Juniper berries

Monday, September 03, 2007

The idea of foraging never occurred to me prior to reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  Rather than something normal people do to find food for themselves, it seemed like something weird and foreign...nearly akin to looking in trash cans for food.  I’ve always been a gardener, excited by the idea of raising my own food.  It seems silly now that I would make such a distinction between things I specifically cultivated for food and food that I might find growing wild.  It is especially odd, considering I grew up in an area where there were so many hunters my school district was (and continues to be) closed on the first day of deer season - what else is hunting and fishing but foraging?

Foraging is, in its most basic sense, wandering in search of food.  And I have done it without considering it as such - like when I was little and gorged myself on a blueberries from a bush I found in the woods.  Lately I’ve been more and more inspired to look for sources of food outside my comfort zone (ie, my garden and the farmer’s market).  To help me with identification, I took out Edible Wild Plants of Pennsylvania and New York by John Tomikel from my library.

Before I start searching the city and burbs for edible plantlife on public property, I thought I might start in my own backyard.  It’s still foraging in your backyard, right?  If the stuff you find wasn’t intended to be food?  Well, I’m going to call it foraging.  Baby steps to real foraging, maybe.

Many of us have juniper bushes on our property in this neck of the woods.  We have three or four giant juniper bushes in the yard.  The Juniperus virginiana is an evergreen that is quite common to the area, usually planted as windbreaks or hedgerows.  It produces juniper berries, although it’s really not a true berry.  It’s a modified conifer cone, so it’s a little scaly. As a rule, you really wouldn’t want to eat juniper berries - most are fairly bitter.  However, juniper berries do have their uses!

The juniper berry is the major flavoring used to make gin.  As far as I know, it is legal to make gin in your home as long as you don’t sell it.  If you’re interested in trying, there are some fairly substantial instructions at Home Distillation of Alcohol.

Beyond their role in making gin, juniper berries are a great flavoring for meat dishes.  They are generally used dried and crushed, and are removed from the dish before eating.  I have used juniper berries from my bushes in meat marinades.  However, I’ve found all sorts of recipes using juniper berries

For more information about how and when to harvest juniper berries, click here.

A word of caution: juniper is a diuretic and can be harmful to pregnant women (it may cause uterine contractions).