Episode 31

Wildcrafting with Pascal Baudar!

Published on: 23rd July, 2022

What is forest beer? How can you collect a yeast starter from the wild? Can lacto-fermentation be successful with little to no brine?

We are surrounded by wild food! In this episode Pascal Baudar shares profound insights into the world of wildcrafting cuisine. His knowlege regarding traditional preservation methods, combined with his passion for flavour, kindles creative and exciting ways to make use of abundant, invasive plants!


Opening tune: Waterplant Waltz by Carmen Porter (https://carmenporter.com)


Pascal Baudar:

The forager and courses: https://www.urbanoutdoorskills.com

His pottery: https://www.pascalbaudarceramics.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pascalbaudar/

https://www.instagram.com/wildcraftedceramics/

Transcript
Carmen Porter:

Welcome to song and plants.

Carmen Porter:

My name is Carmen Porter.

Carmen Porter:

In this episode, I was joined by Pascal Baudar.

Carmen Porter:

His books, the New Wildcrafted Cuisine, Wildcrafting Brewer, and

Carmen Porter:

Wildcrafted Fermentation offer profound insight into traditional

Carmen Porter:

preservation techniques, foraging and creative wild food preparation.

Carmen Porter:

His flavor combinations, wild concoctions and brews will challenge your expectations

Carmen Porter:

and perceptions about your local flora.

Carmen Porter:

I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Carmen Porter:

Welcome to song and plants.

Carmen Porter:

Would you mind introducing yourself

Pascal Baudar:

So my name is Pascal Baudar P a S C a L B a U D a R.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm what you call a wildcrafter.

Pascal Baudar:

And that means I kind of forager, with a little bit of ethics

Pascal Baudar:

consideration about the environment.

Pascal Baudar:

Like what I'm trying to do is really, uh, work with nature and

Pascal Baudar:

concentrate on a lot of plants that are non-native and invasive.

Pascal Baudar:

And one of my goal is to create a cuisine that is beneficial for the environment

Carmen Porter:

what was your journey to wilds plants?

Pascal Baudar:

It started with my grandma.

Pascal Baudar:

When I grew up in Belgium, we were pretty much self sufficient for,

Pascal Baudar:

you know, I don't recall going to the market , I think my dad used

Pascal Baudar:

to go buy meat, but that was it, everything had to come from our garden.

Pascal Baudar:

But my grandma used to send me all the time to go collect some

Pascal Baudar:

wild food too like dandelion stinging nettle, hazelnuts, walnuts.

Pascal Baudar:

and it was completely, completely normal at the time.

Pascal Baudar:

Like there was not even a consideration that it's weird and I'm talking about

Pascal Baudar:

the older generation people in their, you know, seventies and sixties it was just a

Pascal Baudar:

normal way to complement the diet to just.

Pascal Baudar:

Go into the wilderness, whatever wilderness was left and pick up food.

Pascal Baudar:

And a lot of those weeds what they call weeds by the agriculture system.

Pascal Baudar:

Cuz they don't want people to pick them up I guess, but a lot of

Pascal Baudar:

those weed are super plentiful and everywhere it doesn't, you don't even

Pascal Baudar:

need the forest or the wilderness.

Pascal Baudar:

And they're extremely nutritious.

Pascal Baudar:

So this time with my grandma and I really wanted to do as a kid, what

Pascal Baudar:

I'm doing right now, which is, you know, really dealing with wild plant

Pascal Baudar:

and understand all the things you can do and even be artistic with it.

Pascal Baudar:

I think I'm pretty artistic.

Pascal Baudar:

You know, I do my own pottery with wild clay.

Pascal Baudar:

I do my own fibers and cordage with wild plant, but nobody could teach me at the

Pascal Baudar:

time in Belgium, there was no internet.

Pascal Baudar:

I could not find any books about it.

Pascal Baudar:

So I ended up going to the academia or fine art.

Pascal Baudar:

Ended up being an artist, graphic artist.

Pascal Baudar:

And I came back to wild food in 1999 because Y2K was about to happen and

Pascal Baudar:

the end of the world was coming.

Pascal Baudar:

So I decided to do a class with a gentleman called

Pascal Baudar:

Christopher Nyerges in LA.

Pascal Baudar:

He still teaches.

Pascal Baudar:

He teaches like survival, you know, city survival, urban survival, but

Pascal Baudar:

part of its curriculum is wild food.

Pascal Baudar:

And I took a wild food class and I remember I showed up over there

Pascal Baudar:

and after the class, I said, I wanna do this with my life.

Pascal Baudar:

It kind of like everything came back , my goal as a child really came back and I

Pascal Baudar:

basically spent two years doing classes with anybody who could teach me like every

Pascal Baudar:

weekend I would spend Saturday and Sunday.

Pascal Baudar:

And I would do classes with survivalist, botanist, mushroom people, native people.

Pascal Baudar:

I would even , hang out at ethnic store.

Pascal Baudar:

Like if there was, you know, olives in the store, like in the supermarket, I

Pascal Baudar:

would go to like ethnic supermarket, I would stand near the olives, and

Pascal Baudar:

when grandma was picking up olives

Pascal Baudar:

I'd be like, please take me home.

Pascal Baudar:

You know, like show me what you're gonna do because we have a lot,

Pascal Baudar:

olives in California, for example.

Pascal Baudar:

So I spent two years doing that and, and really applied to my life to

Pascal Baudar:

a point that I even spent a whole year living on wild food only.

Pascal Baudar:

and then I realized very fast that if you're serious about it, about

Pascal Baudar:

wildcrafting or foraging, you understand it's really a food preservation.

Pascal Baudar:

So it's really all about food preservation, unlike to the store,

Pascal Baudar:

you know, you can go to the store and buy tomatoes all year long.

Pascal Baudar:

It's not normal.

Pascal Baudar:

It's freaky.

Pascal Baudar:

You know, people don't realize that.

Pascal Baudar:

Wild food is not like that, wild food will show up.

Pascal Baudar:

And we'll show up for maybe three or four weeks at different stage like the local

Pascal Baudar:

black mustard that we have in California.

Pascal Baudar:

It shows up as a sprout, which you can use.

Pascal Baudar:

Then a month later, you have all those greens and you can start using the leaves.

Pascal Baudar:

You can start using the stem.

Pascal Baudar:

And at one point you start flowering and you can start using the flowers and make

Pascal Baudar:

some kind of condiments with the flowers.

Pascal Baudar:

You can ferment the flowers and some of the leaves too.

Pascal Baudar:

And then it turns into seeds, which you can then use, you know, so the

Pascal Baudar:

plant will have a lifetime of three months and go through a different stage.

Pascal Baudar:

And at every stage you can preserve that harvest, including the roots.

Pascal Baudar:

And it's true for every single wild food.

Pascal Baudar:

You know, you can pick up walnuts and collect them when they're green and

Pascal Baudar:

unripe to make pickled unripe walnuts, you can make Nocino, which is a drink,

Pascal Baudar:

and then you can wait for the walnuts to be ready, and then you can make pesto

Pascal Baudar:

and, and you can preserve those walnuts, but it's more about food preservation.

Pascal Baudar:

So I also spent another couple of years to really study traditional

Pascal Baudar:

food preservation technique.

Pascal Baudar:

And I also did a master food preserver a program at the university of California.

Pascal Baudar:

So I realized that really again, wild crafting was really about food

Pascal Baudar:

preservation and about traditional food preservation technique.

Pascal Baudar:

Then I think what made me special from the start was that I was really applying those

Pascal Baudar:

food preservation technique to wild food.

Pascal Baudar:

And I started sharing that.

Pascal Baudar:

So how to make wine or to make beer, how to do lacto fermentation, how to make your

Pascal Baudar:

own vinegars, how to preserve the harvest through canning pickling, dehydrating.

Pascal Baudar:

There's probably like 50 different method of food preservation technique that exist.

Pascal Baudar:

You think of sheperd's pie, which is really pie with meat in it, well,

Pascal Baudar:

the food preservation is really pasteurization and removal of oxygen.

Pascal Baudar:

The sheperds had to wait in the mountain for like a week or two.

Pascal Baudar:

So the sheperd's pie was basically pasteurization of the meat, put inside

Pascal Baudar:

a pie, and then you close the door, you pasteurize it again, but because

Pascal Baudar:

it's closed, there is no more oxygen.

Pascal Baudar:

And then your pie will last for close to a week without any refrigeration.

Pascal Baudar:

So a lot of interesting stuff you realize, you know, when you study

Pascal Baudar:

traditional food preservation technique.

Pascal Baudar:

I really like unusual wild food like thing that people won't

Pascal Baudar:

touch or don't even look at like, insect honeydew, lerps sugar.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm doing a lot of grains and seeds right now, things that you find your backyard

Pascal Baudar:

and people will not even think of using because they think it's so difficult,

Pascal Baudar:

but I'm proving it's super easy.

Pascal Baudar:

so I'm kind of a weirdo in that sense, I like to find like unusual

Pascal Baudar:

content, unusual wild food, but also educating people and showing that

Pascal Baudar:

it's plentiful, it's everywhere.

Pascal Baudar:

Food is everywhere and, giving example of what you could do

Pascal Baudar:

with it, if you wanted to.

Carmen Porter:

when you're learning or applying these traditional fermentation

Carmen Porter:

and preservation techniques to plants that are somewhat unusual and

Carmen Porter:

might not be what you would expect.

Carmen Porter:

Is it a trial and error or are you looking at older traditions of how they would use

Carmen Porter:

those specific plants and what techniques they would use on those specific plants?

Pascal Baudar:

Well, I'm pretty sure they were used.

Pascal Baudar:

That's the point.

Pascal Baudar:

I cannot find a recipe, but I'm pretty sure they were used because in the old

Pascal Baudar:

days and you can go back in time, I do a lot of research, even prehistoric times

Pascal Baudar:

and, Neolithic era and all this stuff.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm sure they were used is just, we don't have the recipe anymore.

Pascal Baudar:

So my job is basically to rediscover the past to a large degree, and basically

Pascal Baudar:

figure out how things were done.

Pascal Baudar:

And I'm sure they were done, lacto-fermentation of wild mustard and

Pascal Baudar:

dandelion and all this stuff is actually pretty interesting, but you can go further

Pascal Baudar:

and you can start mixing seeds to it.

Pascal Baudar:

Mixing wild seeds and mixing wild spices and nuts.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm actually able to research it at that point.

Pascal Baudar:

And I discovered that it was already done because now I have the key

Pascal Baudar:

word, I can find what it is or even if it was not done, I'm pretty

Pascal Baudar:

sure I didn't invent anything new.

Pascal Baudar:

It's really, my job is to rediscover the past to large degree I think, and

Pascal Baudar:

rediscover for me, what's exciting is rediscover flavors that our ancestors

Pascal Baudar:

used to eat or have, or experience that you could not get anywhere in a

Pascal Baudar:

modern restaurant or the supermarket.

Pascal Baudar:

And I'm pretty much going toward my own ethnicity,

Pascal Baudar:

so I do a lot of research mostly from Europe, prehistoric, from middle ages,

Pascal Baudar:

and further, and also the middle east, which is kind of my DNA mix of the two.

Pascal Baudar:

Which is interesting.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, those are all the invasive plants that I find locally too.

Pascal Baudar:

And I, I immediately got attracted to it as a forager.

Pascal Baudar:

So I think, we all without knowing it, we can follow our DNA

Pascal Baudar:

to a large degree, you know, if we will go deep into something.

Carmen Porter:

Do you start the process with the plant, like

Carmen Porter:

looking at what parts are edible...?

Pascal Baudar:

I'm a little bit different and this is something that I tell my

Pascal Baudar:

students, you know, when I do classes, is I see a lot of people taking wild food

Pascal Baudar:

and try to adapt it to a modern cuisine.

Pascal Baudar:

So they are going to make, nettle pasta.

