A local chef is doing something different and has some unique and flavorful food because of it. Dyllan Dale owns Wild Foods by Dyllan. He calls himself the Ozarks Foraging Chef.
When Dale goes out to his garden, he doesn’t just see the tomatoes, lettuce and other typical edible items most others see. He looks beyond that to plants that are growing wild. Take wood sorrel, for instance. It’s a plant that just about anyone would recognize – you can find it in any organic yard or open space. And it grows next to the garden that’s planted behind a Commercial Street building where Dale leases kitchen space.
"Look at the leaf shape," he said, pointing out the sorrel. "The sorrel has heart shaped leaves. And the clover is kind of that long oval shape. Okay, now you have to try it."
"Oh, just munch it?" asks the reporter.
"Just eat it," said Dale.
"I'm game," she replied. "Oh, my gosh, that tastes so good. It's got a real tart..."
"That's that lemon," he said.
"Yeah, that is really good. Who knew?"
"Who knew?"
Dale juices wood sorrel and uses it to make pasta – more on that later.
The chef and owner of Wild Foods by Dyllan for more than two years remembers when he first became fascinated with food.
"When I was about 10 years old, I would come home from school, and nobody would be home. So, I turned on the TV and there was this cool show on called Good Eats with Alton Brown, and the way he explained food and kind of broke down the science behind food was so simplified that I was able to understand it, and it really just intrigued me," Dale said. "So, I think around that age, I decided I was going to be a chef someday."
He began working in area restaurants as a teen, bussing tables and washing dishes, and he eventually worked his way up to kitchen manager. That’s when he decided to get some formal training. But mostly what he’s learned, he figured out himself.
"I really just became obsessed with food almost in like an unhealthy way, right? I'm like up at 11, 12 at night trying to figure out things, trying to make pastries and all this and that," he said, "and so it really just took a lot out of me, but those years were crucial for me to really develop my skill set."
Dale has always had a deep love for nature – even as a kid he was fascinated with ecology and the natural environment and what it gives us. He wasn’t sure how he could ever merge his two passions — that is until he met a foraging chef in St. Louis named Rob Connolly who mentored him for a couple of years.
Now, foraged plants are a part of the cuisine that he creates along with ingredients from local farms or locally owned stores.
"This time of year, we're, of course, foraging mushrooms. It's, you know, springtime going into summer. And so, we just got done with morels, but we're finding oysters right now. Chicken of the woods. We'll start finding chanterelle soon, which is one of my favorites. But also, you're seeing things like burdock pop up and other, you know, wood sorrel and other things," he said. "And so, you know, you can walk out in your yard, and I often do this with people in like a 10-foot area, you can find at least half a dozen things that are edible between dead nettle and dandelions and sorrel and stuff like that, and so it's everywhere. The challenge as a chef is what's worth eating, right?"
That’s where his experience as a chef comes in – he has to find the things that are palatable and figure out what to do with them. It’s a lot of experimentation. But he’s come up with some delicious combinations.
"I do a venison and goat cheese ravioli where the pasta is made with like a nettle puree, like a stinging nettle puree pasta. And then I make a venison and local goat cheese ravioli. That's definitely one of my favorites. I love making croquettes, which is basically a fried soup. You take a thickened, like, creamy mushroom base, and you bread it, and you fry it, and then I'll do like a elderberry coulis or something like that or like a ramp pesto, some type of wild pesto on top of that. So, the croquettes are definitely one of my favorites, said Dyllan Dale. "But I also just, I love making desserts, any type of pastry. Pawpaws, wild plums, mulberries, any type of pastry made with wild fruits."
He said it’s extremely important to know what you’re looking for when you head outdoors to forage. Be absolutely certain you know how to identify mushrooms, for example. He suggests going on foraging walks with experts, and he said it’s easy to learn and well worth the effort.
"I want people to know that it's, it can be easy to learn. It can be very approachable in the kitchen," Dale said. And I want people to know that it can be very flavorful, that there's a lot of flavors in nature that you don't get on the shelf at Walmart, right? Very unique flavors that are absolutely amazing that people don't get to experience unless they go foraging."
We move into the kitchen where he demonstrates how he makes pasta.
"Pasta is really simple," he said. "The basic ratio of pasta is one cup of flour — that could be semolina or double 0 — to one egg and one tablespoon of olive oil or another wet ingredient. So, when you're talking about a wet ingredient, that could be olive oil. That could be beet juice. That could be sorrel juice. That could be a lot of things. So, we'll start with four cups of pasta or of a flour of semolina flour for our pasta. And then we'll make a well in it. That's a French technique. So then once we have our well. We'll crack four eggs into it. And then once we crack four eggs into it and put our sorrel juice in there, it's also going to give that pasta like a nice lemony flavor to it."
The pasta he made that day would be used for a morel mushroom ravioli. Dale planned to cook down some shallots, thicken them with a bechamel sauce and add finely chopped morels before adding it as a filling to the ravioli.
It's important to him to support local producers. He said those relationships are worth cherishing "because we've become so disconnected with our food that when you get to know the farmer that's growing your food, you're like, oh, there's like value here, right? There's something more than just, here's your lettuce and here's some money and have it — have a nice day and that's it. It's like, oh, I know what's going on in your life. And I know that you're struggling as a farm because of this hailstorm. And so, I want to promote you more and you just get to know your neighbor better. And there's relationship in that. And there's a lot of value in that."
Dale serves his food at pop-ups at various venues in the Ozarks. It might be a museum, a local farm, a vineyard or even a beauty shop.
"I mean, we will set up anywhere, put tables up, put chairs up, make it really nice and serve a six-course meal, five-course meal. But then I also do classes," he said.
Those classes include cooking with foraged foods and fermenting.
You can find out when pop-ups are planned and sign up for a dinner or for a class at wildfoodsbydyllan.com.
