Woodlands Hairy Bikers' Best of British

We believe Britain has the best food in the world.

Our glorious country boasts some fantastic ingredients.

Start eating it, will you?

It's home to some amazing producers...

-My goodness gracious, that is epic!

-Isn't it?

..and innovative chefs.

But our islands also have a fascinating food history.

The fish and chip shops of South Wales are running out of chips.

BOTH: Yes!

And in this series, we're uncovering revealing stories of our rich culinary past.

Now, there is food history on a plate.

As well as meeting our nation's food heroes who are keeping this heritage alive.

Let's have them enjoying themselves. It's a short life.

Let's make it a happy one, like they always have had.

And of course we'll be cooking up a load of dishes that reveal our foodie evolution.

Spring, summer, autumn or winter.

It's brilliant.

BOTH: Quite simply, The Best Of British.

6,000 years ago, 90% of Britain was covered in woodland

and the forest bounty provided a major part of our diet.

Obviously, those days are gone, but the great British woodland

still has a lot to offer the adventurous gourmet.

So today's show is a celebration of our great forests

and the culinary traditions that it contains.

We're going to have a look at the gourmet treasures

that lie beneath that leafy canopy.

There's nothing better than gallivanting around the woods

foraging for goodies - this wild food Mecca can provide us

with an abundance of edibles.

From amazing mushrooms and British truffles, to berries and wild game.

We'll explore the revival of a great British nut - no, not him!

Steady! And cook up some fantastic dishes that salute the wonders found

within our 23,000 square kilometres of native woodland.

So it's time to head off into the great outdoors,

and what better excuse do we need to do a bit of off-roading?

Wahey! We're heading to Shadow Woods in Sussex to experience

a fascinating part of woodland food history for ourselves.

We're here to meet Clive Cobie.

He's a woodlands skills expert

who runs courses in foraging and woodcraft.

He knows this place like the back of his hand

and is part gastronome, part wild plant paramedic!

How are you, Clive? Nice to see you.

Couldn't see you in the camouflage.

Man of the woods. Chose a good 'un.

I was just picking this plant here. This is called ground ivy.

It makes a really good herbal tea.

And if you ever have diarrhoea, it's a really good one for curing it.

I would have thought that eating ivy would give you diarrhoea.

This isn't related to normal ivy.

This is just called ground ivy in the way that it grows along the ground.

It's quite a common plant.

-This is your expertise, you see, you know what you're looking for.

-Yeah.

I'm quite used to the woodland plants.

This environment is packed with all kinds of food sources,

if you know what to look for.

All we need to get going is a pointy stick!

-I've prepared you a digging stick each.

-It's Gandalf of the woods.

-I haven't grown my beard yet.

-No, you shaved it off, didn't you?

I did, yes. I wouldn't want to show you up with yours.

-I know, it's probably best.

-Mind, Kingy, there's magic in the woods.

There is magic in the woods, dude.

Dude, you've gone all druidy!

Actually no, foraging is very modern-trendy at the moment.

Top restaurants are taking advantage of the interesting

and unusual flavours found growing wild in our backyard.

Of course, Clive's an expert,

and if you're thinking of trying foraging at home,

you need to be one too.

Otherwise, you'll end up poisoning yourself,

and nobody wants to do that, do they?

Clive, if you had to exist here, just living off these woods,

-could you do it?

-Yeah, you could.

-Throughout the seasons or just...

-The thing is, you'd have to prepare

and there's different ways of storing,

like with hawthorn and with sloe berries.

They would have dried them out and made fruit leathers and stored those

over winter.

It's amazing. I look around us and see green stuff,

but Clive sees food and medicine everywhere!

Ah, here's some interesting plants here. This is called century.

The flowers don't actually come out until midday,

and then the flowers come out and then they close up by the evening.

But this was used for the digestion.

It is actually quite bitter, so if you're going to have it,

it's best just to have a small amount and then adapt it,

rather than having too much in something.

It's like wild plants, what people quite often do is get loads of it,

make a meal of it and it tastes so bitter

that it puts them off for life.

It's best to just experiment with a little amount of wild plants,

put them into your normal food and just get used to it,

and at least you're getting some good nutrients and minerals then.

Whilst some of the woodland flavours can be a bit of a challenge,

there are plenty of others that are quite amazing.

This is water mint. I think you could find a lot of uses for that.

It smells really nice.

It tastes nice as well.

-Oh, wow, that's fabulous!

-Wouldn't that make amazing ice cream?

-Hm.

-It's incredibly refreshing.

That's the only way to describe the flavour - fresh.

Oh, dude, taste that, man.

A picnic.

Oh, it's a prehistoric butty.

It might even have some protein in there as well.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-If we're lucky.

-You never know.

-A maggot.

-There's nothing wrong with a maggot.

No. SI COUGHS

I think I'll pass on the maggot, dude.

-COUGHING

-Are you all right there, dude?

-Yeah.

There are an incredible variety of foods that can be foraged.

In Shadow Woods alone, Clive has found wild garlic,

blackthorn, wild sorrel, burdock root...

..and, to give us an authentic taste of the forest,

he's preparing us a feast using all these wonderful ingredients.

Oh, what an idyllic spot!

This is one of the places I do my cooking

and I've got a ground oven here that I've rigged up,

which is an ancient form of cooking,

but I've modernised it cos I'm using a metal box

rather than a hole in the ground with stones in the bottom,

which is how they used to do it.

-You've got everything in the forest.

-You have, haven't you?

-Needless to say, that's absolutely white hot.

-Yeah.

Ah, look at that! A woodland Le Creuset.

That's bubbling away like a good 'un, Clive.

'Charcoal powered the Industrial Revolution

'and is yet another part of woodland's usefulness,

'because for us it can fuel a rather natty oven.'

Oh, wow, smells good!