Pascal Baudar:

Um, if you taking wild food and use it , in a modern recipe on

Pascal Baudar:

my side, I'm completely different.

Pascal Baudar:

I basically look at the plant and say, what do you wanna be.

Pascal Baudar:

So I'm really trying to zone into, to the flavor.

Pascal Baudar:

And I'm not trying to like, take that plant and change it into something

Pascal Baudar:

else to adapt it to an existing recipe like soup or polenta or whatever.

Pascal Baudar:

So I'm gonna do crazy...

Pascal Baudar:

I do a lot of side, dishes and condiments and stuff like that.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm gonna mix fermented mustard leaves with wild grain, but I'm gonna mix that

Pascal Baudar:

with the wild mustard contentment that I do using the same seeds from that plant.

Pascal Baudar:

And then I'm gonna be adding maybe mustard seed from another

Pascal Baudar:

mustard that tastes like hazelnuts.

Pascal Baudar:

So I'm doing crazy little side dishes that are super tasty and interesting,

Pascal Baudar:

but I don't do a lot of modern recipe.

Pascal Baudar:

I don't do a lot of recipe and adapt the wild food to it.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm really trying to zone into the flavor actually of the thing.

Pascal Baudar:

It's not always easy, and then you end up with things like green

Pascal Baudar:

pine cone syrup, Russian olive syrups, crazy soda, mugwort beer.

Pascal Baudar:

And a lot of those things were done in the past, you know, mugwort

Pascal Baudar:

beer probably was a classic and for Celts and Vikings in the old days,

Pascal Baudar:

because this is what they were using

Carmen Porter:

I've seen you, harvest wild yeast off of plants

Pascal Baudar:

but that's easy.

Pascal Baudar:

I thought it was super difficult, but that's super easy.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm gonna show you all this right now.

Pascal Baudar:

There you go.

Pascal Baudar:

I have juniper berries in a little dish right there.

Pascal Baudar:

And if you notice there's a lot of white powder on it.

Pascal Baudar:

And the white powder is every time you find something sweet, like a

Pascal Baudar:

fruit or whatever, the white powder is composed of wax and wild yeast.

Pascal Baudar:

So in my book, the wildcrafting brewer, I basically explained you just need

Pascal Baudar:

to take a jar and you put 15% sugar.

Pascal Baudar:

The rest is water, and you put a bunch of those grapes, berries,

Pascal Baudar:

plums, anything has white bloom on it.

Pascal Baudar:

In three days that jar is about to explode because the yeast start eating

Pascal Baudar:

the sugar and converting it to alcohol.

Pascal Baudar:

And you get the fermentation gas that are about to make the jar explode.

Pascal Baudar:

And you can use that as a starter.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm gonna go get a bottle.

Pascal Baudar:

I know we don't have video in the interview, so I'm gonna go get a

Pascal Baudar:

bottle of elderberry wine and this one, this elderberry wine was done

Pascal Baudar:

with wild yeast, and you can see on top all the fermentation gas escaping.

Pascal Baudar:

So it's really nice and fermenting.

Pascal Baudar:

It started on day four, which was kind of late, but I'm, I'm living in the mountain.

Pascal Baudar:

It's colder.

Pascal Baudar:

So usually it takes two or three days, but here it took four or five days.

Pascal Baudar:

I was getting very nervous cause this thing was not starting, but

Pascal Baudar:

you can see how active it is.

Pascal Baudar:

So this is the way people used to do it.

Pascal Baudar:

It's very different from what you buy the store, you realize that all

Pascal Baudar:

the wine that you buy the store and the beer are extremely civilized.

Pascal Baudar:

Those wine and beer and sodas and crazy, sometimes I don't even know what to name

Pascal Baudar:

it because I cannot put a label on it.

Pascal Baudar:

It's a mix of beer and wine and mead all in the same time, which

Pascal Baudar:

is really what people used to do.

Pascal Baudar:

They used to use different source of sugar, plants and grains and

Pascal Baudar:

whatever will bring a flavor.

Pascal Baudar:

There was no rule.

Pascal Baudar:

Actually the rule started in after the middle age every time you

Pascal Baudar:

name something very specifically and give the rules, then you can tax it.

Pascal Baudar:

It's always about the money.

Pascal Baudar:

So then you can say what's the wine and the wine can only be made with grapes or

Pascal Baudar:

it's a beer and beer can only be made with hops and grains, and then you can tax it.

Pascal Baudar:

But in the old days, they're just basically brewing with what

Pascal Baudar:

the environment would give them.

Pascal Baudar:

And there was no label on that.

Pascal Baudar:

They were mixed up.

Pascal Baudar:

There were mixed sugar sources, like molasses with honey with berries and

Pascal Baudar:

wild herbs and psychotropic herbs sometimes or whatever or mushrooms.

Pascal Baudar:

When I work on my book, the wildcrafting brewer, basically went back to study

Pascal Baudar:

neolithic and what scientists will find in potteries in tombstone of

Pascal Baudar:

what kind liquid people would do.

Pascal Baudar:

And I even had one of those archeologists calling me going like, 'Hey dude, what

Pascal Baudar:

we're finding is what you do.' So we actually helping each other because

Pascal Baudar:

they say, 'what's your process?

Pascal Baudar:

What do you do?' I said, 'well I just ferment from the environment.'

Pascal Baudar:

And those flavors are funky.

Pascal Baudar:

They're not civilized.

Pascal Baudar:

And they're funky in a good way.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, people are coming to my class like it, because they are my public.

Pascal Baudar:

They're looking for that.

Pascal Baudar:

But if you were to serve some of those things to normal people, Some people may

Pascal Baudar:

not like it and that's completely okay.

Carmen Porter:

How do you pair the yeast culture that you are producing

Carmen Porter:

with the fruit or whatever you are going to be making into a beverage?

Carmen Porter:

Because the yeast does impart a very different flavor,

Carmen Porter:

different types of yeast...

Pascal Baudar:

yes and no, not with wild yeast.

Pascal Baudar:

it is the case with, when you buy yeast, because it's really like

Pascal Baudar:

one big strain of yeast that can impact some specific flavor.

Pascal Baudar:

But I've noticed for me with a wild yeast and I've gone beer with wild yeast from

Pascal Baudar:

all kind different places, it doesn't change that much the flavor cause wild

Pascal Baudar:

yeast will have different culture anyway, and would even contain acetobacter, which

Pascal Baudar:

can turn your thing to vinegar over time.

Pascal Baudar:

So, wild yeast very complex, it's just not one strain it's a

Pascal Baudar:

whole bunch of different things.

Pascal Baudar:

However, that said as much as possible, I will try to do a wine or beer using

Pascal Baudar:

the yeast, coming from the ingredient.

Pascal Baudar:

In my case, with the elderberry wine, I use elderberry yeast because it's

Pascal Baudar:

already there, I have nothing to do really, if I do a, wild beer, I'm

Pascal Baudar:

probably gonna use Juniper berries

Pascal Baudar:

A lot of the plants that I use for brewing such as mugwort, yarrow,

Pascal Baudar:

actually has wild yeast on it.

Pascal Baudar:

It's like the plants are begging to be used for brewing.

Pascal Baudar:

But I don't have any rules.

Pascal Baudar:

If I need a yeast starter from somewhere else, I'll take it from somewhere else.

Pascal Baudar:

I have personally not seen a dramatic change of flavor

Carmen Porter:

And when you mentioned using traditional preservation techniques,

Carmen Porter:

so there's lacto fermentation, there's brewing of vinegars and, alcohol.

Carmen Porter:

What are some of the other techniques?

Carmen Porter:

Dehydration, I suppose

Pascal Baudar:

You have canning , so you have yeast preservation, you have

Pascal Baudar:

removal of oxygen, you have regular canning and, and water bath canning.

Pascal Baudar:

You have high pressure canning.

Pascal Baudar:

You have lacto fermentation.

Pascal Baudar:

if you take all the different fermentation, you also

Pascal Baudar:

have soy fermentation.

Pascal Baudar:

You have kefir, you have oil and different kind of stuff.

Pascal Baudar:

Probably already have like 15 different ways of preserving

Pascal Baudar:

the food with fermentation.

Pascal Baudar:

And you have making vinegar, using Acetobacter with local bacteria too.

Pascal Baudar:

Dehydration, freezing, smoking, the list goes on.

Pascal Baudar:

As I say, I found like, I think it was 48 that I found.

Pascal Baudar:

And then you go into the modern one, which will include, irradiation, for example,

Pascal Baudar:

waxing, which is removal of oxygen.

Pascal Baudar:

That's why they wax the fruits.

Pascal Baudar:

So they look so good.

Pascal Baudar:

It actually makes them keep longer.

Pascal Baudar:

and waxing is actually an old one too, people used to put bee's wax.

Pascal Baudar:

Preserving in ashes for eggs for example, your eggs will stay for weeks

Pascal Baudar:

or putting oil on a fresh egg or butter and your eggs will keep for months.

Pascal Baudar:

Crazy things.

Pascal Baudar:

And some are really weird.

Pascal Baudar:

And the new one was that I found last year when I was doing research, was those

Pascal Baudar:

grapes preserved in clay in Afghani.

Pascal Baudar:

When they preserve grapes for months, like six months and they stay fresh

Pascal Baudar:

and they just put them in a container made of clay, like rough clay.

Pascal Baudar:

And it's the perfect environment because they won't dehydrate, but oxygen can

Pascal Baudar:

get in to some degree, but there's not enough oxygen to really spoil them.

Pascal Baudar:

And you end up with those big, massive clay.

Pascal Baudar:

You just crack them and there's beautiful grapes, fresh after six months of being

Pascal Baudar:

inside, this is pre- historic technology right there and then, using clay to

Pascal Baudar:

preserve food, and you keep discovering, like it's nonstop, you keep discovering

Pascal Baudar:

stuff and like, wow, this is mind blowing.

Carmen Porter:

What you are harvesting and processing is all local.

Pascal Baudar:

Yes.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, it's hyperlocal.

Pascal Baudar:

I can go out and I can come back with 10 plants within two

Pascal Baudar:

minutes that would be edible.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, I'm surrounded with wild mustard over here and mostly I would

Pascal Baudar:

say like 90% would be invasive.

Pascal Baudar:

You know, if I was in LA, it would take me a few seconds to collect 10

Pascal Baudar:

things by just opening the door and going into a garden and come back

Pascal Baudar:

and probably all would be weeds.

Pascal Baudar:

at this time of the year, Los Angeles will be seeds and grains, because we entering

Pascal Baudar:

the seeds and grains time, maybe berries.

Pascal Baudar:

We have berries too.

Pascal Baudar:

Like we have a lot of elder berries right now, currants and all kinda stuff.

Pascal Baudar:

It's, you know what I usually blow people's mind when they do a class,

Pascal Baudar:

because they realize that food is everywhere at any time of the year.

Pascal Baudar:

And 80% percent can be used for culinary use.

Pascal Baudar:

Not always edible but it can be used for culinary use.

Pascal Baudar:

And in my opinion, only like one or percent will kill

Pascal Baudar:

you and the rest is boring.

Pascal Baudar:

It's gonna make you sick a little bit.

Pascal Baudar:

Maybe you barf or whatever.

Pascal Baudar:

And there's not that many plants that are really poisonous like in

Pascal Baudar:

California less than 10, probably.

Pascal Baudar:

So if you learn those 10 plants first, then you can have guarantee

Pascal Baudar:

you're never gonna die type of thing.

Carmen Porter:

the identification, I suppose, is quite key to learn

Carmen Porter:

those few that will kill you.

Pascal Baudar:

Yes.

Pascal Baudar:

Yes.

Pascal Baudar:

But again, if you start with poison plants, then it,

Pascal Baudar:

you know, makes it easier.

Pascal Baudar:

People have it easier those days too.

Pascal Baudar:

There is all kind of different things that I didn't have when I started.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, you can find groups online where you can post photos or like, 'what is it?'

