Spokane, Wash. – Foraging for food isn’t always a desperate quest to find an open restaurant at midnight. In Italy, foraging for truffles is as big a culinary tradition as pressing olives in Tuscany.
Truffles are small white mushrooms with a taste so rich you will wake at dawn and travel with pigs to find them, which is exactly how they were traditionally found. Italian hogs had a certain knack for digging their snouts into the soil and coming up with these rare white gold nuggets.
Restaurants will shave truffles onto your pasta then charge you the equivalent of a Tuscan villa.
Here in Washington, where the weather isn’t nearly as nice or the villas nearly as romantic, there is a foraging community that’s just as intense as its Italian cousin. But Washington’s obsession is with a fat, deep-purple fruit called a huckleberry. It is the object of families’ weekends, scientists’ experiments, chefs’ imaginations and foodies’ addictions.
Call them huckleberry hounds.
I came across them last month at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships here in this pleasant, friendly city in the high alpine of eastern Washington. A few hours before spectacularly failing to land a triple axel on the icy sidewalks, I had dessert and drinks with an old high school classmate from Eugene, Ore.
Les Weatherhead has been a lawyer in Spokane for 24 years, and at a charming riverside restaurant called Clinkerdagger across from Spokane Arena, he insisted I try something. He asked the waitress for a simple scoop of vanilla ice cream with huckleberry purée. The sauce came out in a silver tureen and I ladled it over the ice cream until it formed a creamy, cold, purple and white soup.
The huckleberry, a cousin of the blueberry, is the sweetest berry you’ve ever tasted. While strawberries and blueberries add a nice, sweet touch to cereal and waffles, a huckleberry explodes in your mouth like a SweeTart. It’s like a real sweet raspberry with a long aftertaste you almost don’t want to wash down with a Washington chardonnay.
Then my friend went on to discuss the hordes of huckleberries found by his cabin on nearby Priest Lake and the physical properties of the huckleberries. The spiel amazed me in its passion and was totally beyond my comprehension.
But after some investigating, I learned Les isn’t alone. Huckleberries have been in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains and parts of Idaho since before the Ice Age. For thousands of years American Indians spent their summers and falls hunting and picking huckleberries, a custom they associated with religious significance.
To this day, Washingtonians have carried on the tradition, creating a frenzy every August and September that has forced worried – and hungry – scientists to find a solution.
OK, so it doesn’t quite match the oil shortage. Local concern reached a point in 1990 when Dan Barney, horticulture professor at the University of Idaho, tried domesticating the huckleberry. For more than a decade, he couldn’t find a way to make it grow under 4,000 feet. These things are the yaks of the berry world.
But Barney, who grew up picking huckleberries near his Sandpoint, Idaho, home, has made a breakthrough and now has a few thousand of them growing near his research station. That’s good. He has received orders from as far away as France. No longer will the huckleberry branches be stripped to near extinction.
“I want my great grandchildren to grow up and pick huckleberries,” he said.
Today huckleberries dot menus all over Washington. Clinkerdagger has a killer huckleberry milkshake. At Restaurant Zoe in Seattle, they serve grilled salmon with huckleberry freezer jam and crème fraîche plus a cheese course with Taleggio, huckleberries and a cabernet reduction.
“They’re great,” said chef-owner Scott Staples, a 1982 Cherry Creek High grad whose father, Dixon, owned Dixons Downtown Grill and Racines. “I like them because they have a deep, earthy, rich, almost port-like red-wine kind of base to them.”
I wanted a huckleberry smorgasbord. So I skipped breakfast and trudged across beautiful but icy Riverfront Park hoping no skating judges were around. Downtown in River Park Square mall, Made in Washington could outfit your entire pantry in huckleberry products.
Huckleberry jam, jelly, poppyseed vinaigrette, syrup, honey, apple butter, pancake mix, scone mix, fudge, chocolate bars, pretzels, tea, kettlecorn. Purple packaging covered an entire wall. I picked up a big huckleberry chocolate bar, some huckleberry jam with cheese crackers and a gift box of huckleberry syrup, jelly and jam and sprinted back to my hotel.
I sat at my window, looking out at the gray, cold Northwest day, savoring huckleberry chocolate and huckleberry jam and wondering if, somewhere in the plains of Washington, an American Indian was doing the same.
Staff writer John Henderson covers sports and writes about the food he eats on the road. He can be reached at 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
If you go:
Clinkerdagger, 621 W. Mallon Ave., Spokane, Wash. 509-328-5965
Made in Washington, River Park Square, Spokane, 509-838-1517
Restaurant Zoe, 2137 Second Ave, Seattle, 206-256-2060.
