An outdoor enthusiast, Alex McAllister-Lunt moved into the world of cooking after finishing school and embarked on a successful career working as a chef in pubs, restaurants and spiritual retreat centres. Realising the therapeutic and culinary benefits of foraging while working in London, Alex has enjoyed a wild food journey of enlightenment over the past 15 years and now teaches wild cooking, ancestral bushcraft skills, foraging and fermentation.

He also designs and tends picturesque, edible food gardens for both private and hospitality clients, has an events catering company and makes unique allergen free miso for Umami-chef.co.uk. The company’s Wild Garlic Miso is a testament to just how amazing wild, fermented products can be! We caught up with Alex to find out what free treats were on our doorstep and get his ‘pick-tips’ for the next few months.

What are the benefits of foraging for chefs?

For thousands of years, we were eating wild foods. It was our bread and butter and something I think we all need to re-educate ourselves on. Foraging offers numerous benefits to chefs and kitchens. It’s sustainable, it breeds creativity in the kitchen, it connects the dishes, menu and business to the local area, and it can provide free resources that can help reduce costs and provide a unique selling point to your offering. Not only that, but foraged and wild foods are immensely versatile, higher in nutrients, contain more vitamins and minerals, help improve your gut micro biome and can be truly delicious when prepared well.

Are there any rules when it comes to foraging?

It’s important not just to go traipsing about and ripping up anything you find. We want to protect the ecosystems but there are also some things that can make you pretty ill so you have to be careful. When it comes to basic rules, you’re not allowed to uproot the whole plant in the UK, but you can forage for the four F’s – fruits, flowers, foliage and fungi. Make sure you pick sustainably so you should only take one tenth of what you can see. If you only see one plant, leave it be. Never take the ID of any plant for granted, you have to be sure, know the life cycle and possible lookalikes. There are some amazing websites, forums and Facebook groups that can help with nailing down the species.

Is forgaging just for chefs living close to the countryside?

No, whether they live near the coast, woodland, hills, fens, towns or big cities, there is an abundance of ingredients within easy reach of all of us. When I lived in London, I would go to Cherry Tree Woods, down the canal routes or to Hampstead Heath and Wimbledon Common. There are also nettles, dandelions, daisies, cow parsley, rosehips, acorns and fruit trees lining many parks with the fruit often going to waste. The humble bramble grows absolutely everywhere, you can eat the early shoots, pickle the unopened flower buds as capers, make a Cheong from the petals, dehydrate the berries for a powder, even de-thorn the suckers and weave a basket from them or smooth out and dry the thicker stems to make straws or hand drill spindles for friction fires. Even in built up developments, you can often find Russian olives from the silver berry tree, which have these tart little berries between red currants and raspberries that are everywhere.

What’s the wild Biome Project?

It’s a challenge and project to understand what happens to our gut microbiome when we eat a solely foraged and wild food diet. A hundred of us took up the challenge to live off foraged and wild food for 3 months this year. I did it two years ago and it was a struggle to begin with and took a few weeks to get used to but this time my body relished the challenge. You can find out more here – https://monicawilde.com/the-wildbiome-project/

What are your tips for chefs to begin foraging?

Contact the Association of Foragers (foragers-association.org) and find out who forages locally. There is a real friendly community. There are also some great books such as First Time Forager by Andy Hamilton, Free Food by Monica Wilde, Forage by Liz knight and The Foragers Handbook by Miles Irving.

To begin, start out by searching for ingredients that you already recognise. For example, everyone knows what a nettle or blackberry is. While you’re out – take a picture of something you don’t know and take a cutting but be careful to wash your hands afterwards. Then check online and in books to identify the plant. Do that once a week and that’s 52 new plants a year. Cross reference with a couple of sources. You can check in a decent book or plant guide, there are some great foraging forums on Facebook or message the Association of Foragers. Don’t fully trust apps – they can get you in the ballpark, but they can be wrong. Hogweed and cow parsley are edible but hemlock that looks similar is in the same family and is dangerous. Apps aren’t always great at recognising the small differences.