Pascal Baudar:

like on Facebook you have a group called , wild edible plants or something like that.

Pascal Baudar:

Or foraging California, you have apps.

Pascal Baudar:

Those apps are pretty good, like 95%.

Pascal Baudar:

Correct.

Pascal Baudar:

And even if they're not correct, they will push you in the right direction

Pascal Baudar:

where like, I think this is a Brassica.

Pascal Baudar:

You see what I mean?

Pascal Baudar:

And then you can go online.

Pascal Baudar:

You can take your photo and go like, okay, Google image and say here, show me

Pascal Baudar:

example of black mustard, for example.

Pascal Baudar:

And then you can confirm, so you have, so many different ways

Pascal Baudar:

you can confirm all this stuff.

Pascal Baudar:

In, in my days it was mostly a person to person, transmission of knowledge.

Pascal Baudar:

But I must say that in the stuff I'm doing transmission from person to person

Pascal Baudar:

is still very important because frankly, when you start collecting seeds and

Pascal Baudar:

grains, how do you identify the plant?

Pascal Baudar:

There is nothing left.

Pascal Baudar:

It's just, it's a dry thing, like dry thing with pods.

Pascal Baudar:

so it's a mix at this point, but I mean, all the main one, like I would say

Pascal Baudar:

like all the main edible that everybody knows, like dandelion, mustard,

Pascal Baudar:

wild radish, all this stuff you don't need anybody to teach you anymore.

Pascal Baudar:

You can actually learn that by yourself and be pretty safe in the process.

Pascal Baudar:

But when you start going into the exotic stuff, like Russian olive syrups

Pascal Baudar:

and lerps sugar, grains and seeds and crazy things like that, then yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

Good luck,

Carmen Porter:

Certain plant families too.

Carmen Porter:

When people are first starting to forage, I tend to discourage the carrot family.

Carmen Porter:

Like just stay away from that one for a little while.

Pascal Baudar:

yeah, exactly.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah, exactly.

Pascal Baudar:

Because some of them are super good, some super poisonous, but

Pascal Baudar:

then , the lot of the education comes into, the food preservation process.

Pascal Baudar:

That's where it really comes and I do my living, mostly doing webinars and,

Pascal Baudar:

teaching people lacto fermentation of different wild foods, for example, or how

Pascal Baudar:

to make wild beer and wine, how to make elderberry wine, how to make prickly pear

Pascal Baudar:

wine and the different techniques and the different, you know, the crazy wild beer.

Pascal Baudar:

You can do a wild beer with mugwort, but you can do like a forest beer.

Pascal Baudar:

In the forest is beer, what may end up with 15 plants and mushroom from the

Pascal Baudar:

forest, including roots and grains and wild nuts, you know, shamanic beer.

Pascal Baudar:

And then you go to the psychotropic stuff.

Pascal Baudar:

I do shamanic beer.

Pascal Baudar:

And when I was in Colorado, it's legal and you can have, plants like

Pascal Baudar:

mugwort, yarrow, magic mushrooms.

Pascal Baudar:

and you drink that and like my God.

Pascal Baudar:

But this is what people will have done in the past.

Pascal Baudar:

This is, drinking, for example, alcoholic beverage was not made

Pascal Baudar:

for fun sometime it was more from a religious perspective because your life

Pascal Baudar:

can sometimes be miserable, without all the comfort of modern society.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, it was not easy.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm sure.

Pascal Baudar:

And we didn't have any painkiller or anything like that.

Pascal Baudar:

And being able to drink alcohol and suddenly your muscle ache

Pascal Baudar:

goes away, you start feeling better, you start feeling happy.

Pascal Baudar:

That's super valuable.

Pascal Baudar:

and if you're a shaman, you can start making brews that

Pascal Baudar:

will help healing people.

Pascal Baudar:

So not only the brew itself is a pain killer, but you can add, you know, Willow

Pascal Baudar:

bark, which will be a type of aspirin.

Pascal Baudar:

You can even add magic mushrooms which for some person would

Pascal Baudar:

actually turn pain into pleasure.

Pascal Baudar:

To some degree, kind of do a reverse.

Pascal Baudar:

It's interesting.

Pascal Baudar:

I have that.

Pascal Baudar:

If I have pain, the mushroom actually will change it into pleasure.

Pascal Baudar:

It actually makes it feel good, which is a weird one.

Pascal Baudar:

And you can put all kind of different healing plants in the brews.

Pascal Baudar:

in the middle age, those used to be called witch brews, which were really

Pascal Baudar:

medicinal brews and the church made sure to get rid of those things because

Pascal Baudar:

on top of it, I mean, the church was making money from taxes too from the

Pascal Baudar:

beers, made with hops and grains, and hops is considered a downer.

Pascal Baudar:

You probably will make less sins using a beer that is a downer than

Pascal Baudar:

drinking a lot of mugwort beer, which makes you more happy and

Pascal Baudar:

more, uh, give you more sexual energy.

Carmen Porter:

Because I heard that hops are also, they have painkiller,

Carmen Porter:

but also, antibacterial they can act as a preservative as well for the beer

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah so is yarrow and I mean, I think all the main

Pascal Baudar:

plants that were used to make beer were actually preserve the food.

Pascal Baudar:

In my book I have like several category.

Pascal Baudar:

I have like what I call the Trinity is like the main ones.

Pascal Baudar:

And then after that, it is all kind of different one that were used,

Pascal Baudar:

like horehound, which is very bitter.

Pascal Baudar:

If you use mugwort and horehound together, it kind creates a wild IPA.

Pascal Baudar:

Very bitter

Carmen Porter:

and mugwort, is that Artemisia vulgaris

Carmen Porter:

or Artemisia absinthium?

Pascal Baudar:

Doesn't matter.

Pascal Baudar:

I actually use Artemisia douglasiana, cause it is the local mugwort

Pascal Baudar:

It grows like a weed in California, it's a native plant but it grow like weed.

Pascal Baudar:

It actually has more flavor than the, one that we use in Europe.

Pascal Baudar:

But when I was in Vermont, you know, I found the one from Europe,

Pascal Baudar:

which is kind of consider invasive over there, Artemisia vulgaris.

Pascal Baudar:

Artemisia absinthium can be used too and has been used, it's a bit

Pascal Baudar:

stronge , but that was the one that was used to make absinth too.

Pascal Baudar:

So they, I mean, they all have been used to make brews.

Pascal Baudar:

When I was doing my research, it was fascinating, cause I

Pascal Baudar:

don't know of any bitter plant.

Pascal Baudar:

If the plant was bitter and was not toxic, I would find that in recipes,

Pascal Baudar:

it's interesting, and beer is bitter.

Pascal Baudar:

Beer is really like a bitter thing.

Pascal Baudar:

And then you have also bitters.

Pascal Baudar:

I could write a whole book from making bitters and you can make bitters for

Pascal Baudar:

medicinal use, you can make bitters for drink s, like for flavors.

Pascal Baudar:

I probably have a list of 20 books that can still write.

Pascal Baudar:

So.

Pascal Baudar:

I wish I was like 20 years younger than I could write them.

Carmen Porter:

when you said that, you use lacto-fermentation

Carmen Porter:

of different types of plants.

Carmen Porter:

Very often Brassicas are used for lacto-fermentation, but you're also

Carmen Porter:

doing greens and other plant families.

Carmen Porter:

do you...

Carmen Porter:

and mushrooms too.

Carmen Porter:

And what do you use to get enough liquid?

Carmen Porter:

Do you add any water?

Carmen Porter:

Are you using...

Pascal Baudar:

I'll show you an example.

Pascal Baudar:

So.

Pascal Baudar:

I have a jar in front of me.

Pascal Baudar:

I explained because this is not visual.

Pascal Baudar:

So I have a jar in front of me and it's a jar of fermented mustard roots.

Pascal Baudar:

And if you notice the brine goes halfway, so not everything is

Pascal Baudar:

under the brine, which is a big crime in lacto fermentation.

Pascal Baudar:

Cause people go like "it has to be, there's a rule!

Pascal Baudar:

The fermentation, God say everything has to be under the brine" and you

Pascal Baudar:

should notice, this is my fermented mustard leaves, and there is no

Pascal Baudar:

brine, no brine what so ever...

Pascal Baudar:

maybe a drop, not even a drop.

Pascal Baudar:

So here's the secret, the secret is you actually have to work with your ferment.

Pascal Baudar:

When I do my fermented root and products to brine, I'm using that for soup stock,

Pascal Baudar:

I can flavor tofu with it.

Pascal Baudar:

I can do all different stuff.

Pascal Baudar:

And basically it was the only way for me to extract flavor from those roots.

Pascal Baudar:

This was my experimental stuff.

Pascal Baudar:

Those roots are too tough.

Pascal Baudar:

You cannot eat them.

Pascal Baudar:

Those are wild mustartd, wild radish.

Pascal Baudar:

It's like, so fibers, it's impossible to eat, but you scratch

Pascal Baudar:

them with a knife and you smell,

Pascal Baudar:

it's like a world of incredible smell and flavor is like pungent

Pascal Baudar:

and smells so good, earthy.

Pascal Baudar:

So by crushing them and putting some liquid and salt, I'm

Pascal Baudar:

basically fermenting them.

Pascal Baudar:

And the lacto fermentation will extract the flavor into the brine.

Pascal Baudar:

I don't wanna put too much brine because if I put too much brine,

Pascal Baudar:

I'm gonna dilute the flavor.

Pascal Baudar:

So what I do is I basically shake the content.

Pascal Baudar:

So every day, twice a day, I'm gonna shake that content.

Pascal Baudar:

Sometime I even reverse the jar and leave it, for a few hours reverse.

Pascal Baudar:

And what's happening is the content become acidic.

Pascal Baudar:

And by shaking it, you put that as acidity everywhere.

Pascal Baudar:

And there is no way that this thing can rot.

Pascal Baudar:

After 10 days or 15 days, depending if it is cold for fermentation,

Pascal Baudar:

you get no more fermentation gas.

Pascal Baudar:

That's where you put them in the fridge.

Pascal Baudar:

It is guaranteed to never mold.

Pascal Baudar:

This is too acidic.

Pascal Baudar:

Your pH is already at 3.3 at that point.

Pascal Baudar:

So those mustard leaves are, two years old.

Pascal Baudar:

So you can see that the leaves even have absorb whatever liquid was there.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm aging stuff for five years right now.

Pascal Baudar:

And I'm to some extreme aging.

Pascal Baudar:

I have some, pickle that I'm aging for 20 years.

Pascal Baudar:

Those are for my kids, I may not be alive when they're done.

Pascal Baudar:

those are recipe from the middle east where you preserve garlic in

Pascal Baudar:

vinegar for like 20 years to 30 years.

Pascal Baudar:

The older they are the better they are, you cannot eat them young.

Pascal Baudar:

They're gross young.

Pascal Baudar:

so it's interesting, it's changing.

Pascal Baudar:

Same thing you cannot put on brine for example, a paste, this is fermented

Pascal Baudar:

wild garlic, local wild garlic.

Pascal Baudar:

It's basically spicy paste.

Pascal Baudar:

So it's 75% local wild onion and garlic, and the rest was just a Habanaro product.

Pascal Baudar:

That shit is hot.

Pascal Baudar:

I cannot shake it because it's so tough, but you can stir it, so twice a day in

Pascal Baudar:

the morning and the evening, I stir it and by stirring it, I distribute the acidity.

Pascal Baudar:

And after 10 days or 15 days, when there is no fermentation gas, put

Pascal Baudar:

it in the fridge has nothing to do.

Pascal Baudar:

No brine, it's just gonna keep forever.

Pascal Baudar:

Its become, will become more and more sour and the flavor will change over

Pascal Baudar:

time, which sometimes can be a good thing.

Pascal Baudar:

Sometimes can be a bad thing.

Pascal Baudar:

That's where the experimentation come in.