'As well as smelling delicious, it's packed with medicinal

'and nutritious plants, roots and herbs.'

This one's done.

'This is truly timeless cooking,

'well, except for the pots.'

We've got wild garlic, stinging nettles, dandelions

and various roots - burdock, reed mace -

so it's full of nutrition and carbohydrates.

-Right.

-So it should go well with a rabbit.

'Anyway, enough chat, it's eating time!

'Everything in this dish has been sourced from these very woods

'and I can't wait to see how it tastes!'

There you go.

Oh, fantastic! So what have we got?

That's stinging nettle and dandelion.

-Stinging nettle and dandelion.

-That'll be the rabbit.

-Is this the burdock?

-Hm.

Whoa!

Burdock's lovely!

-Yeah, it's got quite an earthy taste.

-That burdock's fabulous.

Is there wild garlic in here as well?

-Mm.

-What's the really rooty one?

Ah, that's reed mace, it's the base of the stems.

-It is a bit fibrous, but...

-It's a bit like artichoke.

It tastes like artichokes.

-Mm, nowt wrong with that.

-It's lovely.

Do you know what? When the woodland changes from summer to autumn,

and you get that slight muskiness to the air, that's what you get on the plate.

I love that perfume of... living things.

This is a real taste of times gone by, isn't it?

Mankind will have enjoyed this kind of meal for hundreds of thousands of years.

It's only the past 300, 400 years

that we've forgotten about it, forgotten what treasures we've got.

-I shall never take a woodland walk for granted again.

-No, no, same.

Amazing!

Experts like Clive are real food heroes.

Foraging reconnects us with our ancient culinary past,

and his wild rabbit stew contained an abundance of woodland flavours.

But other wild animals are available

and one of my favourites is pheasant.

Pheasants have often been thought to be the preserve of the rich and wealthy who go out shooting them.

But in Britain alone, there are more than 3 million tonnes

of pheasant flesh.

And you can, as they say in the trade, nang it.

-GOBBLING

-You can eat it, and it's brilliant.

We're going to show you how to make

a woodland-inspired pheasant and wild mushroom pie.

It's dead quick to make, and cooking pheasant quick

is a good way of making sure the meat doesn't go dry.

I'm going to talk mushrooms.

Go on, you talk mushrooms and I'll take the breasts off this pheasant.

Right, for starters, I need 300ml of boiling water,

for which I'm going to soak some dried mushrooms.

Dried mushrooms don't have to come from Italy, we've plenty of our own.

I'm going to put half a chicken stock cube

in the mushroom-soaking water for flavour.

And that needs to soak now for about 20 minutes.

Just a note - always check for shot,

because the majority of birds that you buy have been shot.

Now, the worst thing is to bite into the breast

of your pheasant

and get a gobful of gunshot. Eugh!

'Now, you may think of pheasant as a quintessentially British bird,

'but our feathered friends were actually brought here

'from south-west Asia by the Romans.'

'And we've enjoyed them ever since!'

Look at this, Kingy,

-Look at those mushrooms!

-How beautiful is that, mate?

These are all edible and absolutely delicious.

And the thing is, there's many out in the forest that aren't delicious,

and it's a funny thing because we've kind of got frightened

of picking wild mushrooms, and rightly so,

because a lot of people have died. So, when you go mushrooming,

do it with somebody who knows what they're doing

and you can have bounteous treasure of fungi.

I'm taking a handful of various mushrooms - girolles,

blewits and trompettes.

Wonderful stuff!

So I'm going to chop up these beautiful mushrooms

in a somewhat rustic manner and put them in a pan with a bit of oil.

Now, keeping the liquid for later, strain the soaked dried mushrooms,

chop them up and add them to the ones in the pan.

We're going to cook these through for about five minutes.

In here, we've some potatoes poaching gently,

so I'll see if they're done. We don't want them overdone.

How are you doing, Mr Butcher?

Not bad, Mother, not bad, I'm just thinking about the pheasant

and how beautiful the bird is.

I mean, they're stupid, but they're beautiful.

I'm going to get these potatoes off.

I'm just going to drain them and let them stand for a bit.

But we don't want them to go watery.

Separating the breast from the pheasant may look a bit of a mission,

but you can always get your butcher to do it for you.

Really, though, it's the same as with a chicken,

it just takes a bit of practice.

One pheasant breast. How beautiful does that meat look? Fantastic!

Now, these mushrooms are nicely cooked through,

so we set those aside. Oh, they smell so good,

-don't they?

-Fabulous.

-They smell fungal,

they smell of the damp forest floor.

Into the same mushroom pan, add a little more oil.

One finely chopped medium-sized onion.

And half a dozen rashers of rindless smoked bacon, cut into small slices.

We're going to fry this off until the bacon's lightly browned.

We're not going for crispy on this one.

Now cut the pheasant breasts into pieces.

I've prepared three pheasants, which should be enough for six people.

The pie topping is going to be a simple mash.

Just let the drained potatoes dry before you start.

Add a large knob of butter, about four tablespoons of milk

and some seasoning before getting stuck in with the masher.

And I am going to do some seasoning of my own -

salt and pepper on the pheasant.

As soon as Si's happy, we're going to saute the pheasant breasts for a couple of minutes,

literally two to three minutes,

just until the meat's coloured. That's all we want.

-Shall we?

-We shall.

-It's a dry meat, isn't it, quite waxy.

-It is, it's a lovely meat.

It doesn't take long till it starts to colour up.

We're going to cook this for another five minutes

while we make the sauce. So that's when they'll cook through.

At this point, it's just a bit of colour.

-You know what, Si?

-What's happening?

-Here's one for you, being from Newcastle.

-Do you know where the word "pie" comes from?

-No, I don't, actually.

Magpies.

-Really?

-Magpies go around collecting lots of different things

and put them in one place. And that pie is a perfect example.