Where can chefs find more recipe inspiration?

Head to the Eat Wild app, which enables users to access 500+ wild ingredients, delicious recipes and recipe plans, track their eating daily, and analyse the nutritional content, create and store their own recipes. It also provides expert foraging know-how on foraging basics, plant & fungi identification, safety plus cooking and preservation methods. If readers use the code STIRITUP25, they will receive a discount of £4.99 per month meaning the cost is just £5. The offer can only be used once per person and is valid to use until 30th November 2025. For more details visit – https://bit.ly/eatwildappdesktop
For more information on Alex, his wild food, teaching and foraging, visit www.forceofnaturechef.co.uk

Ingredients to Forage Now

NETTLES
One of the few native British plants to have high levels of magnesium, more vitamin C than oranges, more protein than soy, more iron than spinach and more calcium than milk. You can use them to make tea but if you simmer slowly, the protein curd will float to the top. Scoop them off and press them and you have nettle tofu. The leftover water can be used as a stock and the plant matter can be blitzed and dehydrated and made to make nori sheets. Don’t eat them when they’re flowering as they can be harmful to the liver and kidneys but afterwards the seeds are also great for garnishes, sprinkles, truffles or energy balls.

GROUND IVY
Often known as Ale Hoof as it was utilised in beer making prior to hops as a bittering agent and preservative or Creeping Charlie, it is in the mint family but has a myriad of flavours from mint, sage, rosemary and even oregano at different times of the year. Brilliant in a mojito but super with soups, stews and stuffings.

ROSEHIPS
Boil them in a little bit of apple cider vinegar, salt and alexander seed pepper. Strain that through a sieve (the seeds have hairs in them that need to be removed). The puree at the end can be used like a tomato passata and makes a great wild Bloody Mary alongside horseradish root, birch vodka and pickled cow parsley stem instead of celery.

SLOES
Turn them into olives like the plums or they also make a nice base for a trifle. Steep in whisky for a few months or sous vide at 70c for a few hours to speed up the process. Pass through a sieve and use that as a puree between a white chocolate sponge and top that with custard. Whatever booze you make from the sloes, turn that into a jelly for the trifle. If it’s a hot summer, the sloes can be quite big so the tartness can work really well with fish. Juice them and poach fish in the liquor.

UK SEAWEED
No UK seaweeds are poisonous, and we’re surrounded by coasts so we should do more with it. Do check which are the cleanest beaches first though. For all seaweed – dry it in the sun and then smoke it over an oak fire. It contains mannitol, a natural sugar so it’s salty, sweet and smoky at the same time. You can blitz it down as a seasoning or make an ash to coat a wild boar fillet, then serve with dressed spider crab, sea spaghetti, samphire and a nettle colcannon for the ultimate surf and turf.

Acorns
After leeching they make a fantastic gluten free flour so you can make delicious crackers, pancakes and blinis.

Mushrooms and Hazelnuts
Make your own miso. You can make a miso from mushrooms and defatted hazelnuts. Adding 50% koji, 7% salt and leave that for 3 months. We foraged in the New Forest and I made a miso with whatever I could find. I have a miso that tastes of the New Forest floor – what has more provenance than that.

Plums
If you take off the first batch of unripe plums from a tree, it will improve the yield and plum quality of the later crop but don’t discard the unripe ones. Put them in a 5% salt brine with oregano, chillies and you will have massive olives that have a slight plummy aftertaste.

Dandelion
The petals can be picked and turned into vegan honey in a heavy syrup. Once you have picked out the petals, you’re left with a flower head that can be pickled in apple cider vinegar and made into capers.

Ribwort plantain
This grows everywhere, and these are the plants you want to soothe a nettle sting. They have edible flowers but the seed cases that come afterwards can be picked and used as a rice substitute for risotto. Cream, butter, salt, pepper and a little pecorino at the end. They also have a mushroomy flavour to them. The seed heads can also be chopped up and cooked in apple cider vinegar and a rosehip passata. This can be stuffed in greater plantain leaves that have been blanched for an alternative to Greek stuffed vine leaves dolmades.