Spring comes late to the northern woods of Michigan, extending the early spring foraging season well into mid-May. This year it provided another opportunity to return to our indigenous-inspired cooking approach we have been exploring for a few years now. We have already shared one walleye recipe in our indigenous-inspired cooking approach here. But a recent beautiful day on the lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan provided us another beautiful fish to prepare. Foraging in the forest around the lake provided a wonderful set of flavors to accentuate this flaky, tender fish.

The foreground of the picture above are wild leeks, also called ramps (much more on those here). The taller plants interspersed are Ostrich ferns, from which we harvested some of the just emerging sprouts, which are still very tightly coiled. Fiddlehead ferns have a short season and are highly sought after in some culinary circles. I have seen store prices as high as $25 per pound. If you are near a northern forest, perhaps you can forage your own. Read Alan Bergo’s guide here. We adapted our approach to the fiddleheads from Alan’s excellent cookbook The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora, where he suggests a quick 2 minute boil on the fiddleheads and then dressing the still crunchy sprouts with spruce tips and a lemon oil.

The timing was perfect for collection of the spruce tips as well. They add a light citrusy flavor and brilliant green color to the dish. We subbed out the lemon in order to stay true to our Great Lakes region and subbed in trout lily (Alan explains those too) which has a lightly lemony flavor. But do read Alan’s post before harvesting and serving these. We only used a few leaves, finely chopped with our fiddleheads.

Finally, we stumbled across some lovely Pheasant Back mushroom while foraging our greens. This variety is also called Dryads Saddle and our friend Alan Bergo has you covered with a complete guide to harvesting. We were not looking for a mushroom component initially, but sautéed in butter until caramelized, the mushroom added some lovely texture to our finished dish.

The walleye was caught on our lake just hours before and cleaned lakeside, then refrigerated for a few hours. We slathered the filets with ramp butter and broiled until just opaque al the way through.

We served this with toasts of dinklebrod from Stefano’s Slo Foods in Sheboygan. You can also order the bread mail order from Zingerman’s in Michigan here. Each store approaches the bread similarly, using potato for moisture and dense, rich loaf. Stefano’s roasts the sunflower seeds until deeply brown. Dinklebrod (or dinklebrot) is a traditional German bread from Dresden apparently, so the Germanic heritage fits nicely in our Great Lakes Cuisine approach.

We spread goat cheese on the toasted bread and then added a charred ramp pesto made with sunflower seeds, which we have detailed in the past on another indigenous-inspired dish here. If you are not pairing the pesto with goat cheese or another method to tame the flavor, we recommend making the charred ramp pesto a day in advance and allowing it to mellow overnight. It can be very strong, with a spicy bite like raw garlic, when freshly made.

Additional ramp bulbs were pickled for a future use and we saved the stems of the fiddleheads to make pickles of those as well (again based on Alan’s inspiration from his cookbook). We have a pile of ramp leaves that we will be fermenting in soy, which Alan has called “the best infused soy sauce I have ever tasted.” We did this a few years and can confirm Alan’s assessment. Pickling and fermenting extend the bounty of the forage feast and fit nicely within our Great Lakes heritage as well.

When we started this Great Lakes Cuisine journey, foraging and indigenous-inspired dishes were not approaches we had thought of, yet now they feel almost inseparable from our view of what makes Great Lakes Cuisine unique. These indigenous traditions and these plants are so “of this place”, they infuse the later arriving European immigrant traditions with fresh inspiration and create a fusion of cuisine that feels as if it could only have happened in this place and in this way. Perhaps that is true of any definable cuisine. This may be no great insight, rather a simple truism of cuisine. In any event, we feel this confluence of factors, and fascinating flavors, is the essence of Great Lakes Cuisine. Now, go forth and forage! But take Alan Bergo with you!