You go around the forest collecting stuff, put it in a dish,

it's a magpie pie.

-Ahh!

-It's a Toon Army pie.

You see, you see, not only did we invent the steam engine...

and loads of other stuff,

we invented the pie as well. You cannae whack it, can you?

I don't think we did, but I'm taking it, you know.

I think we're there, Si.

Lovely. Yeah.

We've got some colour on all those pieces,

but again, it's still raw in the middle and that's what we're after.

Now...two cloves of garlic

and finely slice these, crush it if you want.

I think, again, a little bit rustic.

And to that, we want to add 100ml of port.

To this, we add three tablespoons of ordinary plain flour.

One...two...

three.

And just give that a stir and a coat.

And this is to thicken the sauce

that will inevitably come out of the cooking juices.

And just make it a very unctuous... and lovely...texture.

Right, this is nearly ready to assemble.

Just slide all those glistening fungi back in with the pheasant

and add to the liquid saved from soaking the dried mushrooms.

Let that heat through before transferring to a casserole dish.

Slap it in.

Make sure your dish is hot before you put the filling in.

You don't want it to stop cooking just yet.

Likewise, if your potatoes have gone cold,

give them a quick blast before dolloping on.

And again, rustic and rough. Where you've got the rough bits,

-we're going to have a nice crispy peak, aren't we?

-Lush.

That's how I like potato done, it's brilliant.

Pop it under a grill for two minutes until it's crispy and golden topped.

And then we've got an extra treat for the top!

Hoo-hoo-hoo! Look at that!

# If you go down to the woods today

# You're sure of a big surprise. #

-Gorgeous.

-There's one little trifling garnish, isn't there?

-Oh, is there, David? Oh, I wonder what that is.

-Truffle oil.

Truffles, mushrooms, the forest.

As it hits the heat of the pie, you're going to be wafted...

into like...

heaven.

-Beautiful! Plates, veg, scoop, eat, enjoy.

-Marvellous!

Thing is, Kingy, if beef makes cottage pie,

and lamb makes shepherd's pie, what does pheasant make?

Blooming lovely pie, that's what, dude.

Now, is the pheasant tender?

The fork went in as it would do if it was stamping on an angel's foot.

-Aw!

-Yeah. Brilliant! No mystery.

-Wow!

-The bacon's flavoured it, the garlic, the black pepper.

All those mushrooms. The depth of mushroomy flavours -

using the dry ones as well as the wild ones.

It is a fungal delight, and all from our Great British woodland.

I know! That is a well-packed pie.

In fact, there's not mush-room in that for anything else!

Hey, hey!

Historically, when it comes to our woodlands,

it was open season for hunter-gatherers all year round.

If you could catch it, you could eat it.

But, as time went on, the land got divvied up amongst the wealthy.

And soon nature's larder became the preserve of the rich.

By the late Middle Ages, the right to hunt was purely

the privilege of landowners and nobility.

And thus began the most secretive of rural pursuits - poaching.

Me dad did it for 20 year, poaching.

And me dad used to have a big pocket. Fortune was never made...

I mean, in the early days, was never made, I mean, for a gain's purpose.

It was just to feed the families.

For some country folk, it was often the only option

when it came to getting food for the table.

I'd never poach a salmon in my life.

They gives theirselves up!

For others, it became one way of sticking one to the landowner.

Claiming back what was rightfully theirs.

Male chickens, we just fatten up and fatten up.

And they used to go to the market and get sold in the market.

We used to go about two nights before, or three,

and get one off the perch. You could just reach up,

get hold of his legs and pull him down.

You'd put his neck out, in your pocket!

This particular time, I got the cops after me this particular time.

"The fox had him," I said. "The fox had him."

So, he said, "Let's have a look at your trousers!"

The marks on the trousers were straight up the knees

where I'd knelt in the clay to put my hand up.

He said, "I've never seen a fox with bloody corduroy trousers on before."

And they might be laughing about it but, historically,

the punishment for poaching could be extreme and even included execution.

By the 1970s, laws were more relaxed

but a new breed of poacher was on the prowl.

# Bad boys stick together

# Never sad boys... #

For the modern poacher, this is money on the hoof,

all tax free and not bad for a night's work

when sold through illegal game dealers or to restaurants,

which asked no questions.

It used to be the poacher with his bag and a few pheasants.

But, no, this is big business. We're getting people

coming out of the large conurbations.

They're coming out and making a lot of money.

Yes, it's really big business.

The modern poacher packs a knife, a powerful lamp

and a car battery for his night's work.

There's no sporting element involved. It's just butchery for profit.

These people, who are doing it for the money,

have got absolutely no qualms at all about the methods they use.

A sportsman - the old type poacher - was a nature lover

to a certain extent at heart. He took greatest care.

What he did, he did efficiently and as humane as he could possibly be.

Not so these brethren. Cruelty is absolutely appalling.

Today, organised poaching is sadly still on the increase.

But there are wild foods out there that are available to all,

without the need to poach.

In the heart of picturesque Kent grows a traditional woodland food

that was once eaten by everyone in the land.

Cobnuts were a British staple, cultivated from hazelnut

and prized in cooking since the Middle Ages.

The Victorians thought the Kentish variety was the best around

and planted swathes of cobnuts across the county.

Their popularity plummeted after the First World War,

as costs rose and imported nuts took over.

But now cobnuts are back in fashion and being cultivated once again.

At Hurstwood Farm in Kent, 84-year-old Mr Dain

has dedicated years to growing this glorious nut.

He's a Kentish farmer born and bred.

I suppose I started when I was about ten

when one of my schoolmasters said,

"And what are you going to be when you grow up?"

So, I said, "A farmer." To which he replied,

"Well, I'll give you a shilling when you plant your first field."

Well, about, I don't know, 15 years later, I got that shilling.

And he remembered.

