Sea aster is one of many gastronomic delights you can gather easily and sustainably on the salty water margin. It hangs out with other stars of the wild food world like Marsh samphire, sea purslane, sea arrowgrass, sea plantain, annual sea blight, scurvy grass and orache and i’m pretty envious of the sheep that get to graze these delicacies.
If foraging conjures up images of bimbling along tranquil hedgerows, gently picking berries with a gentle sun on your back, then picking rock samphire may disabuse you of the notion. Though it does occasionally grow on the foreshore, its preferred home, clinging to precipitous coastal cliffs, makes for anything but bucolic harvesting.
Orache doesn’t always get good reviews in foraging guidebooks, but I rate the varieties I encounter very highly – both as a salad leaf when young, and as a spinach substitute when mature. The tender young leaves, to my palate, are wonderfully sweet with nutty overtones and a hint of salt…
The flavours and textures of some wild foods can be challenging to our modern palettes. We have got used to the easy sweetness of tame vegetables, while importing piquant spices from abroad to make them more exciting…
One of the great pleasures of foraging is discovering exciting flavours in the common and innocuous-looking plants around us. Sea arrowgrass never fails to raise squeals of surprise and delight when we encounter it on my guided coastal walks.