Bushwacked Sour

Author Notes

About thirty five years ago Connie Green found a couple baskets too many chanterelles once again and took the golden overflow to a Napa chef, thus beginning America’s oldest wild foods company. Author of the award-winning The Wild Table, Seasonal Foraged Food and Recipes, Connie supplies culinary luminaries like Thomas Keller, Christopher Kostow, and Michael Mina. Connie and the same tribe of hunter-gathers have been sustainably harvesting from the wild for over three decades.

Connie is a longstanding Good Food Award entrant. This year her company Wine Forest Wild Food finalised/won (won if published past 16th Jan) with her entry of Pickled Sea Beans. The recipe below however draws upon her 2013 winning entry in the pickles category, a wild elderberry shrub.

The intense flavor of this shrub can take you in diverse directions, from its traditional use as syrup or as a base for astounding salad dressings. Its complex black currant-like flavor belies elderberry's legendary medicinal properties. Nothing in any health food store will taste this delicious, and, because of its concentrated flavor, a little goes a long way. Any bitters can be used in this recipe but we think orange is really a cut above.
—Good Food Awards