Cobnut trees were introduced to Hurstwood Farm

in 1985, in an attempt to get this humble nut back on the culinary map.

We were the first planters of cobnuts.

The orchard we're standing in now, which is about six acres,

was the first experimental orchard.

There's something like 200 varieties of cobnut

but I have to say I think Kent cob is the best.

Its flavour and texture are supreme

and so we're very proud of it.

It's been a difficult process and nowadays Mr Dain

is a self-confessed nutter.

You can't grow nuts without being a bit of a nutter.

We should point out that this is what

people in Kent call cobnut farmers!

He knows all there is to know about these cracking British snacks.

Cobnuts have quite a pedigree in Britain.

They were considered a delicacy in the Middle Ages

and referred to in Shakespeare's time as "filberts".

He even mentions them in his play The Tempest.

"I'll bring thee to clustering filberts,

"and sometimes I'll get thee young sea-mews from the rock.

"Wilt thou go with me?

"I prithee now, lead the way. Without any more talking."

After the nuts are picked at Hurstwood Farm,

they have to go to be painstakingly quality checked, then roasted.

Then they're either eaten whole, used in stews,

or even dipped in chocolate.

But, perhaps, most excitingly for foodies, the farm has rediscovered

another very important use for the nuts - cobnut oil.

Cobnuts first came into this country introduced by the Romans,

so that they had cooking oil. So, we've really gone back

1,500, 2,000 years in starting to produce cobnut oil again.

It's very satisfactory and is a rather special taste.

The farm now produces about 60,000 tons of nuts a year.

Catherine Robinson is the farm's manager

and just as passionate about cobnuts as Mr Dain.

What we have here is the oil from the cobnut.

It was recognised centuries ago as being a fantastic product.

But, we lost it for several hundred years,

and now we're getting it back again.

You can use it for all sorts of things.

From bath oil to salad dressing, to, um,

making it into bread and cakes and things.

Not only are cobnuts tasty, they're also really good for you as well.

It's got B vitamins in, it's got vitamin E in.

And it has no cholesterol in.

But it has that richness that butter has.

So, if you want to have a bit of a treat,

but you don't actually want to have the cholesterol,

and all the bad stuff, um, it is very good for you.

After being dried, the shelled cobnuts are pressed

and left for a week, before being filtered and rested,

and then poured into bottles.

One bottle of Kentish cobnut oil.

But the real test of good oil is cooking food with it.

Local chef Steve Weaver is rustling up a nutty treat

with a bit of alfresco dining in the orchard.

The beauty of the cobnut oil, compared to, say,

cooking with olive oil, it's got a much higher burning threshold.

And imparts that gentle nutty flavour.

Steve's frying up rabbit with mushrooms, herbs, parsley

and a bit of bacon.

He's a real devotee of cobnut oil.

You can smell the cobnut oil coming through -

even through those flavours that are in there.

It's a lovely, sort of non-greasy oil.

It doesn't stick, it's just lovely and smooth and soft.

And, of course, you can't get enough whole cobnuts in there either.

We've got some roasted cobnuts here.

I'm just going to drop a few of those in there.

I'm just going to add a bit of crunch to the dish -

that extra bit of nutty flavour.

They've invited a few locals along to get a taste of cobnut cooking,

but what will they make of it?

That's really delicious. It's lovely! Very good.

You can really taste the mushroom and nuts.

It comes through immensely well.

-And the parsley finishes it off delightfully.

-Mm.

It's absolutely delicious!

It sounds like the nuts are a winner.

But they're not just for savoury dishes, you know.

Oh, no, they're just as good in puddings.

I'm going to make you a nice honey, cobnut and cream sauce

to go with the apple. You can't get more traditional than that, can you?

It's just a bit of honey, roasted cobnuts chopped up

and a bit of cream.

This is cinnamon and golden caster sugar.

Just on the apples in the cobnut oil.

There we go!

Ooh, that's beautiful!

The combination with the nuts and the spices - wonderful!

I'm going to do it at home, definitely!

These are great traditional flavour combinations

and, for Catherine, that link with history is extra special.

The cobnuts, the honey, the cream and the spices

could have been eaten in Medieval times.

Cooked exactly like this, outside on the fire.

This is delicious.

These woodland snacks are great for making your cooking

a little bit different, but if you can't get hold

of these little nuggets of nuttiness, you can always swap

the cob for its smaller cousin, the hazelnut,

as we're doing next in our Best of British kitchen.

And we're pairing it with an ingredient which,

for me at least, brings back happy memories.

Very often, one's very first foraging in the woods

is for blackberries and brambles.

-We've all done it. We've all had a pick and an eat.

-We have.

We've all gone out as kids with a hat with a bag

and dance home gaily and you make bramble jelly and good things

-from the fruits of the forest.

-Do you?

-Yeah.

But we're not going to making either of those today. This is much posher.

It's a blackberry fool with a hazelnut lemony biscuit.

-First off, I need to toast my nuts.

-He does.

Much the same as the squirrel.

Now... All I'm going to do

is about 600 grams of these blackberries.

And 75 grams of caster sugar.

And I'm going to cook those gently for about three minutes

with a lid on.

I'm going to start the nuts roasting

and put them in the oven for about six minutes.

-They'll just have a nice rustic aroma.

-Nice!

What we're doing here is we're cooking these quite gently,

until they start to let out their juice.

As soon as that happens, I'm going to pull 12 out of the pan

and set them aside. And they'll be used for decoration

on top of the fool in due course.

This is warm, hot. Put them in the oven about six minutes

and just cross your fingers that we don't burn them.

Let's get the biscuit mix mixing.

First, I'll add 125 grams of well-softened butter

and, to that, I'm adding 150 grams of caster sugar.

That's got to be beaten well

until the butter changes from yellow to a light cream colour.