Pascal Baudar:

So I've eaten, mustard that was fermented for three year.

Pascal Baudar:

It's an aquired taste, but you can still play with it.

Pascal Baudar:

You can still take that mustard after three years, it's okay.

Pascal Baudar:

This is an ingredient that I have to work with.

Pascal Baudar:

So you can still add if it's sour, you can add a little bit of seasoned

Pascal Baudar:

vinegar, for example, that will contain maple syrup or whatever.

Pascal Baudar:

You have always the freedom to create at any stage.

Pascal Baudar:

And I don't have the rule that you cannot cook a ferment.

Pascal Baudar:

Why not taking those leaves that are three years old and cook them.

Pascal Baudar:

I always get shit when I do that, 'why will someone take something

Pascal Baudar:

formented then cook it because you're killing all the bacteria.'

Pascal Baudar:

I'm like, 'because I'm don't care.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm about flavors.' So those people are so obsessed sometimes.

Pascal Baudar:

But guess what, what about the sourdough?

Pascal Baudar:

Oh my God.

Pascal Baudar:

What a crime?

Pascal Baudar:

You cooking all those bacteria to make a bread.

Pascal Baudar:

You see what I mean, people have cook with stuff all the time, you

Pascal Baudar:

know, you use soy sauce for cooking?

Pascal Baudar:

But if you take like a lacto-fermentation it's like, oh, like wake up

Carmen Porter:

In terms of the process, what's the difference between doing

Carmen Porter:

a alcoholic brew and a vinegar?

Pascal Baudar:

There's different way you can do it, but if you really

Pascal Baudar:

wanna do it the natural way, is you basically only use wild yeast.

Pascal Baudar:

If you use wild yeast, there is always Acetobacter.

Pascal Baudar:

Those are the bacteria that turn into vinegar and it's

Pascal Baudar:

a normal, regular process.

Pascal Baudar:

Meaning by that the yeast will start eating the sugar

Pascal Baudar:

and convert it into alcohol.

Pascal Baudar:

And when alcoholic fermentation is over, then the Acetobacter will take over.

Pascal Baudar:

And you can say, well, that's not really true because then in the old days, wine

Pascal Baudar:

will always turn into vinegar over time.

Pascal Baudar:

And that was not always the case.

Pascal Baudar:

Well , you can only make vinegar, this is what a lot of people don't

Pascal Baudar:

understand, you can only make vinegar , if your beverage has an alcoholic

Pascal Baudar:

content between three and 9% alcohol.

Pascal Baudar:

So if I make my Elderberry wine, the recipe will ask

Pascal Baudar:

for up to 12 to 14% alcohol.

Pascal Baudar:

So it is not gonna turn into vinegar.

Pascal Baudar:

Now in the old days, it may turn into vinegar, if you were storing wine into

Pascal Baudar:

a clay container, like people used to do sometimes, because eventually the

Pascal Baudar:

alcohol will evaporate through the clay.

Pascal Baudar:

And when the alcohol will go down to 9%, then the Acetobacter will take over.

Pascal Baudar:

Which is how I found out that the amphoras, were in the old days were

Pascal Baudar:

lined up with pine resin to make them waterproof, which I ended up using

Pascal Baudar:

pine resin on my own pottery and the pottery that I make locally right now.

Pascal Baudar:

Pine resin is super beautiful.

Pascal Baudar:

You get all shade of brown and black and I tested it, it's waterproof.

Pascal Baudar:

and it doesn't taste like rein because I did that at super high temperature.

Pascal Baudar:

So it become a glaze.

Pascal Baudar:

It's like a glaze, but it works in a pit fire.

Pascal Baudar:

So you can make a pit fire and use pine resin to make your,

Pascal Baudar:

your dishware waterproof.

Pascal Baudar:

It's super interesting.

Carmen Porter:

I saw that you also would use pine resin as a glue.

Pascal Baudar:

yeah, I'll show you a tea pot right now, and that's a little

Pascal Baudar:

tea pot and you see that, the branch is actually, using the, uh, pine pitch.

Pascal Baudar:

You can see the pottery I'm really using the whole environment.

Pascal Baudar:

For a top for the teapot, I'm using a stone and then moss.

Pascal Baudar:

I can use mugwort or whatever, and this is done with local clay the

Pascal Baudar:

handle is made with burned Manzanita from the forest fire.

Carmen Porter:

Oh, wow.

Carmen Porter:

It's gorgeous.

Carmen Porter:

And you're eating local ingredients out of the dishes that

Carmen Porter:

came from your local environment.

Pascal Baudar:

Yes.

Pascal Baudar:

So this is why I call that the pinyon pine needle teapots.

Pascal Baudar:

So actually made pinyon pine needle and the clay come from the same location

Pascal Baudar:

where the pinyon pines are growing, the stone come from the same location.

Pascal Baudar:

So is the branch that's used.

Pascal Baudar:

This is, this teapot is a terroir in itself.

Pascal Baudar:

Everything is like, even pick up the moss from the side of the tree it's called old,

Pascal Baudar:

old man beards, which is a non-toxic moss.

Pascal Baudar:

You have to research that too, because some moss can be very toxic.

Pascal Baudar:

And in California we have one main one that's, uh, Wolf lichen.

Pascal Baudar:

I use moss or lichen, this is actually a lichen.

Pascal Baudar:

Wolf lichen, which was used to, poison wolves.

Pascal Baudar:

So you put that inside the rabbit or the deer that was used.

Pascal Baudar:

So, you know, and the Wolf will eat it and they die.

Carmen Porter:

Wow.

Pascal Baudar:

I know like mushroom people are already weird, but when you

Pascal Baudar:

meet the lichen people and the and the moss people, oh my God, this is where you

Pascal Baudar:

going to like unknown territory of people.

Pascal Baudar:

They're not normal.

Carmen Porter:

What about water plants?

Pascal Baudar:

Water plants?

Carmen Porter:

Mm-hmm

Pascal Baudar:

what do you mean water plants like seaweed?

Carmen Porter:

Like cattails and watercress...

Pascal Baudar:

yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

Well, Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

I use that.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

I use that all the time.

Pascal Baudar:

The thing I don't use are the ones in the sea because of my environment.

Pascal Baudar:

I used to live in Los Angeles, and there is no way I would touch the water.

Pascal Baudar:

I know what's in it, actually study what's in it.

Pascal Baudar:

And I tell you, like studying wildcrafting is a good study of the environment and

Pascal Baudar:

you realize, how disgusting humans can be, mostly in the sea of Los Angeles.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

I would not touch anything from the research I've done, I would not

Pascal Baudar:

touch anything below San Francisco.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, in terms of forging, I would not touch seaweed.

Pascal Baudar:

I would not touch anything below San Francisco.

Carmen Porter:

Fresh water?

Pascal Baudar:

Fresh water.

Pascal Baudar:

Yes.

Pascal Baudar:

I live in the mountain right now.

Pascal Baudar:

We have fresh water.

Pascal Baudar:

I've made, beer with rain, water, and all kinds of different stuff.

Pascal Baudar:

I've made snow beer, not, not yellow, snow beer.

Pascal Baudar:

It's just snow beer, meaning that I use snow for the water.

Pascal Baudar:

So it's nothing special.

Pascal Baudar:

Don't do yellow, snow beer.

Pascal Baudar:

It's not good.

Carmen Porter:

But in terms of water plants...

Pascal Baudar:

yeah.

Carmen Porter:

What are some of your favorite water plants to forage?

Pascal Baudar:

it's mostly watercress is a good one.

Pascal Baudar:

Cattails is definitely one that I use a lot too.

Pascal Baudar:

And you can totally ferment cattail like, you will not even know, you are not using

Pascal Baudar:

saurkraut, my ferment is usually like 50%, cabbage, 50% cattail and you will

Pascal Baudar:

not even know the cattail is in there.

Pascal Baudar:

Like it's a natural and it contents a lot of starch and sugar.

Carmen Porter:

What part of the plant?

Pascal Baudar:

The shoot, the young shoot.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, I could use probably the roots.

Pascal Baudar:

When I was in LA, I was very careful about the roots because of pollution.

Pascal Baudar:

And actually the main problem was homelessness because every time I

Pascal Baudar:

would go in nature and follow the river, I would find like homeless camp.

Pascal Baudar:

And that's where they cleaned themselves or relieve themselves

Pascal Baudar:

all kinds different stuff.

Pascal Baudar:

I would not want to use those roots, but in the mountains I could do it.

Pascal Baudar:

Actually I've used the roots.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah, I did.

Pascal Baudar:

In 2016, it's in my first book.

Pascal Baudar:

I extracted the starch from roots.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah, you could brew.

Pascal Baudar:

You can make beer because starch is the store that you can turn into sugar.

Pascal Baudar:

You can actually brew with cattail too, I've made cattail beer, uh, what else?

Pascal Baudar:

The main interest for me is also, most Southern California is what

Pascal Baudar:

you find alongside the water.

Pascal Baudar:

because again, at any time of the year, if you find a source of water,

Pascal Baudar:

you always gonna find green plants.

Pascal Baudar:

Another plant that I really, really like that grows in the water is water mint,

Pascal Baudar:

super invasive, can really take over an environment, but it's super yummy.

Pascal Baudar:

It's one of my favorite mint.

Carmen Porter:

What do you like to do with it?

Pascal Baudar:

Brewing tea, sodas, dehydration, use as a spice,

Pascal Baudar:

all kinds of stuff like that.

Pascal Baudar:

Nothing special, anything that you can do is a mint really.

Pascal Baudar:

It just add the flavour.

Carmen Porter:

When you say a soda, what is that process?

Pascal Baudar:

Making a soda is the simplest process you can have.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, you can use white sugar if you wanted to.

Pascal Baudar:

You basically, make a beverage, a taste a little bit too sweet for your

Pascal Baudar:

taste, and then you add some commercial yeast, if you want to, or you can

Pascal Baudar:

add a bit of wild yeast starter.

Pascal Baudar:

And if it is too sweet you know that the yeast is going to eat

Pascal Baudar:

the sugar, so it could come back down the amount of sweetness.

Pascal Baudar:

And then I just take a couple of, watermint twigs or regular mint or

Pascal Baudar:

peppermint twigs inside the bottle.

Pascal Baudar:

And I let for four or five days, I have soda right there and then.

Pascal Baudar:

You can add lemon, you can add ginger to it.

Pascal Baudar:

You can create, you can add pine needles, you can do whatever you want.

Pascal Baudar:

But the process is that simple, one of the feedback I get from people when

Pascal Baudar:

they come to my workshop is they seem to realize like how simple the shit is.

Pascal Baudar:

We make things so complicated now, like making beer so complicated, they

Pascal Baudar:

write like huge book on the process of making beer and you have to buy all this

Pascal Baudar:

expensive equipment, but people in the old days used to make beer in pots.

Pascal Baudar:

You can totally do it.

Pascal Baudar:

And some of those beer were not aged for months.

Pascal Baudar:

They were age for days.

Pascal Baudar:

If you ferment something for five or six days, you already get

Pascal Baudar:

5% alcohol, this make you happy.

Pascal Baudar:

We are very good about making things complex.

Pascal Baudar:

And then once things are complex, we decide to write the books on the rules.

Pascal Baudar:

Then we can tax the liquid too.

Pascal Baudar:

And, you make charts and laws that you cannot make anything different, or you

Pascal Baudar:

cannot call it a beer or wine or whatever.

Pascal Baudar:

But I like to go back on time and go back into anarchy and say, we can do

Pascal Baudar:

whatever we want, it gonna taste awesome

Pascal Baudar:

and better than what you do.

Pascal Baudar:

I had beer expert, like a beer taster who came to one of my class and

Pascal Baudar:

taste my mugwort beer and said, 'this better than any beer I ever had.'

Carmen Porter:

Nice!,

Pascal Baudar:

And on the reverse I had a group of people who didn't know that

Pascal Baudar:

they would be served wild food for lunch.

