While spring and summer offer a bounty of wild food treasures, there is a cornucopia of good things to forage in fall. Fruits like native aronia and pawpaw, and imported and notoriously stinky ginkgo, ripen on trees and shrubs. Hen of the woods, one of the most delicious and easiest of mushrooms to identify, begins to appear at the base of hardwoods. Even as winter arrives and days contract with cold, wood ear mushrooms remain in season when the weather is damp. For anyone newly curious about wild food to forage or to grow (in the case of the fruit), here are six fall forages that make the season exciting. They are sustainable to gather, and easy to identify.
Photography by Marie Viljoen.
Aronia
Like apples, the fruits of aronia are known botanically as pomes. Like apples they are ready to harvest in early fall. Darkly tannic when underripe, aronia has a long season, and begins to turn black and juicy in late August. The fruit persists well after frost and is also sweeter after a cold snap’s bletting. It can be gathered earlier, but wait until entire clusters are a midnight purple; any hint of red means they are unpalatably acerbic, giving the shrub that chokeberry common name. (Scarlet-hued fruit are a different species, Aronia arbutifolia, and can be used in the same way, but yield less juice.)
Around mid-September (where I live), the first forage of aronia is plump and mouth-puckering, but ideal for juicing through a foodmill. Freeze the juice in ice trays and store in bags or a container. The frozen cubes of aronia juice can be used like red wine in cooking, adding depth and complexity to slow-cooked stews and braises. An ounce of juice shaken into a cocktail gives it an antioxidant-rich backbone (aronia in supplement form is big business). A staple is my kitchen is slow-fermented aronia, dried, and used in baking and cooking like raisins. To ferment the fruit I cover it in sugar in a jar, let it sit for weeks to months—the lid on loosely—before straining it off and bottling the syrup (you can use this elderberry syrup method for the aronia syrup). The delectable, leftover fruit is air-dried slowly on trays and it keeps indefinitely.
Ginkgo
Roasted ginkgo “nuts” might be the ultimate bar snack.
New York City’s streets and parks are richly planted with Ginkgo biloba. The trees’ tolerance of pollution and their vivid fall color make them a beloved ornamental. Female ginkgo trees bear heavy crops of fruit, which drops to the grass or sidewalk beneath when ripe. This is one of the smelliest times of the urban year. Aside from knowledgable East Asian connoisseurs who gather the fallen fruit to process in late fall (and city-dwelling raccoons and possums who love the reeking pulp), few urbanites love ginkgo for these odiferous weeks. But hidden inside that fruit is a nut-like shell. And inside that shell is a delectable treat: a pistachio-green kernel that tastes something like a roast chestnut crossed with tofu.
Collecting the fruit is quick work, and processing it is worth the trouble. (You can read here about how to clean and prepare ginkgo). Do wear gloves when handling the pulp, because the fruit can be a skin-irritant. The ginkgo “nuts” must be boiled or roasted, and traditional wisdom suggests eating no more than 20 of the delicacies at one sitting, or in a day.
Pawpaw
Native pawpaws (Asimina triloba, and there are other native species) are the tropical-tasting and mango-resembling cousins of truly subtropical cherimoyas, soursops, and custard apples. As word of their deliciousness keeps spreading, more parks, community gardens, and small farmers are planting these cold-hardy trees, and every fall brings a larger clutch of the fruit to local markets.
Depending on where they are growing, pawpaw season can last from early to late fall. Spotting the well-camouflaged pawpaw fruit is about identifying the tree, first. The large-leafed trees are scattered across woodlands of the Eastern United States. In cities, more parks and more and more gardens are now home to the fall-fruiting trees. Pawpaws drop at the perfect point of ripeness—picked too early, they will not ripen. Foragers are also weather-watchers, and a good time to look for pawpaws on a tree near you is after a windstorm when the ripe fruit can be found lying beneath the trees.
There is only one caution with pawpaw: Eat them in moderation, as more than a couple can have a laxative effect. The seeds are toxic, so if you are puréeing the pulp in food processor, for an unforgettably good pawpaw ice cream (make sure no seeds have slipped in, accidentally.
American Persimmons
Small, native American persimmons (Diospyros virginiana) are an overlooked fall fruit. They are aromatic and taffy-sweet when perfectly soft and ripe, and persist on bare branches well into the cold days of winter. This is another fall forage that rewards weather-watchers: after wind, head out to a local persimmon tree and scour the ground beneath. These small persimmons have seeds, and one way to make the best use of them is to foodmill the seeds out and freeze the pulp, in batches. I use persimmon pulp to flavor savory sauces, as well as in ice creams, and bakes (you’ll find recipes of those in my book Forage, Harvest, Feast).
One way to use American persimmons that are not perfectly ripe (and inedibly tannic, when raw) is make mini hoshigaki, the Japanese air-dried persimmon treat. The fruits must be peeled first, and then hung up to dry—a faster process than with their ample, Asian cousins. Something about this curing process sweetens them and their dried flavor is reminiscent of the scent of roses. The dried fruit can be eaten as a snack (remember the seeds), or soaked, de-seeded, and baked. I like them especially in a late fall focaccia.
Hen of the Woods
It’s hard not to do a happy dance when you spot a choice hen of the woods at the base of an oak in the middle of autumn. The mushrooms can be very large, and their rich flavor is very good. Grifola frondosa is also known as maitake, transliterated from Japanese and translated as dancing mushroom. It is not easy to confuse hen of the woods with another mushroom, and its possible lookalikes are edible (compare with black staining polypore and umbrella polypore).
Where I live, hen of the woods appears reliably in October at the base of oaks; but I have seen it on sycamore and on cherry, too. Older mushrooms can be tough but are still useful for making mushroom broths, while tender hen of the woods can be roasted (whole, if it is a cauliflower-sized young ‘un) or in pieces. Tossed with oil and salt, and sheet-pan roasted at 400 degrees, their scent is—to me–like warm chestnut honey and soy sauce. In short, addictive.
Wood Ears
Fruiting on logs and dead trees, one of the most generous forages of the year is the wood ear mushroom (species of Auricularia), in season through winter, as long as the temperature is above freezing (when frozen, or when the weather is dry, they turn rock hard). On a snow-damp, thawing day, wood ears soften and feel like a velvety, living rubber. Their texture is an irresistible combination of crunch, slip, and slither. They plump up and absorb broth, or sauce. My favorite way to use them is in soups or stews, and every fall and winter I make a ritual cream-laced chicken and wood ear stew scented with field garlic, which has just begun to appear after summer dormancy. At home, wrapped and in the fridge, wood ears last well for weeks. Dried, they can be reconstituted after an hour’s soak in warm water.
If you are in the New York City area this autumn, you can join my forage walks with picnics and meet and eat these fall forages in person, before venturing out on your own.
See also:
- Gardening 101: Persimmon Trees
- Chicken of the Woods: A Beginner-Friendly Mushroom to Hunt and Cook
- Sweet, Tart, Juicy—and Invasive: Autumn Olives Are Ripe for the Picking
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