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Where food opens the door to conversations about craft, culture & tradition.
The Wild Kitchen Ep 7 Alan Bergo
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Tiffany Bader: [00:00:00] It is my pleasure to welcome Alan Bergo to the Wild Kitchen. Alan is a chef and author, and for many people, he's best known as a forger chef. He spent years cooking professionally and studying wild food. And has introduced people all over the world to foraging and cooking in a more connected seasonal way.
Alan, thank you very much for joining me.
Alan Bergo: Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Tiffany Bader: I have to say, part of the reason why I do this podcast is because, uh, I like talking with interesting. Passionate people and one of the things that I like, like hitting me over the head, when I look at your content, your video content and stuff like that, and your book and your, your website is that like, dude, you are a passionate guy.
You are like. In, in the best possible way. Like so passionate about foraging and cooking, and I wanna use the term quirky, like in the best possible way. Nerd. Like I nerd. Yeah. [00:01:00] Like I nerd. Yeah. Like, I just, like, I feel like I, I wanna have a geek out conversation with this guy about like wild plants and food and, um, I was talking to Hank Sean.
He was, he was singing your praises too, and I'm like, oh yeah, no, I, I need to chat with this guy. So. Thank you very much. Um, I'm excited to, uh, to talk to you about what you're up to and, uh, all sorts of fun food stuff.
Alan Bergo: Yeah, that's great. I didn't know you talked to Hank. Hank is a close friend of mine and actually lived like.
Five minutes away. I was just texting with him last night. Really? It's insane to have like, yeah, two of my mentors, uh, like Hank's, like my mentor for like, kinda like the meat world. And then I have Sam Thayer and both of them live. Sam Thayer lives two hours away. Hank lives like 10 minutes away now. It's, it's crazy.
It's crazy.
Tiffany Bader: I noticed in your work, you talking about, uh, how you got into, you know, you went, went through the root of the restaurant world. And it, it kind of beat the shit outta you. Um [00:02:00] mm-hmm. And so. You didn't, you didn't seem to go out with the aim of being a forger and, and doing what you're doing now, but you just kind of followed your curiosity and passion and it led you to the point that you're at now.
But, you know, was there a point, a turning point for you where it was like, no, this is, I'm not going back to working a line. This is what I'm doing.
Alan Bergo: Absolutely. It was after the last restaurant that I ran closed. I didn't know what was going to happen. I just knew that like closing a restaurant is one of the worst things ever.
Uh, the restaurant, it was Luces. It had been around for like 30 years. One of the most venerated places in the twin cities, like one of the standard bearers of farm to table, whole animal cooking and. When it ended, like staff's peeling off, I was showing up at like 4:00 AM I was baking bread, doing prep, doing the ordering, running, uh, lunch and dinner service.
Customers were taking paintings off the walls. Uh, [00:03:00] you know, the staff's peeling off it, it was terrible. I lost like 15 pounds, dropped a bur mixer on my toe and broke it. My left my right arm. Didn't work. Uh, I was just a, like a broken person after that. And then two years before, I had done, a year before I had closed a restaurant that I'd run for two years and, and did basically the same thing.
And I was like, this is horrible. And I mean, all like working for like 55 grand a year. Like, I was like, I can get an apartment now. It was, it was just, it was ludicrous. And I and I, and. Nothing had really, like killed my joy. Uh, as far as food goes before, I kind of always thought that I would be a chef. I didn't always think that, uh.
I actually tried to get outta the industry most, many, most of the years. When I was cooking on the line, I was trying to get out. I knew that my curiosity and my passion for ingredients, uh, I knew there was something there. I didn't know what I could do with it. So I was trying to get a job in sales most of the time because you can't [00:04:00] make money.
Like I, I had to give up my apartment and live in basements at the greatest restaurant that I worked at, the, the most impactful place. I was living in friends' basements, going from basement to basement. When I was there and I had to give up my apartment to be able to afford to take the pay cut to work there.