Pascal Baudar:

So those are regular, regular, regular people.

Pascal Baudar:

Those are not my public.

Pascal Baudar:

Those are not people who come to my class, knowing what to expect.

Pascal Baudar:

And I didn't even know that they didn't know.

Pascal Baudar:

So they were like, 'what the hell is this mugwort beer?' Like 50%

Pascal Baudar:

of the people will not like it.

Pascal Baudar:

And 50% will love it.

Pascal Baudar:

So, because they're so used to their Budweiser.

Pascal Baudar:

Sorry bud, it's not a Budweiser, it's not a Corona.

Pascal Baudar:

This is what your ancestor will drink.

Pascal Baudar:

You know, welcome to my world.

Pascal Baudar:

You don't like it.

Pascal Baudar:

Leave .We are not civilized here.

Pascal Baudar:

Get out of here!

Carmen Porter:

When you're collecting seeds and making condiments, the

Carmen Porter:

condiments that you're making are combining, I suppose, vinegars that

Carmen Porter:

you're also brewing from your environment.

Carmen Porter:

Are you doing additional fermentation...?

Pascal Baudar:

I've done crazy things.

Pascal Baudar:

I've actually taken vinegar and, pasteurize it.

Pascal Baudar:

So I kill all the bacteria, add sugar and then referment it with wild yeast.

Pascal Baudar:

That's a twist.

Carmen Porter:

Yeah,

Pascal Baudar:

Going back to alcohol using the vinegar as a base, and it

Pascal Baudar:

did work, although the yeast was being like, 'what the hell is going on?'

Pascal Baudar:

It was not an easy fermentation and was it worth it if I recall, because

Pascal Baudar:

I did that quite a while ago...not really, but it was interesting.

Pascal Baudar:

I was able to do it, it was a weird drink, alcoholic fermented vinegar.

Pascal Baudar:

So, I mean, you can go like, you know, when you know all

Pascal Baudar:

the principle of fermentation.

Pascal Baudar:

All the lacto-ferment that I do, it's never a complete process.

Pascal Baudar:

Once I say something like fermented mustard leave after one month or two

Pascal Baudar:

months or three months, I'm tasting it and going like, okay, what am I

Pascal Baudar:

gonna do for that specific class?

Pascal Baudar:

Or I'm inviting people to eat or have people eating at my place?

Pascal Baudar:

What am I gonna do?

Pascal Baudar:

And I always do something different.

Pascal Baudar:

If I deal with a lot of American, I'm going to use

Pascal Baudar:

season vinegar, which is sweet.

Pascal Baudar:

Why?

Pascal Baudar:

Because Americans are not used to the sourness of lacto ferments.

Pascal Baudar:

When I used to work with restaurant, the chef, asked me to

Pascal Baudar:

do lacto fermented food for them.

Pascal Baudar:

And their public was like, yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

And the chef said, 'you know, they don't like it.' I said, 'well, is your

Pascal Baudar:

public American?' They go, 'yeah.' I said, 'okay.' And I replaced the

Pascal Baudar:

brine with, season rice vinegar.

Pascal Baudar:

And everybody went wild going like, 'this is so good!

Pascal Baudar:

I really love those lacto ferment.' I'm like 'it's vinegar.' But you see,

Pascal Baudar:

by just changing it, you adapt that ferment for their taste, you know?

Pascal Baudar:

So I would serve the, I would serve the fermented leaves with dijon mustard, but

Pascal Baudar:

I would make the dijon mustard with the same mustard that I picked up in the wild.

Pascal Baudar:

So it becomes more of as a vinegar based thing.

Pascal Baudar:

If I deal with Asian public, then I can, I know I can go for those crazy flavors.

Pascal Baudar:

And they're like, 'yeah!' Including texture, for example, Americans,

Pascal Baudar:

don't like to chew something is chewy,

Pascal Baudar:

they go like, 'woo it's chewy.' And in different culture,

Pascal Baudar:

it's completely fine to chew.

Pascal Baudar:

They're like, 'oh yum!' Asian culture chewing is really part of the experience.

Pascal Baudar:

Even in Europe, it took me a while to get used to chewing.

Pascal Baudar:

So if I don't cook my mustard, I have a chewy ferment.

Pascal Baudar:

If I cook my mustard, before I ferment it, I have a tender a ferment.

Pascal Baudar:

It's the same fermentation, same ingredients, the difference is I

Pascal Baudar:

cook it first and not cook it first.

Pascal Baudar:

So if I go to the American, I would use the cooked one.

Pascal Baudar:

If I have a mix and I would lot of different people from different countries

Pascal Baudar:

and different ethnic and all that, and I'm gonna go, you know what, I'm

Pascal Baudar:

going to go for like the chewy one.

Pascal Baudar:

You know, So yeah, you can play with all this stuff.

Carmen Porter:

I guess if you're doing these workshops all at different times,

Carmen Porter:

you've got so many different plants that are going to be

Carmen Porter:

offered from different seasons.

Carmen Porter:

And I suppose in California, you also have plants that are growing all year round.

Pascal Baudar:

yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

Like fir you can collect fir at any time of the year.

Pascal Baudar:

I use white fir for flavoring tastes like tangerine, however,

Pascal Baudar:

the flavor would change in the year, in springtime is gonna be

Pascal Baudar:

more peppy, more young, more lemony.

Pascal Baudar:

And later on in the year is becoming more I call that noble, like more

Pascal Baudar:

complex flavor, more experience to the flavor, you know, it's interesting.

Carmen Porter:

Do you collect any pollen?

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah, pine pollen, , cattail pollen, those are

Pascal Baudar:

the easiest one, I guess you could collect any pollen that you want.

Pascal Baudar:

You could do that.

Pascal Baudar:

Oh yeah,

Pascal Baudar:

uh, super invasive locally, tastes like licorice, wild fennel, wild

Pascal Baudar:

fennel pollen super expensive.

Pascal Baudar:

By the way, the price of wild fennel pollen is more

Pascal Baudar:

expensive than gold by weight.

Pascal Baudar:

People don't know that, it's a pain, you have to like grab the flowers into

Pascal Baudar:

a paper bag and, let them drop the pollen, which is really tiny, takes an

Pascal Baudar:

incredible quantity to get tiny amount.

Pascal Baudar:

And usually people fake it and they use the, the dry flowers.

Pascal Baudar:

But if you really use the pollen it's more expensive than gold and very

Pascal Baudar:

so potent, it's incredibly potent.

Carmen Porter:

and it's an invasive.

Pascal Baudar:

It's super invasive in California.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

You see, it's so interesting for me.

Pascal Baudar:

I do follow , the language of invasive, non-native and all that, but really, I

Pascal Baudar:

really can't like don't care kind of, meaning by that I don't associate any

Pascal Baudar:

emotional issues that some people have.

Pascal Baudar:

You go to groups about invasive plants, on Facebook or social media

Pascal Baudar:

and I call those hate groups, because they're very emotional about it.

Pascal Baudar:

'Yeah!

Pascal Baudar:

Kill it!

Pascal Baudar:

Spray round up on it!' You guys are so ridiculous, use the plant, do

Pascal Baudar:

something good with it because right now there are no positive solution.

Pascal Baudar:

We have thousands of acres of mustard in LA, thousands, tens of thousands of acres.

Pascal Baudar:

All those mustards are crops in different countries.

Pascal Baudar:

The only thing people are gonna do locally is they're gonna spray

Pascal Baudar:

chemical to get rid of it, which really poison the environment.

Pascal Baudar:

Or they do a restoration.

Pascal Baudar:

That means they grab everything and throw away the resource and I'm

Pascal Baudar:

going like, this is fucking nuts.

Pascal Baudar:

This is food.

Pascal Baudar:

Like you have people in LA who cannot afford their organic

Pascal Baudar:

food and you throwing crops.

Pascal Baudar:

You are really throwing away crops, under the label that they are invasive.

Pascal Baudar:

Meanwhile, wheat has destroyed 72 million acres of native

Pascal Baudar:

flora and land that's okay.

Pascal Baudar:

Because that's a agriculture.

Pascal Baudar:

That's okay.

Pascal Baudar:

That's not invasive.

Pascal Baudar:

But Black mustard!

Carmen Porter:

Well, something that I do like about your books and the content

Carmen Porter:

that you provide is that it's showing people that they can use these plants

Carmen Porter:

and that there's a lot of delicious things that they can do with them, so

Carmen Porter:

that instead of seeing them as the enemy, you're then seeing as an opportunity.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

That's the way.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah, it's really exactly, you know, it's an opportunity.

Pascal Baudar:

It's one way to, to add to the diet and those, many of those plants

Pascal Baudar:

actually are plants that came from Europe from where I grew up.

Pascal Baudar:

So I know those are the plant that grandma used to grow and

Pascal Baudar:

say, go collect those for food.

Pascal Baudar:

And also in the middle east, there's a big tradition in the middle east

Pascal Baudar:

of using those plants, you know?

Carmen Porter:

a lot of the seeds are used as spices

Pascal Baudar:

yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

Yes,

Carmen Porter:

so they'll impart a lot of flavor.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah, you go to a middle Eastern store, you basically

Pascal Baudar:

have a whole aisle that's just different, seeds and herbs.

Pascal Baudar:

And you find the plants I forage.

Pascal Baudar:

You find like the horehound, the yarrow, you find the, the mugwort, there's roots.

Pascal Baudar:

You find the fennel seeds, it's all there.

Pascal Baudar:

And I'm not making a dent by the way.

Pascal Baudar:

my job speaking of seeds, I'm really planting seeds into people's head.

Pascal Baudar:

So maybe somebody will wake up and have enough power or a

Pascal Baudar:

position that you can actually say, you know, we can do something.

Pascal Baudar:

Why don't we collect all this black mustard and make dijon mustard

Pascal Baudar:

with it that we are going to sell.

Pascal Baudar:

And all this money will go back to saving the environment and

Pascal Baudar:

planting native plants, for example.

Pascal Baudar:

It could be done.

Pascal Baudar:

But I'm just me, little me somewhere, I don't have that power in any way, shape or

Pascal Baudar:

form, but I have the power to plant seeds in people's heads and to show examples.

Pascal Baudar:

And I'm really strongly, think that, uh, foraging and wild crafting

Pascal Baudar:

is important and can be not only sustainable, but can be beneficial.

Pascal Baudar:

I already know that 99.999999% of the population has zero interest in foraging

Pascal Baudar:

and wildcrafting, they won't do it.

Pascal Baudar:

They don't care.

Pascal Baudar:

They, they go to work.

Pascal Baudar:

They wanna go to the store and get their food.

Pascal Baudar:

They have zero interest in foraging.

Pascal Baudar:

So there is a room for foragers and wildcrafters and we can do,

Pascal Baudar:

and I think it would be awesome,

Pascal Baudar:

if we do it, but we do it with the viewpoint that we are actually

Pascal Baudar:

going to help the environment.

Pascal Baudar:

Cause we not the one fucking up the environment, the other people do.

Pascal Baudar:

And we have to take responsibility for that.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, I remember driving, in Minnesota and I drove for seven

Pascal Baudar:

hours in fields of corn and soy.

Pascal Baudar:

There is no environment left and there's nothing, nothing left.

Pascal Baudar:

It's just corn and soy.

Pascal Baudar:

If you wanna find something, you have to go to the ditch, but they

Pascal Baudar:

use so much chemical, you don't wanna use something from there.

Pascal Baudar:

And those are the people who go to the store and sometimes they

Pascal Baudar:

give you shit going like, 'oh, foraging, you stealing from nature!'

Pascal Baudar:

It's like, 'oh, come on.' so I think as forager and wildcrafter you have that

Pascal Baudar:

responsibility to make up for their lack of responsibility , and really

Pascal Baudar:

interact with the environment in such a way that it is beneficial because

Pascal Baudar:

sustainable is not good enough anymore.

