Bushcraft Foraging | How to Cook Edible Wild Milkweed Pods on a Campfire in the Summer

Description

Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) is known widely as a poisonous plant on which Monarch butterflies depend.

But the truth is, many parts of this plant are edible, so long as they are treated properly as demonstrated in the video. This is a useful skill to know for any nature lover, bushcrafter, survivalist, or prepper. Don't let yourself pass up a good food source!

What is Adventure Bushraft? A series of short cinematic videos in which we do a small walk with some sort of bushcraft activity - processing wood, using plants, making shelters, etc.

Tags: Milkweed Butterfly (Organism Classification),milkweed,Monarch Butterfly (Organism Classification),Wild Food (TV Program),wild edible,eat the weeds,Summer,Camping,Weekend,Survival,prepper,SHTF,TEOTWAWKI,edible plants,plant identificaton,Botany (Field Of Study),Ethnobotany (Field Of Study),Survival Skills (TV Genre),Bushcraft,Campfire,Outdoor,Ray Mears' Bushcraft (TV Program),Family,how to,Les Hiddins (TV Personality),bush tucker,Asclepias (Organism Classification)

Video Transcription

this is a plant you're likely to see in a lot of meadows and things like that around here

this is milkweed and this plant is really important for monarch butterflies they lay their eggs on the leaves so that uh the caterpillars can eat them and that actually makes them boys eNOS and this plant is indeed poisonous to us as well but when the plant is young you can actually eat the shoots in the leaves and you just have to boil them up and then they're good to eat and right now actually the seed pods are inedible so long as you cook them as well now the way to identify this plant is that when it's young you want to make sure that the stem is fuzzy and that it also has a milky sap now if it's smooth or if it has no milky sap it could either be dog Bane or some other poisonous plant that you cannot cook and of course the seed plots here are really distinctive these don't come out until maybe late July early August but we're gonna cook some of these up and try to make a meal and the amazing thing is that all the materials I need to cook my food we found right in this little ditch in the middle of Suburbia now I am only gonna take a couple pods from each plant two reasons one whenever you're foraging for wild edibles it's a good idea to only take a little bit from each plant in general because you don't want to do any harm to one individual plant and you want to protect the ecosystem too like I mentioned earlier this plant is especially important for monarch butterflies and they have not been appearing as frequently as they used to and in fact I believe there's a tiny tiny monarch caterpillar right on here they start out really small and they get really big

now the key is to collect some of the smaller pods less than two inches is ideal this one looks pretty good and there's two things you can do to check and make sure it's not too mature first if you squeeze the pot a little and it splits open really easily it's a good sign that it's not good for eating second if the seeds inside are still white that's good but if they are brown and already sort of dry and fuzzy that's probably not going to be a good pod to eat so you really have to get these while they're still young and once again I'm only taking a couple from each plant and leaving plenty on there for Mother Nature of course something that grows even more prominently in this ditch than the milkweed are these cattails and cattail is one of the finest natural Tinder's that I've come across so I'm just going to take a few of these heads and

should be all I need now there's actually some really good firewood in this ditch now I wouldn't blame you if you thought I had put these here and planned this so that I could say that I found my firewood in the ditch also well the truth is I actually did put these here but it was about seven months ago when I did I came here to have some tea and start a little fire in the snow in the winter but anyway it's here so I might as well use it I've got this nice saw very simple design probably a pretty cheap saw but it works well enough and I've got to thank my friend yeah he's going traveling for a while on some trains going on a really awesome adventure I'm a bit envious honestly but he let me have his saw because he wasn't gonna use it and works quite well I can't begin to tell you how hard it was to start this fire I got a flame going twice got my feather sticks lit and everything and then poof nothing the cattails were way too young and green so I had to resort to using some thistle seeds which actually worked pretty well but uh it really just goes to show the key to fire making is lots and lots of preparation more preparation than you think you need so I finally just collected a bunch of fissile seeds feathered a bunch of sticks a lot of little ones it's pretty humid conditions right now so it takes a lot to start a fire here but now we can finally boil some water and get our milkweed pods cooking well one thing that ironically you don't want to get from the ditch is water

I brought my own bottle of tap water and you're gonna want to boil these pots to do it if any of the toxins that might be inside of them one thing I do want to mention is you'll notice that I've actually got this fire on a platform of larger logs and there's two reasons for that one is that uh it's wet on the ground so I wanted to have something dry to start the fire on and to actually if you have a fire lots of little things burning down on to bigger wood rather than what's usually the reverse where you have big wood on top the fire tends to last longer and burn for a longer while

well once the pods are boiled toxins are all gone you just dump the water I got here some sesame oil I'm just gonna give these pods a little stir fry in the fire I've also brought a bit of this chili bean powder or chili bean sauce rather dope and John in Chinese the brand is Lee Kum Kee I'll do another video on this sometime I'm just gonna take a bit of this put it on next I've got a bit of salt a bit of pepper and my favorite got garlic powder putting that on quite generously and I'm just gonna put this pan right on this fire believe me when I say that it smells absolutely incredible

well gonna give this a try smells great

Wow some people have described it as over and that's what I expected it tastes like

but it's uh not as slimy as overnight and it takes them back for the others to try anyway

thank you for joining me I hope you get to try some no we Tod sometime hopefully by the time you see this video won't be too late there's always next year if that's the case it's absolutely delicious

check out our full episode right here and you can see some of our other site videos down there this is just such a beautiful night I might stay out a little bit

you

it's actually pretty good it's kind of chewy like oh crap that's not slimy and pawed kind of like it's juicy so flavors in it so it's actually really good I could eat this on a daily basis you