These are the blackberries I'm going to use for the top of the fool.

They've had just long enough to get a jammy sheen on them.

We now need, over a very, very gentle heat,

to cook these for a further 15 minutes.

I think my nuts are done now!

-You can smell them, mate!

-Wonderful, nice!

Release the oil, a little bit coloured up.

Now we've to put them on a board and chop them roughly.

While Dave's doing that, I'm going to add

300 ml of chilled double cream.

And 100 ml of yogurt.

I'm going to whisk that to soft peaks.

Did you know, in the past, people worried that fresh fruit

wasn't safe to eat, so they boiled up their foraging spoils

and ended up with something that tasted delicious with cream -

the fool. In fact, the name "fool"

is from the French word "fouler",

which means "to mash", and British fools have been around

since the 17th Century.

Aye, and you're still here, Dave, aren't you?

Ooh, a saucer of milk for Mr King!

Now, that's what we mean by soft peaks.

We only want to take it that far.

Because the acidity in the fruit will help thicken the cream

when we fold the fruit in.

Well, one could fairly say these nuts have been nibbed.

So, I'll mix them now with my butter and sugar.

To this, add the zest of half a lemon...

150 grams of plain flour...

and half a teaspoon of baking powder.

Mix together to make the dough.

When it gets too stiff to use the spoon, get stuck in with your hands.

I've got my baking trays and I want to do about a dozen on each tray.

What they do is we make little balls - flatten them.

Squidge them flat.

About a centimetre.

These are home-made biscuits. So, I'm not too worried

about them being absolutely symmetrical and identical,

because I want them to be a little bit home-made.

I think that really is part of the charm.

Now, what we're going to do with these blackberries in the pan,

we're going to push them through a sieve to form a puree.

So, as soon as you feel that your blackberries

are soft enough to do that, and I think we're pretty much there...

..we'll start that process.

Now, all I'm doing, with the back of the spoon,

is just pushing the blackberry flesh through the sieve,

which will eventually leave the seeds in the sieve

and we can discard them, cos we don't want them.

Now, these may look a little bit thick,

but that's fine,

they're going to spread as they heat up.

We pop these into a pre-heated oven, 180 degrees Celsius in a fan oven

for about ten to 12 minutes until you've got biscuits.

Now, Dave's biscuits might need to get hot,

but my blackberry puree needs to get cool if it's going to set,

so I put it to one side and wait.

I hope they're spreading.

HE CHUCKLES

Make sure you give every biscuit plenty of room on the tray.

If you don't, you might just end up with one very large cookie.

Ooh-hoo! Cooling rack!

Oh, mate, they smell amazing.

Yeah, it's amazing how much they've spread, look.

Oh, wow, aye!

They've got a lovely kind of crackle on the top.

Wow, look at them, they're just starting to firm up now.

-Just leave them to go cool.

-Brilliant.

Well, while they're cooling,

I'm going to go and see if my puree has firmed up any.

Oh, yes! Look at that now, brilliant.

Now, this has to be cold.

Not warm, it's got to be cold.

I'm going to add that to the cream and the yogurt.

And I'm going to fold it in twice.

That's it, and then leave it.

-Are you looking for a ripple?

-Yeah. A ripple, a marvelling effect.

That's it. Don't do it any more,

don't be tempted to do it any more.

Oh, to make the most of that gorgeous ripple,

we're going to serve this in glasses,

so you can see that splash of colour going all the way through!

On top go the lightly-stewed blackberries I saved earlier.

And a little sprig of mint!

BOTH: Ooh!

You know, I think that's a lovely little homage

in a very delicate way

to the great British woodland.

There are over 2,000 types of blackberries in the world -

enough to make infinite recipes,

but this little pud of ours is our favourite.

Let's be foolish.

And cookie!

THEY CHUCKLE

Oh, that's good.

Again, not only have they got all those beautiful flavours,

they've got the textural difference as well, which I love,

and the little mint leaves

-accent all of those flavours perfectly.

-Oh, aye.

-Here's to a good rummage in the undergrowth.

-Aye.

But if you decide to go rummaging around out there, take care,

as not everything in nature's larder is quite what it seems.

-IN A SINISTER VOICE:

-In the deepest, darkest corners of our British woods,

strange fruits blossom in the undergrowth.

Shrouded in mystery.

Otherworldly beings.

That draw their life force from death and decay.

WOMAN SCREAMS

Waiting to release their spores and reproduce.

Without them, life on this planet, as we know it, would end.

But one wrong move and they can kill.

The mushroom, dude!

WOMAN SCREAMS

A mushroom is the fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus.

Not the most appetising-sounding or indeed looking of things,

but we have been consuming them since ancient times.

But over all of those years,

the perpetual question has always been - to eat or not to eat.

You see, here in the UK,

there are more than 3,000 different types of mushrooms and toadstools

and, of those, around 100 are seriously edible

and around 40 significantly poisonous.

But which is which?

Sometimes, the name's a bit of a giveaway.

This is the death cap.

One of these is probably enough to do in a couple of people

if they ate this completely.

For maybe the first half dozen hours or so, you don't feel any effects.

Probably by the third or fourth day, you're liable to become seriously ill

and usually die as a result of liver damage.

So, just to be on the safe side,

throughout most of the 20th century

there was really only one type of mushroom we Brits ate

and we farmed it ourselves.

I mean, why mess around?

You knew exactly what you were getting.

How could you go wrong with a mushroom lovingly mined

by these friendly-looking ladies?

'Commercial mushrooms are grown in caves, sheds and railway tunnels

'throughout the land - a tribute to our conservative taste in fungus.

'Or is it just that ancient caution?'

Plus there were endless amounts of dishes you could cook with them.

All of these have got a wonderfully exotic name,

haven't they, these mushrooms?

-Yes, champignon de Paris

-Champignon de Paris.

