Sacramento chef forages wild ingredients from Mendocino forests for unique dishes
Chef Tyler Bond in Sacramento embarks on monthly trips to Mendocino County, traveling hours to forage rare ingredients that elevate his restaurant’s dishes.
“We got up at 5 in the morning. It was nice and dark,” Bond said. “The more hours we have walking, the better.”
Bond, who has been foraging for fungi for nine years, searches for wild ingredients that cannot be cultivated.
“Some of these wild ingredients we just can’t grow,” he said.
Using the landscape as his guide, Bond plays a real-life game of hide-and-seek with nature.
“So you can kind of see this darkness right here. It’s probably holding moisture. I would slow down and look closer into this for some orange shine of a lobster or that pale golden flash of a chanterelle,” he explained.
The hunt is not always easy.
“It’s hard because the color of the leaves are the color of the mushrooms,” Bond said.
After an hour of hiking through the shadows of California’s tallest trees, Bond finally made a discovery.
“Here we go. You found some mushrooms. Chanterelles, baby. They are kind of all over, so watch your step,” he said.
Chanterelles, trumpet-shaped golden mushrooms prized by fine restaurants worldwide, grow closest to Sacramento along the coast, where the redwoods keep the ground moist year-round.
“They are beautiful mushrooms,” Bond said. “Once you find one, there’s others.”
Bond also forages for lobster mushrooms, which he described as “one of the best examples I harvested my whole life.”
These mushrooms, along with chanterelles, can sell for $25 to $50 per pound on the market.
But Bond’s foraging isn’t limited to mushrooms. He showed off a huckleberry patch, saying, “We’ll probably cook some of these down, a little bit of wine, maybe a little bit of sugar, maybe not depending on how sweet they are. They taste like blueberries, real good.”
He also forages watercress, a spicy and herby plant that grows out of cracks along the coast.
“You can just walk to a beach and enjoy a beautiful plant,” Bond said.
At Mulvaney’s B&L, Bond’s hard-to-find ingredients take center stage.
“So these are chanterelle mushrooms,” he said. “We are about to give these a julienne, and they are going into a set for chicken.”
Bond routinely shares his bounty with others.
“I think about how much hours goes into it. When you think about somebody who is out there in a place it should grow, how many hours it took to get it, pick it, bring it here,” he said.
For Bond, the effort is worth it.
“This takes time, and nothing worth doing well is worth doing easily, right?” he said.
“Because that’s my world. Beautiful ingredients processed by professionals, delivered to our community,” Bond said.
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