Pascal Baudar:

So when companies say we sustainable, it means shit to me.

Pascal Baudar:

we cannot be sustainable when somebody says sustainable, I'm

Pascal Baudar:

like, dude, you lazy, it should be beneficial at this point.

Carmen Porter:

I like in the idea of forging, I understand the need for,

Carmen Porter:

responsible harvesting of native plants.

Carmen Porter:

But when it comes to invasives, they're just an opportunity.

Carmen Porter:

it's like you said, a lot of those plants came over as food plants from people who

Carmen Porter:

brought them because they were familiar with them and used to eating them.

Carmen Porter:

So there's so much potential there.

Pascal Baudar:

Those are colonizers plant!

Pascal Baudar:

Let's eat them, get rid of them!

Pascal Baudar:

But you know, it's interesting, when I was in Colorado, they really do a

Pascal Baudar:

lot for environment in Colorado, but in the same time, in my opinion, their

Pascal Baudar:

view of nature for some degree is to turn the environment into a museum.

Pascal Baudar:

So they have this program called, um, green spaces or open spaces and is

Pascal Baudar:

everything but open meaning that it's open because you have to follow the

Pascal Baudar:

trails, but you have barbed wire on each side of the trails with signs everywhere

Pascal Baudar:

saying you cannot go there, you know, habitat sensitive habitat or whatever.

Pascal Baudar:

And then you look at it and 99% is invasive food.

Pascal Baudar:

You go like 'bullshit!' I mean, sometime they're right, you go to the

Pascal Baudar:

mountain and, and those area, pristine, but in some area you go like habitat

Pascal Baudar:

sensitive habitat, you go 'bullshit!

Pascal Baudar:

This is like 90% invasive'...curly dock, pepperweed, I recognize

Pascal Baudar:

all those one cause I deal with all those invasives and garlic mustard...

Pascal Baudar:

we should be able to go over there and use them.

Carmen Porter:

Yeah.

Carmen Porter:

And if people knew that they could, I think that's a big one as well.

Carmen Porter:

So many people don't realize that they're surrounded by food.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

They don't know, they don't.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, that's why I'm just saying like foraging can be beneficial

Pascal Baudar:

because 99.9999999% of the population has zero interest.

Pascal Baudar:

Zero.

Pascal Baudar:

When I pick up some stuff from the ground, people look at me

Pascal Baudar:

like, 'what are you doing?'

Pascal Baudar:

Which is why I travel with a camera.

Pascal Baudar:

When somebody looks funny at me, I just take my camera and do a fake

Pascal Baudar:

photo and they go, 'oh, he's a photographer' and then leave me alone.

Carmen Porter:

but I think part of it is just fear.

Carmen Porter:

There is a detachment from our environment, so people are afraid

Carmen Porter:

to harvest something in case it's poisonous cuz they don't know.

Carmen Porter:

I think if they knew , they might be more open to it.

Carmen Porter:

And I think that that is something that is starting to grow in popularity.

Carmen Porter:

People are starting to gain interest in eating local and

Carmen Porter:

harvesting their own food.

Pascal Baudar:

Eating local is usually farming really, which is also like, I

Pascal Baudar:

mean, if you look at farming, it's really growing invasive plant on native land.

Pascal Baudar:

So you still destroy the native flora and fauna.

Pascal Baudar:

How come, you cannot go to whole food and say, 'I want two pounds of acorn

Pascal Baudar:

?' People would say, 'well, if we

Pascal Baudar:

well, what if we were growing those native plants instead of growing

Pascal Baudar:

those non-native plant, you will actually help them in the process.

Pascal Baudar:

Europe, you know, all the forests are pretty much gone because of agriculture.

Pascal Baudar:

I find it interesting sometime that the farmers or the people depending on

Pascal Baudar:

farming suddenly say that you should not go into the environment and take things.

Pascal Baudar:

But they are the ones, which really, if you think about that, they're

Pascal Baudar:

creating more damage using the diet and they existing preexisting

Pascal Baudar:

food system, they really damage the environment by using that.

Pascal Baudar:

But they gonna tell you, 'oh, you should not pick elder berries,' come on.

Pascal Baudar:

So it's controversial.

Carmen Porter:

yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

If I use a lot of native plant, I will plant them.

Pascal Baudar:

So I've planted elderberries, I've planted all the different sages, I've planted

Pascal Baudar:

mugwort fields, I've planted cattails, I've planted all kind different stuff.

Pascal Baudar:

I've planted, you know, black walnut tree.

Pascal Baudar:

Would say like a hundred percent of my foraging is pretty much done on private

Pascal Baudar:

property unless I deal with super invasive plants, then I don't care.

Pascal Baudar:

If I go into the Angeles forest and I see Mediterranean mustard or black

Pascal Baudar:

mustard growing, my God, I'm helping the environment by removing it.

Pascal Baudar:

A friend of mine was picking up, nasturtium like a whole field of

Pascal Baudar:

nasturtium, which can be invasive locally, and the ranger showed up and

Pascal Baudar:

basically made him throw everything back.

Pascal Baudar:

And you go like 'crazy!

Pascal Baudar:

Why?' You know, rangers should be educated on these things too

Pascal Baudar:

I think.

Pascal Baudar:

A lot of them don't even know the plants that are there exist, instead of

Pascal Baudar:

fighting against people who forage or wanna connect with the wilderness, they

Pascal Baudar:

should actually create programs where people learn how to eat those invasive

Pascal Baudar:

plant and do something that is positive and remove them from the environment.

Pascal Baudar:

I tried to have a permit at one point, for a specific section of

Pascal Baudar:

the Angeles forest, uh, a permit to pick up only non native plant.

Pascal Baudar:

And their solution was to ignore me for five years.

Pascal Baudar:

I kept going and I never got any peep, I never got any answer.

Pascal Baudar:

I call, I sent emails, I sent letters, I did everything and the

Pascal Baudar:

solution was to don't deal with me.

Pascal Baudar:

They didn't wanna deal with me.

Pascal Baudar:

They didn't wanna say yes, they didn't wanna say no, they just didn't wanna deal.

Pascal Baudar:

So their solution was to like put it somewhere and hide it.

Pascal Baudar:

Some people could make a living working with, the Rangers and teaching

Pascal Baudar:

people, and get paid, to teach people uh, how to interact correctly with

Pascal Baudar:

nature, for example, and what are the non native and invasive plants

Pascal Baudar:

and what you can do with them.

Carmen Porter:

I think especially the, what you can do with them, because the

Carmen Porter:

identification is really important, but I find in the foraging movement,

Carmen Porter:

there's so much about identifying the plants, but then there's not

Carmen Porter:

enough on what you can do with it.

Carmen Porter:

So bringing in like you do, bringing in the traditional techniques of what

Carmen Porter:

people did with some of these plants before and showing people that it can

Carmen Porter:

taste good, these plants can provide all kinds of interesting nutrients and flavor

Carmen Porter:

potential is really exciting and inspiring!

Pascal Baudar:

And I think a lot of people will start foraging don't continue.

Pascal Baudar:

I remember my early class were mostly survivalists.

Pascal Baudar:

Most survivalists are not really like the best cook type of thing.

Pascal Baudar:

So they will boil things.

Pascal Baudar:

I remember this person who made crackers, which is of curly dock seeds.

Pascal Baudar:

It was the most disgusting thing I ever ate, but you know, then she added sugar

Pascal Baudar:

to it and then everybody was munching on it, they were like 'mmm nice!' And

Pascal Baudar:

I'm like, oh my God, it was like the grossest cracker I ever ate my life!

Carmen Porter:

So what do you do with curly dock seeds?

Pascal Baudar:

I'm actually going back to all the seeds and grains right now.

Pascal Baudar:

It could be like maybe a next book project and I'm going back because

Pascal Baudar:

not enough is done with them.

Pascal Baudar:

I look at curly dock seeds and it's, their mostly, they kind of boring, to be honest,

Pascal Baudar:

so far I say they're kind of boring so far

Pascal Baudar:

cause I have to like move back and see if we can do something else.

Pascal Baudar:

But it's mostly an additive, like a flour additive, you make a bread,

Pascal Baudar:

then you put like 20% or 15%.

Pascal Baudar:

It's gonna look like a super beautiful primitive bread.

Pascal Baudar:

Like it's an aesthetic more than anything else.

Pascal Baudar:

And it's adding fibers and could be valuable in a survival situation.

Pascal Baudar:

I was talking to my dad, during world war II, bread composed of like 30% to

Pascal Baudar:

40% saw dust and the rest was wheat.

Pascal Baudar:

So it fills your stomach, but you're using 40% less wheat.

Pascal Baudar:

So curl dock could be that way for example.

Pascal Baudar:

I go back to it.

Pascal Baudar:

I know we did something at the time that was kind of interesting is we,

Pascal Baudar:

you add sugar, so you add a lot of sugar water to the curly dock and then

Pascal Baudar:

you pan roast it and it becomes kind of like a tiny little rice crispy.

Pascal Baudar:

It's a texture thing.

Pascal Baudar:

It's very interesting.

Pascal Baudar:

Then you can use that for plating.

Pascal Baudar:

If you're a chef, to make a dish very pretty.

Pascal Baudar:

So it's crunchy curly dock.

Pascal Baudar:

There is possibilities of doing crazy things.

Carmen Porter:

Yeah.

Carmen Porter:

well, another one that I wondered about because, lambs quarter

Carmen Porter:

grows so abundantly and it's so closely related to quinoa and orach.

Carmen Porter:

So what would you do with lambs quarter or lambs quarter seeds?

Pascal Baudar:

What we did at the past was seed cakes.

Pascal Baudar:

So you can mix them with eggs, for example.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, like quinoa, you have to prepare the seeds correctly.

Pascal Baudar:

I use them, when we made like acorn burgers, we will put like different seeds.

Pascal Baudar:

It was kinda like a vegan burger type of thing, but acorn, mushrooms and

Pascal Baudar:

lamb quarter seeds, and all that.

Pascal Baudar:

I use seeds a lot as an additive to things.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, I do a lot of ferment and I have seeds in it, and grains

Pascal Baudar:

in it because it's nutritious.

Pascal Baudar:

don't even know they're there type of thing.

Pascal Baudar:

I'll show you one.

Pascal Baudar:

What have in my hand is a jar that contains fermented wild radish

Pascal Baudar:

roots and wild radish leaves.

Pascal Baudar:

The spice are curry-like, and it looks like a mess of little cubes with

Pascal Baudar:

green stuff, but it's probably like 10% of wild seeds and grains in it.

Pascal Baudar:

It smell incredible, very curry, garam...

Pascal Baudar:

so it's kinda like Indian spices, but it's all wild grains and seeds.

Pascal Baudar:

You barely see them.

Pascal Baudar:

People don't realize that seeds can have a lot of flavors.

Pascal Baudar:

I did a course on Instagram, like a couple of days ago about all

Pascal Baudar:

the different mustards seeds.

Pascal Baudar:

It's people think that mustard seed taste like mustard, but no, it's the

Pascal Baudar:

exception only , the black mustard and I think the Chinese mustard taste

Pascal Baudar:

spicy, the other one is like hazel nuts, Walnut nuts, very nutty nutty flavor.

Carmen Porter:

really.

Pascal Baudar:

Yes.

Pascal Baudar:

We have the tumbleweed mustard over here, and it taste exactly like Hazel

Pascal Baudar:

nuts, and then I'm gonna roast them.

Pascal Baudar:

Then it can bring like a complet different flavor profile.

Pascal Baudar:

So I use specific tumbleweed mustard because it's a fantastic

Pascal Baudar:

flavor combination with that ferment...curry, nutty, hazel nuts...

Pascal Baudar:

that's really fantastic.

Pascal Baudar:

And then I use some that don't have any flavor, like, cheatgrass, which

Pascal Baudar:

is the most hated plant in California.

Pascal Baudar:

People don't know that, but it's a hunter-gather grain from Europe.