Ooh, la, la! It might sound fancy,

but he's talking about the button mushroom.

What about that one?

That's a suggestion as a snack a light supper dish, a pizza,

which I'm sure everybody's familiar with.

Well, I've heard of pizza...

What about the prawn cocktail here?

That's not prawns, that's raw mushrooms instead of prawns,

and you'll find that, putting it into the same sort of sauce,

you've got an equally acceptable dish.

So just the same as a prawn cocktail,

-except you use mushrooms instead of prawns.

-Yes, yes.

-Lovely.

But as the years went on

we started to broaden our horizons a little.

There's a move afoot to introduce another type - the oyster mushroom.

It looks a little different in the pan,

but it's certainly quite safe to eat

and we might get a taste for it in time.

But some people weren't even satisfied with two varieties

and got a bit adventurous down in the woods.

Ah, a stinkhorn! Very nice.

It's a good specimen.

Yes, it's a very good one, just at the beginning...

Ever tried eating it?

It's not, I understand, particularly palatable,

but it certainly...I think you can eat.

Foraging clubs allowed people to get out

and explore the miraculous world of mushrooms in safety.

But, you know, it always tastes...you know, it always tastes of fungus.

But tasting first and asking questions later

really isn't the best course of action with a mushroom.

It's better not to taste death caps.

Oh, now he tells us!

It's better out than in, mate!

But not surprisingly,

foraging for mushrooms remained a minority pursuit until recently,

when more and more people have started to take an interest.

Wild mushrooms have become de rigueur for the gourmet.

And mercenary mushroom hunters have realised

that there's money in them there woods.

Probably, the world's most commercially valuable mushroom.

And how much would that cost in a restaurant, in London or something?

A dish containing that one mushroom

would probably be 20 or 30 quid even, possibly.

And we must say this interest in wild mushrooms is fantastic -

there are some incredibly tasty ones out there.

But, unless you really know what you're doing,

and very few people do,

stick to the ones that are commercially available.

But these days plenty are.

After all, being cautious could save your life,

or at least your taste buds.

'No doubt that Anglo-Saxon attitude of unbridled fear will last

'and, anyway, many fungi taste like blotting paper or a bath sponge.'

WOMAN SCREAMS

Thankfully, most of the wild food that comes from our forests

is of the tasty variety.

For thousands of years, they've provided us with foraged feasts,

but our ancient British woods also played an important role

in the origins of farming.

Between the Stone Age and the Iron Age,

pigs that were domesticated from the European Wild Boar

began to be farmed in our woodland,

where they were fattened up as they rooted around,

gorging on fruits, nuts and wild plants.

It was Iron Age people

who discovered the delights of bacon, ham and sausages.

And we're not talking the kind of bulked out, meatless mess

that plagues us today.

They pigged out on the very best!

Hey, dude! I can imagine an Iron Age version of you!

Well, I'd be a chief, obviously,

leading the tribe against those pesky Romans.

Today, Iron Age methods of keeping woodland pigs

are beginning to make a comeback.

And, in Oxfordshire, chef Mark Lloyd is on a mission

to re-create a woodland pork dish from a bygone era.

He's come to the famous Wittenham Clumps,

home to an Iron Age hillfort,

to forage for ingredients that both bring out the flavours of the meat

and would have been enjoyed by our ancestors.

I love foraging in woods like this.

It's got everything that our ancestors would have eaten

for the last 10,000 years.

It probably hasn't changed that much.

They would have been out looking for mushrooms, berries.

They'd have had squirrels, they'd have had all of the things

that we now maybe shy away from a little bit,

but it's also perfect piggy woodland.

They'd have been snouting around in here, turning everything over,

looking for roots, looking for tubers,

taking the nuts as soon as they fell off the trees, the windfall apples.

They'd have got nice and fat in here.

And it's the perfect place to keep them - they've got a cover, shelter,

and it's just an amazing place to be.

This is where farming began.

This is where we started to bring the things we wanted to eat a lot of

and consistently together

to save us having to go out and find them constantly.

And also, if we put it all together, we could find it easily,

we could grow it in the amount that we needed to sustain ourselves

and we could keep pests away from it.

It sound perfectly like our modern-day farms now, doesn't it?

Put those three things together, you've got a farm.

Mark believes the best ingredients to accompany pork

are the kinds of food the pigs themselves would've eaten.

That is a beautiful oyster mushroom.

Chinese absolutely love oyster mushrooms

and they go great with pork.

This is what our piggies would be eating.

As we know, mushrooms can be dangerous,

but, as an experienced forager,

Mark knows exactly what to look for.

This is a young mushroom,

which we can't be sure isn't going to make you sick.

So this little fella is staying right here for today.

We're going to go find something else.

OK, so another lovely

little mushroom here.

It's a thing called the Amethyst Deceiver.

I'm just going to pinch this off nice and gently.

Look at the colour of that.

They're great eating, and there's a little trick with them -

if you soak them in a bit of water before you cook them, they go really purple.

That's another one for the pot.

Mark's having a smashing time, isn't he?

Fungus bouquet.

Aye, and there's more around than just fungus.

These are sloe berries.

This tree is absolutely packed with them.

For our purposes, they're going in our sauce with our pig.

A little bit of slow-roasted pork and sloes. It's going to be lovely.

In an afternoon's ramble,

Mark has found a wealth of woodland delicacies.

There's mushrooms, crab apples and sloe berries,

but what he really needs is a pig

and he's not going to find one up at Wittenham Clumps!

Mark's off to Hertfordshire to see Eamon Bourke, who runs Molly's Pigs,

a farm that rears free-range porkers.

-Is it feeding time?

-Yeah, let's go and see them.

These pigs are saddlebacks

and they're pretty ideal for rearing in a woodland farm.

Being an old breed,

they're hardy, and their mostly dark coat is resistant to sunburn.