Uh, but everything, everything eventually worked out, but I just couldn't see how the pieces were going to fall into place.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah. It, you know, it's funny, I remember. Working in restaurants, working at one, well, I say working, but really it wasn't working. I was working there for free for seven months, got a job and I was like so happy and like it's slave labor, right?
But when I was finally at the point where I was making money as a chef, I had kids and I sat down and I actually calculated out how much I made versus how much it cost me. To get to work. Like not even cost of living nothing. This is like, this is what I'm paying for parking for vehicle insurance, like [00:05:00] getting to work.
I was a couple hundred dollars ahead. I'm like, this something's wrong. Like the math is not math here. This doesn't make sense. And I just like. The passion, uh, it's hard to sustain that passion for cooking in that environment when you can't, you can't feed yourself and you can't live. So it's, it's tough.
But you also had some, some medical issue, like you got, um, uh, Lyme disease, didn't you?
Alan Bergo: Yeah, I got a bad, I got the Bell's Palsy and all of that. The bigger thing is that, you know, Lyme is like a neurological thing. It. Interacted and exacerbated a pre-existing condition I had that made it look way, way, way, way worse.
Yeah. Uh, I had cluster headaches and I would get them maybe like one month outta the year. I couldn't drink alcohol. I would have these insane headaches that kind of come with the moon and the tides bizarre. And when I got Lyme, instead of me having them one month outta the year, I had [00:06:00] debilitating attacks 3, 4, 5, 6 times a day.
Every day, not one month outta the year. 365, 24 7. And they would like to come at about, they start at about 7:00 PM at night. So when I'm managing tickets in the past.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah. Yeah. Good timing.
Alan Bergo: Uh, yeah, I eventually. I got off gluten and that did most of the work along with taking a whole bunch of supplements.
Uh, but then last year I had been, I'd been in remission for a couple years. I got COVID and COVID interacted with it and did the same thing. They had to get a wheelchair to get me off a plane, going down to see the people. I had Hammond's black walnuts in Missouri. So I have to be careful about that now.
Uh, but yeah, I've, I did that and I am, I'm still here. And now I get to be, uh, uh, you know. I didn't really see myself as being a Lyme disease advocate. Uh, but here we are, you know?
Tiffany Bader: Yeah. You, you have a story in, in, I think it's on your website, where you're talking about how you had like earplugs [00:07:00] and, uh, oxygen mask and an eye patch while you're working the line like that.
That's, that's a level of dedication I don't think many people have for their work.
Alan Bergo: Oh yeah. The, the boss called me the pirate and, or the new salad girl. Nice. Because I had, this mental fog was so bad that I was running the busiest station on the line. They had to take me off and put me on pantry. It was humiliating.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: Uh, but it, it is what it is. I, I love that guy and I talk to him regularly and I will be having dinner with him and a whole big list of friends once the, once I'm done with the book here.
Tiffany Bader: Nice. Nice. So transition, uh, nicely into the book you're working on now. So for anyone that doesn't know, this is the book that you have out now and it's freaking awesome.
It's like, I love it. Um, I find. It balances that. It's not a plant identification book per se, but like it uses all sorts, like a wide [00:08:00] variety of plants that aren't commonly used in, in wild cooking books and technique is on. Like it's amazing. And, and the recipes are fantastic, but they're not, they're not like, like so fancy and over the top where people are gonna get discouraged.
There's like, there's recipes that keep, people will cook in here so. Is it next sort of, uh, natural progression from that? Like, well, what's, what's the next book about?
Alan Bergo: Well, when I was writing the first one, I was going to, I started writing the manuscript. When I was on the line at like at the last year of Lucia's, took me three years to write Flora.
I scrapped the first manuscript because I quickly saw if I try to cover everything in my life, like meat, mushrooms, and plants, if I try to cover all these things. The content will be thin and I'm not gonna be able to go into detail about stuff. And it just wasn't the way to do it. So I split things up and I said, I'm gonna do a three part series.
So that's what I bill it as to the publisher. And [00:09:00] Flora is kind of like, uh, it's kinda like the plant ver portion of my life. And then there will be fauna, which is what I'm working on now, and fungi will come. Later. But flora and fauna are interesting because they're also like a yin and a yang, right? And this book is not, fauna is not a sequel to Flora, uh, because it works with meat primarily.