Carmen Porter:

Hmm.

Pascal Baudar:

It's forgotten grain.

Pascal Baudar:

It's people only see it as an invasive.

Pascal Baudar:

They have no idea that the grain was actually edible.

Pascal Baudar:

You have to boil it.

Pascal Baudar:

You boil that grain for 50 minutes.

Pascal Baudar:

It looks like the most beautiful red rice.

Carmen Porter:

When you're eating the seeds and grains of invasive

Carmen Porter:

plants, that also reduces the spread

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah, but you're not making a dent.

Pascal Baudar:

Me by myself, I'm not making...

Pascal Baudar:

you get hundreds of thousands of acres of cheatgrass locally.

Pascal Baudar:

that thing is taking over, but it'sa hunter-gatherer grain from Europe.

Carmen Porter:

and that's an opportunity when you have a lot of

Carmen Porter:

it growing, if you were planting that field in order to obtain a lot of

Carmen Porter:

the grain, it-would-be a lot of work.

Carmen Porter:

Whereas there it's growing as a volunteer.

Pascal Baudar:

So this is a good example.

Pascal Baudar:

It's a whole plastic bag, like grocery bag and it's full of cheatgrass.

Pascal Baudar:

And it took me three minutes to collect.

Pascal Baudar:

I gave those to a famous restaurant in California called

Pascal Baudar:

N-Naka, Japanese restaurant.

Pascal Baudar:

And they were using the most hated plant in California as a beautiful

Pascal Baudar:

grain in their dish because they like to use local product.

Pascal Baudar:

So they were using it for plating to make it very beautiful.

Pascal Baudar:

And people were like, 'what is that?' And they like 'foxtail.' I

Pascal Baudar:

mean, most people call it foxtail.

Pascal Baudar:

It was an interesting dichotomy, I mean, because this was the most

Pascal Baudar:

unwanted grain that nobody wants.

Pascal Baudar:

People don't even know it's a grain , but only the rich people can afford it.

Pascal Baudar:

Because I mean, going to a N-Naka is probably going to cost you at least

Pascal Baudar:

600 dollar per person, so they're basically paying to eat the most

Pascal Baudar:

common, unwanted plant locally.

Carmen Porter:

But as a forager, you have the opportunity because the possibility

Carmen Porter:

is there, to just harvest it yourself!

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

And you have to be very careful as a forager, Like I'm very careful

Pascal Baudar:

not to spread those seeds around.

Pascal Baudar:

Like the last class we tasted Russian olives and I was like going

Pascal Baudar:

like, okay, people gave me back.

Pascal Baudar:

I had a container I used to get back all the, the pits,

Pascal Baudar:

because if it grows up...

Pascal Baudar:

I thought it was not in Southern California actually, cuz it's

Pascal Baudar:

super invastive in Colorado.

Pascal Baudar:

Yesterday I went to the store and guess what I passed by and I see

Pascal Baudar:

on the side, Russian olives tree.

Pascal Baudar:

First one, I like, my God, I didn't know

Pascal Baudar:

this was here.

Pascal Baudar:

So it is already here in the desert.

Pascal Baudar:

I love using it.

Pascal Baudar:

I actually love using Russian olives.

Carmen Porter:

What's the name scientific name?

Carmen Porter:

Approximately, like what's the family?

Pascal Baudar:

It has nothing to do with olives.

Pascal Baudar:

It tastes like dates.

Pascal Baudar:

They're very sweet.

Pascal Baudar:

The only reason they call them olives is because it kind of look like small

Pascal Baudar:

olives and they grow like small olives.

Pascal Baudar:

Elaeagnus angustifolia, And I found that out from the national

Pascal Baudar:

invasive species information center.

Pascal Baudar:

One of the first thing when I go into a new environment and I was in

Pascal Baudar:

Colorado, I show up there, I travel all year long, last year in the RV.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm always looking for two things, salt and sugar.

Pascal Baudar:

if I have salt, I can do lacto fermentation.

Pascal Baudar:

And if I have sugar, I can do yeast fermentation.

Pascal Baudar:

So finding salt and sugar in the wild.

Pascal Baudar:

And I found the sugar mostly in the Russian olives because they're very sweet.

Pascal Baudar:

So I basically, I boil them and then I strain them and then I take the

Pascal Baudar:

sweet boiling water and keep boiling it until I get molasses at the end.

Pascal Baudar:

And the molasses is actually in my opinion, more delicious than maple syrup.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

I have a jar, I can show you a jar.

Pascal Baudar:

So this is your Russian olive syrup and I found out it's super medicinal for

Pascal Baudar:

inflammation, so I'm actually taking it.

Pascal Baudar:

But it tastes better, it's more complex and maple syrup.

Pascal Baudar:

It's interesting.

Pascal Baudar:

And again, this is one of those, like how come people don't do that?

Pascal Baudar:

How come even chef locally, don't use that in their cuisine?

Pascal Baudar:

Chef should be using this stuff.

Carmen Porter:

I've seen you use lerps sugar as well.

Carmen Porter:

What exactly is that?

Carmen Porter:

I don't think that we have that insect here,

Pascal Baudar:

Where are you located?

Carmen Porter:

Quebec, Canada.

Pascal Baudar:

Yes.

Pascal Baudar:

Too cold.

Pascal Baudar:

it's basically a little insect that has a symbiotic relationship with Eucalyptus,

Pascal Baudar:

specifically the blue gum Eucalyptus.

Pascal Baudar:

When we imported that tree for California, think the tree were supposed

Pascal Baudar:

to be used for railway, but they didn't work because it's splits, but

Pascal Baudar:

Eucalyptus loves Southern California.

Pascal Baudar:

So they grow everywhere.

Pascal Baudar:

They actually considered kind of invasive too.

Pascal Baudar:

But they imported the fly with it unknowingly.

Pascal Baudar:

So this little fly, what it does is it deposit little eggs on the leaves and

Pascal Baudar:

you have a tiny larvae that sucks the juice of Eucalyptus and poops sugar.

Pascal Baudar:

So it's basically sweet sugar poop.

Pascal Baudar:

it's, native food in Australia.

Carmen Porter:

Okay.

Pascal Baudar:

So if they were going on a long journey, they will

Pascal Baudar:

collect all those from the leaves.

Pascal Baudar:

And when they still a bit wet in the morning or whatever, and make a ball out

Pascal Baudar:

of it and will be a power bar because it's composed of starch and sugar.

Pascal Baudar:

You will find different type of similar honey dew coming from different kind

Pascal Baudar:

of flies in different region of the world, including the middle east.

Pascal Baudar:

And some experts think that the manna from heaven in the Bible is actually

Pascal Baudar:

that, because at one point it falls on the ground and the ground is cover

Pascal Baudar:

of sugar and starch, which is what bread is made of, and you can make

Pascal Baudar:

them into tiny bread if you wanted to.

Pascal Baudar:

So some experts think, this is the manna from heaven that was falling from the sky.

Pascal Baudar:

The flavor profile, when you dry it is exactly like rice crispies.

Pascal Baudar:

You will eat that as a cereal, you will think it is rice crispies.

Pascal Baudar:

It's the same crunchiness is the same flavor.

Pascal Baudar:

But you have all kinds of different honey dew.

Pascal Baudar:

It's not something unusual, sometime in California, people park their

Pascal Baudar:

car and their car become all sticky.

Pascal Baudar:

Well, if they look around and make sure nobody's there and they start licking

Pascal Baudar:

their car, they gonna realize it's sweet.

Pascal Baudar:

So those will be from aphids.

Pascal Baudar:

So some aphids can also do that.

Pascal Baudar:

Insect are the same way too.

Pascal Baudar:

You know, not a lot of foragers are dealing with insect, but there's a

Pascal Baudar:

lot of very edible insect you find in the wild and some of them are really

Pascal Baudar:

invasive like the gardens snails.

Pascal Baudar:

If you take a gardens snail and you shake it and then you listen to it, it usually

Pascal Baudar:

goes...because it come from France.

Pascal Baudar:

So they're not native.

Pascal Baudar:

The story is a guy who came from San Francisco during the gold rush and had the

Pascal Baudar:

bright idea, was French, had the bright idea of like selling this to people

Pascal Baudar:

as a delicacy, but nobody wanted it.

Pascal Baudar:

So he released it and you know, now you find garden snails everywhere.

Pascal Baudar:

When I was in Vermont, they really trying to not have any worms

Pascal Baudar:

because worms are not native and worms can destroy the environment.

Pascal Baudar:

and for farming, they're actually importing worms.

Pascal Baudar:

And you have even worm farms.

Pascal Baudar:

It's interesting.

Pascal Baudar:

Or you have saved the bees, but the bees are really not native.

Pascal Baudar:

The native bees don't make any honey,

Carmen Porter:

Mm-hmm

Carmen Porter:

. Pascal Baudar: It's so complex.

Carmen Porter:

The pollinator thing is fascinating.

Carmen Porter:

I found this year in our region, there was massive beehive die off.

Carmen Porter:

but I found that in my immediate region, the native pollinators are just booming.

Carmen Porter:

So the orchards around here didn't necessarily take a big hit, even though

Carmen Porter:

the hives were mostly dead because there was enough habitat for the native bees.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

But nobody, they're not interested in native bee because they don't make money.

Pascal Baudar:

Really.

Pascal Baudar:

It's all about the money again, I mean, you do have people, I

Pascal Baudar:

care about the native bee, but

Carmen Porter:

they care about it when the hives are failing.

Carmen Porter:

So when the bee hives are failing and all of the apple orchards around here

Carmen Porter:

are entirely dependent on the native bee population, then they care about it.

Pascal Baudar:

It's interesting.

Pascal Baudar:

That's interesting.

Pascal Baudar:

When I say like, you know, lerps sugar, it's insect poop, people go like,

Pascal Baudar:

weh, you look at lacto fermentation, you know what lacto fermentation is?

Pascal Baudar:

It's an insect excretion.

Pascal Baudar:

That means it a pee or poo.

Pascal Baudar:

Same thing with alcohol.

Pascal Baudar:

Sorry, your beer, everything is super organic.

Pascal Baudar:

Honey is bee vomit.

Pascal Baudar:

The yeast will actually eat the sugar and excrete, we use the word excrete, alcohol.

Pascal Baudar:

So it's basically changing the sugar into alcohol, but you can call it

Pascal Baudar:

different names if you wanted to.

Pascal Baudar:

But excrete is more civilized, but everything, everything is

Pascal Baudar:

really very organic like that.

Pascal Baudar:

Some people say, well, insect, poop.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm like, you like, honey?

Pascal Baudar:

You like drinking beer?

Carmen Porter:

It's just, what's familiar

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

And people don't wanna know anyway.

Pascal Baudar:

There was a restaurant was using that lerps sugar and call it forest sugar.

Pascal Baudar:

It's better of marketing, not insect poop.

Pascal Baudar:

what are you eating?

Pascal Baudar:

Forest sugar!

Pascal Baudar:

Woohoo!

Carmen Porter:

Yeah, commercializing.

Carmen Porter:

So how can people find your work and your books?

Pascal Baudar:

Right now I'm located in the middle of nowhere, I'm like a

Pascal Baudar:

hour and a half Los Angeles, so mostly webinars and I basically just advertize

Pascal Baudar:

my webinars on my social media.

Pascal Baudar:

And also to be honest on my social media, I do share everything.

Pascal Baudar:

I share recipes.

Pascal Baudar:

Everything I do.

Pascal Baudar:

I share, share, share.

Pascal Baudar:

I don't like to like keep stuff for myself.

Pascal Baudar:

I like books cause everything is there.

Pascal Baudar:

You know, you can go through it.

Pascal Baudar:

Social media is more tough.

Pascal Baudar:

Hard to find stuff.

Pascal Baudar:

You have a post on social on Instagram from two years ago.

Pascal Baudar:

Happens you got 600 post in between.

Pascal Baudar:

There is no table of content.