They also have a strong snout,

for rooting and snaffling all those goodies from the forest floor.

So you started off with 20, how many have you got now?

Yeah, there is roughly, in total, 168 in here.

And then, there's 59 boys.

Great environment for them, isn't it? I mean, they've got acorns and beech

-and they can go rooting, there's mushrooms growing all over the place.

-Yes.

-And they never stop, they're constantly turning the ground over, looking for something.

-Yeah.

-I mean, they are greedy as pigs, they'll just keep going.

-Yeah, that's the thing.

I feed them at seven o'clock in the morning and at five o'clock at night

and when you come down at five o'clock at night,

it's like they haven't been fed.

Keeping pigs this way is essentially how it was done

in the early years of farming.

They are some of the happiest pigs I've seen.

And they've got plenty of space.

I really love seeing pigs just wandering around.

There's nothing worse than seeing them penned in.

-They've got a really, really happy, easy life, haven't they?

-Yeah.

And that's got to make a difference in the way they taste.

Eamon became a farmer by chance,

after buying some pigs to clear his woodland.

But up till now he's only used his pigs for sausages

and he doesn't often cook with joints of the meat

so Mark is going to show him just how good his woodland pork can be.

Right, you're going to do a bit of cooking.

-Try.

-Try!

It's dead easy. Really, really easy. The pork you have is amazing

so we don't need to mess about with it too much. All I want you to do

is pour oil right into the middle of the pork

and then rub it all over the skin.

Nice pinch of salt, all over there as well,

and then you're going to rub that in.

Get in there with both hands. Go on. Right in.

Now, these lovely chestnuts, another seasonal favourite of mine,

but instead of putting vegetables under the pork,

we're going to put these under there,

so as those juices come out, they'll sit and start to cook those through

and we'll just quickly peel them

and chuck them through the mushrooms and the spinach that we've got.

And I assume the pigs maybe would forage on them.

If there's chestnut trees you've got down there,

yeah, they'd eat them before you could get to them.

Whilst the pork roasts over the chestnuts, Mark's making a side dish

with his foraged ingredients to make a real Iron Age feast.

Look at that!

Mark has made a roast pork belly

with wild mushroom and spinach,

along with a crab apple, blackberry and sloe sauce,

all topped with a black pudding and oat crumble. Fantastic!

Here's the real test, though - what do the eager family think?

This is all your pork. And I just threw some wild stuff at it.

I like it all.

LAUGHTER

They love it!

We love the pork. We know where it comes from...

But this was exceptional.

The whole thing around it made it... made it a very special meal.

It's thanks to people like Eamon

that we can all get the chance to taste a little bit of our heritage.

And for our next recipe

we're delving even further back into our culinary past

and cooking up the forerunner of the woodland pig, wild boar,

but we're dragging this little piggy right up to date.

There are many and varied recipes that we know and love.

For instance, the one that we're going to do today -

wild boar ragu with home-made pappardelle.

You can't get more gourmet than that!

It's also a great way of making a little special meat go a long way.

It's an odd thing because wild boar, by the very nature of it,

the meat is very dense, so it lends itself to a long cooking time.

Now, the reason for that -

wild boars are full of muscle,

they're full of sinew, and they're tough.

-Shoulder.

-You see?

That's what we're going to be cooking today.

Now, if you can't get wild boar,

you can do it with really good shoulder of pork.

Obviously, it won't be a wild boar ragu, it'll be a pork ragu,

but the recipe will still stand up and be lovely.

What I'm going to do and what's very important,

I'm going to start to trim off the skin and any sinew that I have

because we really don't want that

because it's very, very unpalatable on a wild boar, it's very chewy.

It's like pork bubblegum, which is wrong.

It's darker than pork, isn't it?

It's a very dark meat. I mean, it's a very individual flavour.

It is. It's masculine food.

At mediaeval feasts, the wild boar would be centre stage.

Its head would be brought in on a platter

and whilst it's being paraded in, there'd be rousing songs,

you know, like...

# We've got a wild boar on, wild boar on, wild boar on

# We have got a wild boar on

# And then we're going to war! Rrrr!

You haven't got an aggressive bone in your body, have you?

-No, I have. I can flare.

-Can you?

-Oh, aye.

-He can flare.

-You should see me when my laundry's not done right.

-Oh, that's true.

Once you're happy that you've gotten rid of all the Dave-like tough bits,

cut the boar meat into rough cubes

and season well with salt and black pepper

before browning off in a hot frying pan.

You may need to do this in a couple of batches.

And, like we say, don't crowd the pan.

You crowd the plan, you'll poach and stew it.

Wild boar used to be common in British woodland

and hunting them was popular with the toffs.

Unfortunately, it was so popular

they managed to completely wipe them out in this country.

So I suppose a wild boar now

would be like a farmed boar that had escaped,

boar being extinct from years ago, cos we ate it all!

It shouldn't take long to brown this meat and it'll have

plenty of time to tenderise in the next stage of cooking.

If you were to eat that now,

you'd be chewing on it for a very long time.

-That will do us, won't it?

-Yep.

I'll add that to the casserole dish.

Excellent.

A leetle more oil, Meester King?

OK. Merci!

Perfecte!

And wild boar, being a wild creature,

actually, the shoulder of pork has quite a lot of fat.

-There ain't much fat on that, was there?

-There's not.

So we need to put a bit more back.

Look, I've just kind of gone along on the streaky bacon

and cut it into bits, basically,

and what we want to do is get these nice and crispy.

-Bit of a lardon.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-That's what I like.

-Yeah! Rrr!

Bit of flame on, bit of flame on.

Just let that go until it goes crispy.

And bang it in there. Job's a good 'un.

-Excellent.

-Then we can get the rest of it in.

-Exactly.

-Whew!

It'll probably take about five minutes, so be patient -

you don't want flaccid bacon.

