taoutdoors

Video Transcription

welcome to the totally awesome outdoor show and in this episode I'm gonna go foraging for some chestnuts and hopefully at the end take him home and roast them up I'm here with my dog Jax he's a little Jack Russell terrier he's going to join me on the foraging and hopefully you guys would enjoy coming along on the adventure with us you

you

this is cast on iesous Teva or the sweet chestnut as we know it the Latin word sativa means cultivated by humans the Romans actually used the sweet chestnut the nut itself for porridge and monks and other people have used it for hundreds and hundreds of years it's quite easily identifiable not just by its bark which has these long kind of furrows or fissures like this but actually the leaf itself the leaf is far more easy to identify this tree they grow to around 20 to 35 metres high and the trunks can grow pretty wide up to around about two meters in diameter let me just show you what the leaf looks like so this is what the leaf looks like and it's quite easily to identify the chestnut because of this kind of tooth tooth like edge and actually I'd like to think of it as like a serrated saw blade you can see that it's very very sort of similar to the blade of a saw and that's probably one of the easiest ways to identify this tree the leaves itself are actually fairly large they're one of the largest leaves in the iana trees in the UK and if I show you this one just in comparison this one is obviously not turned yet we are in back end of October so this will start to drop off turn color and drop off soon but here's another one which you can see the difference it grows incredibly huge these leaves again it's got that serrated edge to it and this is going to lovely golden color as we're now well into autumn and the trees are starting to lose their leaves that's kind of one way you can identify this tree as well as the bark or basically but the other really easy way to identify it is the actual seed or nut itself so in the autumn months the female flowers basically develop into these spiny casings known as capsules and they these are basically a protective casing for the nut itself to protect it from squirrels and things like that and they are actually really really spiky so generally when you're breaking these open you're going to need a pair of gloves because these real spiky inside these capitals is the colibri 'm Orca Lybia for plural and that's basically the night itself what I've got here is a couple in different stages so trying to break these open is actually fairly difficult

the iphone by grabbing them and twisting them and that tends to pop open the capital there and inside you can see the key Livia which is the nuts the actual fruiting seed of the chestnut now these ones are not fully developed yet but I'll get them out anyway they usually have about three to seven inside and that's what they look like that is the equilibrium so here it is in different stages this one I just opened so that was not ready really the fruiting the nuts weren't really ready to eat this one as you can see on the back has gone slightly Brown tinged brown so it's fallen recently and actually been open very very recently probably by squirrel and then this one here is very Brown the seeds have gone they've probably been taken by squirrel or just into the ground and actually this interior of the cap you'll hear is almost like suede it's really really soft and furry and actually you get that texture with the chestnut self kind of like a sweet potato texture okay so I'm back from my foraging session out in the woods and I'm here in my kitchen so I've collected some chestnuts some sweet chestnuts hitting my little oilskin pouch here and what I'm going to do is just quickly show you how I prepare them it's a very common way of doing it but you can obviously add your own bits to it little bits of seasoning and things like that but I'll show you how a pair of pair them and then how I roast them afterwards so here is my chestnut one of the ones that I picked and what I'm going to do is they say you can put a cross in it but actually I'm just going to put one long line in it just so that it splits and it's easy to open now I'm going to go kind of across the grain here I only need to push gently I'm using just my bushcraft knife for this but you can actually use like a bread knife and just soar away just to be safer but I'm literally just gently rocking back and forward there we go there's the split I don't go into two three and that's all you need to know once you can see that split there that should be fine and the reason you split them is because basically they can explode when they are heated up in the oven so if I squeeze that you can actually see the the nut itself inside so we're going to do that to all my chestnuts and then put them in a saucepan bring it to the simmer and then I'll show you the roasting part so they're all in there I'm just going to add a little bit salt just helps give it a little bit of extra flavor and now I'm going to put that to simmer and once it's simmering then I'll take them out and get them on the roasting pan so now they're ready to go in the oven I'm going to put it on gas mark 6 which is about 200 degrees Celsius or 400 degrees Fahrenheit and I put probably better than for about 20 to 25 minutes and then they'll be ready to eat so the chestnuts are at the oven they've had about 20-25 minutes and as you can see they've started to peel open the reason you do roast them is because the shell is actually very hard to take away from the nut itself so roasting it just makes that shell easier to put away and also being a traditional kind of winter well autumnal snack it's quite nice to have them and eat them warm so I'm going to let those set for about 10 minutes or so just to let them cool down a bit and then I can eat them ok so they're cooled down and I can now the show pulls away really easily and it's obviously got this little kind of very under part 2the just number the shell but you can actually peel that away and it's fine and there is the real juicy bit and that's really really nice and it's got the texture of kind of sweet potato but it's really nice it's kind of sweet really that's why they call it the sweet chestnut but it's very very nice and actually a packed full of carbohydrates protein and fats so really good for you especially on those cold days and you're looking to forage for some wild food sweet chestnuts way to go you