Pascal Baudar:

So how you gonna find it?

Pascal Baudar:

So books are still valuable in my opinion.

Carmen Porter:

Your books are beautiful.

Carmen Porter:

The images are gorgeous.

Carmen Porter:

Everything is out clearly

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

I used to be an artist and photographer, so that helps, but I use natural daylight.

Pascal Baudar:

So everything I use is daylight.

Pascal Baudar:

There is no equipment.

Pascal Baudar:

Like if you look in the back of me, you see my camera and you see a window.

Pascal Baudar:

This is where I do my photo.

Carmen Porter:

oh, wow.

Pascal Baudar:

So there's nothing complicated there.

Pascal Baudar:

Everything is just done with daylight,

Carmen Porter:

And you do give some in person, seminars and tastings

Carmen Porter:

For people who are more local.

Pascal Baudar:

sometime, I used to do that full time, but

Pascal Baudar:

basically I travel for the whole year, it was more difficult to do.

Pascal Baudar:

also we had the covid.

Pascal Baudar:

I could not give live classes anymore in Los Angeles area.

Pascal Baudar:

So I was like, okay, and I discover the zoom and the webinar.

Pascal Baudar:

So that opened the, uh, possibilities of going anywhere

Pascal Baudar:

and still being able to teach.

Carmen Porter:

And also being able to teach people anywhere, like people from

Carmen Porter:

anywhere can tune into your webinars.

Pascal Baudar:

yeah, exactly.

Pascal Baudar:

I would say 50% of my public is from Europe and middle east and crazy

Pascal Baudar:

country, like far away like China and all stuff and Russia and I had no idea.

Pascal Baudar:

And I think I did the first webinar and I did it for like 25 people, I

Pascal Baudar:

mean, I put a limit of 25 people and I think I sold out in 20 minutes.

Pascal Baudar:

I was like, oh my God.

Pascal Baudar:

And I had no idea that I had all those people from Europe who have my book,

Pascal Baudar:

were like, 'yes, finally, we can have a class with the guy' type of thing.

Pascal Baudar:

Like it was very humbling, like, wow.

Carmen Porter:

the other thing is, your pottery is available.

Carmen Porter:

is there a seperate website for that?

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

I have a website called PascalBaudarceramics.com.

Pascal Baudar:

My, uh, social media account on Instagram is wildcraftedceramics

Carmen Porter:

Okay.

Carmen Porter:

I'll put all of the links in the show notes so people can find it all.

Carmen Porter:

So if there are any other ones as well, you can send them to me

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

I have urban outdoor skills, which is my main site for classes.

Pascal Baudar:

So my urban outdoor skills is more like me as a forger and

Pascal Baudar:

then Pauscal Baudar ceramic is about the pottery that I create.

Pascal Baudar:

But they kind of mix together because for me, pottery, I'm basically

Pascal Baudar:

more and more creating my own little universe with wildcrafting

Pascal Baudar:

and branches and stones and clays.

Pascal Baudar:

So I'm like a kid I'm creating my own little tiny universe

Pascal Baudar:

and having fun in the process.

Carmen Porter:

That's good.

Pascal Baudar:

Sorry.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm eating those juniper berries right now.

Pascal Baudar:

They're so sweet.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah,.

Pascal Baudar:

Those are the California juniper.

Pascal Baudar:

They are like little fruits.

Pascal Baudar:

They become completely like crunchy molasses and you can actually use them

Pascal Baudar:

, to make drinks like, uh, fermented drinks.

Pascal Baudar:

it's very rare in the desert.

Pascal Baudar:

Usually they dry so fast that they don't have the time to really

Pascal Baudar:

mature and become dehydrated.

Pascal Baudar:

But if I find some in the desert close to a stream, this is

Pascal Baudar:

really, this is location based foraging, like, you can do that.

Pascal Baudar:

Like you do location based and that will change your flavor profile of a plant.

Pascal Baudar:

Like if you collect lambs quarter in the sun, it'll have a different flavor

Pascal Baudar:

than lambs quarter in the shade.

Pascal Baudar:

Or curly dock in the sun and curly dock in the water is completely different flavor.

Pascal Baudar:

So Juniper, right location, near water, and it taste like

Pascal Baudar:

it's more sweeter than date.

Pascal Baudar:

It's pure sugar.

Carmen Porter:

Oh, that's fascinating.

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah, it's interesting.

Pascal Baudar:

I found some reference, so.

Pascal Baudar:

I have a twenty three year old cat and she's senile.

Pascal Baudar:

So she does that every...

Pascal Baudar:

Three times a day, daily prayer.

Pascal Baudar:

Are you done with the prayer?

Pascal Baudar:

Okay.

Pascal Baudar:

She's deaf too.

Carmen Porter:

Oh,

Pascal Baudar:

so she doesn't hear herself.

Pascal Baudar:

So she doesn't meow, she screams at you.

Pascal Baudar:

I remember reading a book like in 2010 when I really started to get

Pascal Baudar:

into foraging, and the book says that natives used that to make sweet

Pascal Baudar:

little pancake for kids as candy.

Pascal Baudar:

and I could not figure it out every time I was in the desert, I go, gross!

Pascal Baudar:

Was tasting like pine, soil type of thing.

Pascal Baudar:

And then one time I see these tree with just incredible berries and I

Pascal Baudar:

pick one off from the ground and I tried it and it was pure sweetness.

Pascal Baudar:

I was like, God, that was true.

Pascal Baudar:

It could be used as a little candy.

Pascal Baudar:

And I had no idea.

Pascal Baudar:

It blew my mind.

Pascal Baudar:

I was like, wow, but it's all about location, location, location,

Pascal Baudar:

know, and the timing and location, yeah totally.

Pascal Baudar:

You can also follow the animals.

Pascal Baudar:

The coyotes love those berries when they're ripe.

Pascal Baudar:

if you see a lot of coyote tracks going to a tree then you know,

Pascal Baudar:

that those berries are good to go.

Pascal Baudar:

it's fascinating the world of wild crafting.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, it's what a lot of people would've known in the old days.

Pascal Baudar:

You know, if I wanna know what something is in the environment, for

Pascal Baudar:

example, I can look at coyote poop or bear poop and I will, they will tell

Pascal Baudar:

me that there is currant over here,

Pascal Baudar:

there is, you know, coffee berries and different stuff.

Pascal Baudar:

Cause it's basically an email.

Pascal Baudar:

They send me saying, this is the food we find locally.

Pascal Baudar:

It's the old time internet like I'm just sending you an email this

Pascal Baudar:

is what you can find locally.

Carmen Porter:

Yeah.

Carmen Porter:

is there anything else that you would want for people to...?

Pascal Baudar:

I think we cover a lot.

Carmen Porter:

I think we did talk a lot.

Carmen Porter:

well, thank you very much for joining me.

Carmen Porter:

I really appreciated the conversation.

Pascal Baudar:

But the thing I can say, you know, the more I do this stuff,

Pascal Baudar:

more I realize, I don't know shit.

Pascal Baudar:

It's the amount of possibilities, absolutely mind boggling and

Pascal Baudar:

infinite and you can't stop learning.

Pascal Baudar:

Like I'm in a more native environment right here, because I'm high in the

Pascal Baudar:

mountains, so you have less invasive plant and I'm finding all those grains and seed.

Pascal Baudar:

I do research on it and I found that more than 50% are edible.

Pascal Baudar:

I come to the conclusion that there may be hundreds of edible seeds available,

Pascal Baudar:

locally in Southern California, hundreds.

Pascal Baudar:

And probably half of them are non-native and half of them will be native.

Pascal Baudar:

I'm gonna concentrate on the non-native one, because they are

Pascal Baudar:

frankly like the more common one.

Pascal Baudar:

This is all lost knowledge to a large degree, because the

Pascal Baudar:

old world Europe was civilized.

Pascal Baudar:

They're not gonna touch those grains.

Pascal Baudar:

Like yeah.

Pascal Baudar:

You know, poopoo it, because it's been agriculture society for 2000 years now,

Pascal Baudar:

or more than that, 4,000 years, probably.

Pascal Baudar:

So people have forgotten all those grains and seeds.

Pascal Baudar:

They're fascinating to rediscover and eat every single one is a flavor.

Pascal Baudar:

And seeds, you go like, , 'We're going to make bread?' No.

Pascal Baudar:

What about sprouting, you know, what about sprouting?

Pascal Baudar:

What about adding them to ferment?

Pascal Baudar:

What about using them as spice?

Pascal Baudar:

What about using them?

Pascal Baudar:

And, you know, I just posted on my Instagram, I did a

Pascal Baudar:

breakfast cereal this morning.

Pascal Baudar:

Everything is made from grains and seeds which I collected locally.

Pascal Baudar:

Super nutritious.

Pascal Baudar:

It is the ancestor.

Pascal Baudar:

I mean, use wild barley, which is the ancestor of the regular barley.

Pascal Baudar:

Had my biggest epiphany when I was looking at seeds and grains, like two

Pascal Baudar:

years ago, was when I was in the store.

Pascal Baudar:

And I look at all those civilized stuff around me.

Pascal Baudar:

And I went, it was like being in the matrix's like, what if

Pascal Baudar:

the weeds were the real food?

Pascal Baudar:

if you, when you collect all those grains and seeds and you were looking

Pascal Baudar:

at the nutritional value, they probably will be way higher than

Pascal Baudar:

your boring grains, that like wheat and millet, because those, I mean,

Pascal Baudar:

it's always about the money and time.

Pascal Baudar:

Those grains were chosen because they're easy to grow and they yield a lot,

Pascal Baudar:

but it doesn't mean they're the most

Pascal Baudar:

Nutritional, they don't have the most nutritional value.

Pascal Baudar:

If you look back in time and look at the teeth of hunter

Pascal Baudar:

gathers, they were perfect.

Pascal Baudar:

And when that agriculture came in, all the teeth started falling off because of the,

Pascal Baudar:

you know, starch and sugar in the mouth.

Pascal Baudar:

And anyway, listen, I'm rambling right now.

Carmen Porter:

no, it's fascinating though.

Carmen Porter:

And I think that there's a lot there to think about,

Pascal Baudar:

Yeah,

Carmen Porter:

thank you very much

Pascal Baudar:

you're very welcome

Carmen Porter:

Oui, je parle Francais.

Carmen Porter:

As mentioned the links are in the show notes.

Carmen Porter:

I highly recommend checking out Pascal's books.

Carmen Porter:

They're well researched, visually stunning, thoughtfully put together,

Carmen Porter:

creative and deeply inspirational!

Carmen Porter:

Thanks for listening.

Carmen Porter:

This was the first episode for which I've included a transcript.

Carmen Porter:

If you found it to be useful, please let me know at carmenporter.com.

Carmen Porter:

I'll consider transcribing all previous and future episodes if you

Carmen Porter:

enjoyed or appreciated this feature.

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About the Podcast

Song and Plants
Botanical musings and music
Learning the binomial nomenclature (scientific names) of biota is a fascinating way to glean insight into the natural world. Though daunting at first, they can become familiar and accessible with the help of melody and context. This podcast will present tunes where the scientific names of species comprise the lyrical content. Episodes will describe habitats, growing conditions, nutritional information, and locate species within their taxonomic hierarchy. Historical significance, interviews and anecdotal stories will also be presented. Each musical release will inspire eight weekly episodes. Come grow with me!

About your host

Profile picture for Carmen Porter

Carmen Porter

Growing up, my playground was the forest and orchard behind my house which were teeming with fascinating flora and fauna. I was the little girl singing to her extensive plant collection and pet caterpillars. After leaving home for too many years to pursue higher education and wander around the world, I returned to plant a garden. There are currently more than 500 cultivars of fruits and vegetables growing around my house.

'Song and Plants' came about when I started writing music to help me learn the binomial nomenclature (scientific names) of local biota. The podcast accompanies the tunes by providing information that extends beyond the lyrical content.