Bun Lai Forages For Pesto

On the side of a quiet road, chef Bun Lai explained that Japanese knotweed, brought to the United States first as an ornamental plant, has spread to become one of the country’s more tenacious invasive species. It breaks roads and streets. Its roots extend deep into the soil, and if you leave just a little piece behind, it returns. ​“It’s like a horror movie,” he said.

To bring it under control, Lai suggested a formidable adversary: us.

“There is not a more powerful force that exists in the world than the human appetite,” he said.

But no one cultivates knotweed, Lai, the celebrated culinary force behind Howe Street’s Miya’s restaurant, explained to four Hopkins students — Caroline Laplaca, Maya Karlan, Aislinn O’Brien, and Unique Parker — who joined him on this recent expedition for a school project. You can’t buy it in a store, he told them. The only way to get it into your kitchen is to find it growing somewhere and harvest it yourself.

In short, you have to forage.

And knotweed isn’t the only thing you can forage for. Avoiding the poison ivy growing nearby, fellow forager Emma Broadhurst knelt down and showed me the silky leaves of a wild leek, growing in the shade in a dark patch of soil. She picked off the leaves, leaving the bulb behind to regrow. She took a bite from one leaf and handed me one to try. It tasted like it looked: sweet and bitter, rich and complicated, and above all, strong.

I could easily imagine myself cooking with it — if I only recognized it the next time I saw it.

Learning To Forage

Now is a good time for the necessary warning that we can’t just eat whatever we find that looks good. Some plants can hurt us; some can kill us. But others are both delicious and nutritious. How do you learn which plants you can eat and which plants you can’t?

Lai learned from his mother Yoshiko, who developed her own passion for it as a young girl in the countryside of Japan. At a time when girls were encouraged to stay in the shade to keep their skin pale, ​“my mother was in the sun all the time,” Lai said. ​“She would be out gardening and foraging until the very last moment. I got that from her.” 

When he was growing up in an apartment complex on Prospect Street in New Haven, Lai said, Yoshiko told him not to buy her presents for holidays. ​“Make me something,” Lai said his mother told him. ​“Do something that takes effort and care.” For Lai, that sometimes meant foraging for plants in the small lot at the corner of Prospect and Division where there is now a community garden. As a child, he once brought his mother a burdock root, all in one piece, that he’d dug up. Another time he mistakenly planted the invasive knotweed. Along the way, his mother taught him what she knew, and encouraged him to learn more.

“Foraging is passed on from the generation before you,” Broadhurst said. Though that didn’t always mean from parents to children. Broadhurst herself learned about foraging at the Institute of Sustainable Nutrition in West Granby, Ct., spending Saturdays and Sundays there for much of a year. After learning to identify edible plants, ​“I just took it home and started playing with stuff,” she said. ​“I’m a frugal cook and I thrive off the idea of scarcity. There’s more to be had with less. I’m better able to create and think in terms of preparation for a meal.”

But in identifying the species of edible plants growing near Lai’s house, he thought about diversity. As Lai talked about the nutritional value and indestructibility of knotweed — it has been known to destroy sidewalks and grow through driveways as it spreads — Broadhurst pointed out several other plants to me that all had their different flavors. In addition to knotweed, wild leeks, there was mugwort, garlic mustard, and wild onions, all full of nutrients and, unlike many cultivated crops, resistant to insects.

“There’s nothing we can grow that can catch up to what Mother Nature grows,” Lai said. Lai made foraging a part of Miya’s menu beginning in around 2001, when he and a friend began collecting Asian shore crabs and ​“tried to figure out if it was edible or not.” They are now part of the sushi menu. Knotweed followed.

Returning to the house, we met with Tim Lujan, a friend of Lai’s who works at Sunset Grille in East Norwalk. Lujan likewise learned to forage from his father’s family, who are part of the Pueblo in New Mexico. His aunt taught him to look for mushrooms and wild spinach. He looked approvingly at the plants the Hopkins students had gathered.

Lai’s plan was to make the plants into pesto. After the students cleaned the plants, Lai folded them into a blender with olive oil, walnuts, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, and some nutritional yeast in place of cheese. At the end, he added a little salt. This he served up on pasta so we could taste the pesto by itself. He also made small anchovy, cheese, and tomato sandwiches, using the pesto as a spread.

The pesto was strong, complicated, and earthy. I also ate the garlic mustard flower Lai added as a decoration; it added crunch and lightness. The sandwich, meanwhile, didn’t taste high-end gourmet. It tasted healthy. It tasted good.

“Now you know when you’re hungry, you can just go out to your backyard,” Lai said.

The next day, I got up, got a pair of scissors, and ambled out to my backyard, where wild onions grow in abundance. I’d never pulled them, but never eaten them, though my son and his friends — who had been taught about wild onions at one of Common Ground’s summer programs — I knelt down and snipped a few, brought them into my kitchen, and chopped them up to throw in some eggs. They were delicious, a stronger flavor than the scallions I’d been buying at the store. And they were just growing there, without needing any care. They were there when we moved in over a decade ago. Provided I don’t eat them all, they probably will be there still when we move out.