Now, in the same pan, add a bit more oil and one large onion - diced.

We need to cook that for a few minutes until it goes translucent.

Then add four cloves of garlic...

..about 75 grams of black pitted olives,

and then two teaspoons of juniper berries.

It's the flavour of the woodland, isn't it?

And I kind of think putting juniper in it shows a bit of respect

to the wild boar as a free-range woodland creature.

Oh, wow.

-Oh, the smell!

-Yeah!

-Fabulous.

So that needs to go in there.

This could be, really, the fanciest,

most fabulous spag bol you've ever tasted in your life.

Next, we want 500ml of red wine

but don't just sling it straight into the pot.

Use a splash of it to deglaze the frying pan first.

And don't forget, this is what we do. This is all about making sure

that each flavour, we get the most from it.

In goes the rest of the wine,

one can of tomatoes,

two tablespoons of tomato puree,

half a litre of water,

a beef stock cube

and, to balance the acidity of the tomatoes,

a couple of spoonfuls of sugar.

That's the base, so now some more flavours of the forest - sort of.

Two bay leaves, a nice sprig of rosemary

and another of thyme.

Now, we'll leave that with a slight gap for the steam to come out

for two and a half hours to cook away

and that's what we serve with the pappardelle.

-I can't think of anything better.

-No, I can't either.

-I can.

-What?

-Home-made pappardelle. Shall we make pasta?

-Let's go.

-Love it.

So we start off with flour,

and this is pasta flour, which is a very hard flour,

and the beauty of this is, it gives you pasta with more stretch.

Into there, pop three eggs.

One...two...

three.

You're getting too cocky. It'll all go wrong.

It's that boar cooking, you know,

it's taken me back to the woodland, to me roots.

And just pulse this together until it forms a dough.

There should be enough liquid in the eggs

to form the dough without adding water.

Now, I've found...

..you need to take your hands in for ten minutes, knead it like mad,

and then you get pasta you can work with.

You need to get the warmth of your hands in to get that gluten going

-in the thick, it's brilliant,

-Yeah.

-I love it.

Honestly, there is no substitute for this.

It's tough.

It's a man's game, this! Good job I've got strong hands.

# When the moon hits the sky like a big pizza pie... #

-Two hands is better.

-# That's amore... #

Well, some of us don't need to use two hands, do you know what I mean?

If you've got that strength.

HARD ROCK MUSIC

Look at that, Kingy.

That's got more stretch in it than Nora Batty's stockings.

Just place that in clingfilm now,

leave to rest for half an hour,

roll out and knock out your pappardelle.

The pasta Dave's rolling out is so delicious

that it got its name from the way most people eat it.

The verb "pappar" is Italian meaning "to gobble".

So pappardelle is gobble-up pasta - how romantic is that?

Now, you could cut this and use it immediately

but I think it's best left to dry for a while.

The nice thing is, it can be left overnight or for several hours,

so what we'll do is, we're going to create a rustic device

like you would do in t'woodland.

We're going to hang and dry.

-I'll create the rustic woodland device if you want to...

-Right.

Cut your gobble-up pasta into suitably gobbleable strips

before hanging it onto whatever marvellous invention

you have come up with for drying it on.

Ah, look at this.

-Very satisfying, this, isn't it?

-Very.

Not as satisfying as eating it, I have to say, but it's satisfying.

I think with the ragu smouldering away,

the pasta standing in the corner,

-you know you've got a good dinner on, don't you?

-You do.

So now it's just a waiting game.

-Maybe we should do something masculine whilst we're waiting that last hour.

-Like what?

-Boxing?

-Yeah, boxing.

No, I have my glasses.

You can take them off.

No! I'm not falling for that one.

-Arm wrestling.

-Yeah, all right.

Ow!

'Of course, you may have your own thoughts on this,

'but I can think of no better way to pass the time odd hour or two

'than by holding hands with me oldest, bestest mate!'

DAVE GROANS

-It's been an hour!

-Yeah?

-Mustn't let the food spoil.

-You're not wrong.

Oh!

-Look at that.

-Oh, yes.

-Ooh.

-That's just falling apart.

Oh, yes! Now, that's the consistency you're looking for -

thick, unctuous gravy that's going to stick to that pappardelle

with lovely pieces of meat. Oh...

It's like wild boar reduced to crude oil.

That's kind of the effect you're after.

That's all the debris from the rosemary and the thyme.

I'll just pop that on there.

Now time to cook our pappardelle in a large pan of salted boiling water.

I think one would describe that as a nice roiling boil. I think so.

One of the things with pasta is, always use loads of water.

Don't crowd the pan up. Give the pasta room to breathe.

Loving it, Dave, I'm loving it.

I know! That is butch pasta.

And cook uncovered for about three minutes.

Which gives me enough time to grate a little pile of parmesan

ready for serving.

-This is pasta you could never get out of a packet, isn't it?

-Oh, yes!

The way I like to do this is to create a series of layers

that will meld together as you eat the dish.

So a splash of olive oil, a sprinkle of pepper and parmesan.

Then the rich wild boar ragu.

And another little sprinkling of parmesan.

We've all had red, runny, luminous tomato ragu sauces.

That's the bee's knees.

There we are - our fruit of the forest.

Wild boar ragu with gobble-up pasta.

There's only one little thing left to do - gobble it up.

-Mmm.

-You know, moments like this,

-Dave and I really do wish you could taste it at home.

-Yeah.

-Honestly.

Kingy, if this is one of the fruits of the forest,

I'm going to eat more fruit!

Our woodlands are not only

a beautiful and historic part of our British landscape...

For foodies like us, they're a veritable larder.

They've provided us with unique culinary traditions.

And if we want to preserve the edible treasures

they contain for the future, they're something we Brits should cherish.

And if you want to try out the recipes in today's show, visit...

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