The New Wildcrafted Cuisine - by Pascal Baudar (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"This gorgeous book will make you salivate and dream. Pascal Baudar is exploring important culinary terrain."--Sandor Ellix Katz, author of the New York Times bestseller The Art of Fermentation

The New Wildcrafted Cuisine takes incorporating wild foods into your meals to a new, palate-bending level and in the process redefines terroir as we've come to know it.

Award-winning author and "culinary alchemist" Pascal Baudar, a professional forager and wild food instructor, combines his research and in-depth knowledge of plants and landscapes with the fascinating and innovative techniques of a master food preserver.

This beautifully photographed book offers up dozens of creative, seasonal recipes and instructions for preparing a variety of preserved foods, including Pickled Acorns, White Sage-Lime Cider, Wild Kimchi Spice, Wild Mustards, Currant Capers, Infused Salts with Wild Herbs, Pine Needle Vinegar, and much more.

The New Wildcrafted Cuisine is sure to inspire both chefs and adventurous eaters to explore their own bioregions and find an astonishing array of plants and other materials that can be used in their own kitchens.

"A beautiful book, loaded with recipes and techniques."--Saveur

"Pascal's book contains some of the most unique and innovative ideas that you'll ever find for using wild flavors. Clear instructions accompany each recipe, along with striking photos of the ingredients and finished products."--Samuel Thayer, author of The Forager's Harvest

"[Baudar is] perhaps the prince of wildcrafted haute cuisine: He creates visually stunning, palate-pleasing recipes using innovative cooking processes and foraged ingredients"--NPR's "The Salt"

"A gorgeously photographed collection of prose and recipes that's both survival manual and mission statement."--Los Angeles Times

Review Quotes

"Baudar, a self-described 'professional forager' whose ingredients and preserves have been used by such chefs as Ludo Lefebvre and Top Chef winner Michael Voltaggio, shows how to transform barks into vinegars, insect sugar into beer, and rocks into plates, among other things, in this avid guide to field-and-table cooking. While most of the recipes center on fauna found in Southern California, aspiring survivalists anywhere will likely appreciate Baudar's deep commitment to the practice. Pickled acorns, anyone? Dirt index: Swimming in the primordial ooze."--Publishers Weekly

"Pascal's book contains some of the most unique and innovative ideas that you'll ever find for using wild flavors. Clear instructions accompany each recipe, along with striking photos of the ingredients and finished products."--Samuel Thayer, author of The Forager's Harvest and Nature's Garden

"As a Southern California native, I grew up with the terroir that I eventually would incorporate into my cuisine at Girasol. Pascal was my spark. The first day Pascal walked through our back kitchen door with a cornucopia of foraged California wild plants and 'Old World' recipe vinegars and beers, I knew I had found my voice. Pascal's seemingly infinite knowledge and passion for what grows in the desert region we live in has truly inspired me. This book is one of a kind, a walk off the beaten trail and an exploration of true wild flavors. Chefs who truly care about finding new ways of expression and commitment to 'time and place' cooking will undoubtedly be captivated by it."--CJ Jacobson, executive chef, Girasol restaurant, and winner of Top Chef Duels

"Visually stunning, The New Wildcrafted Cuisine is incredibly impressive, a tour de force, a masterpiece. At long last, an author has truly captured the power and sophistication that wild foods can impart to both our diets and our lives."--Stephen Harrod Buhner, author of The Lost Language of Plants and Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers

"The New Wildcrafted Cuisine takes wild foraging to a gourmet level of creativity. I am delighted by Pascal's ingenuity of wild combinations and impressed by his experience demonstrating the vast potential of culinary artistry. Pascal clearly articulates the procedures and details of transforming wild ingredients into practical recipes, thereby making the gifts of nature more accessible to us all."--Katrina Blair, author of The Wild Wisdom of Weeds

"This gorgeous book will make you salivate and dream. Pascal Baudar is exploring important culinary terrain in his coastal California bioregion, incorporating the incredible diversity he forages into a broad array of foods and drinks in exciting, elegant, and clever ways. Beyond the particulars of what he can harvest there--some which you or I might find where we live, but much of which is very different--it is his methods, ideas, and aesthetics, all of which can be applied much more broadly, that are truly inspirational."--Sandor Ellix Katz, author of The Art of Fermentation and Wild Fermentation

About the Author

Pascal Baudar is the author of three previous books: Wildcrafted Fermentation (2020), The Wildcrafting Brewer (2018), and The New Wildcrafted Cuisine (2016). A self-described "culinary alchemist," he leads classes in traditional food preservation techniques. Through his business, Urban Outdoor Skills, he has introduced thousands of home cooks, celebrity chefs, and foodies to the flavors offered by their wild landscapes. In 2014, Baudar was named one of the most influential local tastemakers by Los Angeles Magazine.