The focal point is on meat. It, it is a sibling. And I will hopefully, if we, we will see what happens in the edit. But I'm trying to make it so the books work. Like collaboratively. I may call out recipes and fauna that are in Flora. I don't know other books that do that, but it's like they, they work together.
Plants and meat. Uh. I have learned it's, it's hard for me to even start with all the things that I've learned, right? In this book, I'm writing a book that's supposed to be an instructional book for other people. I end up learning a [00:10:00] lot about myself and how I operate on like, deeper, deeper levels. Uh, but one of the things that I, I learned kind of just in the last month, uh, I.
I was getting questions from people, uh, doing recipe testing. I had over a hundred recipe testers from Barbados to Finland that have been testing recipes for me. And a lot of other books don't do this. They will, they might do a little bit, but not. A hundred home cooks, testing three or four recipes a piece, emailing me back individually, or emailing my grandmother or my mom who were coming to help because there's so many emails, like I had over 500 replies.
I was like, and I'm not contractually obligated to do this.
Tiffany Bader: No,
Alan Bergo: this, this is just doing due diligence. It's a Hank Shaw thing too. So it takes, I
Tiffany Bader: was gonna
Alan Bergo: say, Hank Shaw did that to Hank. Yeah, Hank does that. Hank told me that I should do that when I started writing Flora and I did it and the book was better for it.
It is not easy, it is not fun having a hundred [00:11:00] home cooks pick apart your recipes, like their recipe critics that I, I am fine if I do not do that all, all the time, but it's helpful and I, you gotta take what the helpful things and date those nuggets and incorporate them where you can. Um, but what, what I kind of learned like big picture.
Is that there's basically like three areas that support my creative work and those are botany, plants, ology, and with meat. I was struggling with, this is the, the third part is anatomy. Okay. And kind of the, the high level takeaway here is that maybe understanding a little bit of science, like Latin names of plants or mushrooms, uh, that can help you identify them, help you understand them, a little bit of extra effort and learning.
It can really improve your cooking. Help you understand why, uh, you might use something in [00:12:00] a specific recipe or also think outside the box. So a couple good examples. Uh. You know, with Latin names, I didn't expect to use Latin names of meat in this book, but it is actually exactly what I do. Uh, you're not, I know no one is going to be going to a store saying, can I have a gluteus maximus?
Right. Yeah. No. But when I was researching some of the more interesting cuts of beef, uh, I don't cover any common cuts. That you can use any kind of steak you want for a lot of the, there's a bunch of steak recipes in there that's open-ended, just like Flora. I'm not gonna call for a specific cut. I will give you examples, but when I was researching some of the cool things, I, I wanted to describe some of them, but I'm like, I'm not gonna go and describe every cut of steak on a cow.
'cause people already know some of these. What do I wanna read? Like what, what's the book I wanna read? I wanna read the cool stuff. I wanna read about the toys, the interesting things. I'm not gonna cover the basic stuff 'cause most people already know that. And when I'm researching some of these different [00:13:00] cuts it.
Some of them were hard to figure out exactly what it was. And I found myself going back to the research tools that I learned from working with mushrooms and plants to get the same information, very similar information, uh, for meat. Uh, so for example, you have a decal steak, right? We have common names and scientific names for meat, as well as mushrooms and plants.
You have the deckle steak. It can also be called the rib cap. Uh. Some butchers won't know what that is. The spins Dorsey is the muscle, right? Uh, and like I said, that's just one example. No one's gonna be going and asking for steaks by their scientific name, but understanding the muscle that you use in a recipe is it can help you really think outside the box and it can kind of destroy the box, uh, from a creative standpoint in some ways.
So take bacon. I, uh, I love bacon. Homemade bacon is like the food of the gods, and I use [00:14:00] it in all kinds of stuff, but I don't just say, here's a recipe for pork belly that you can make into bacon. We think about what is, uh, the muscle that's used that's a belly, so it's a fatty cut. Mm-hmm. And after showing you a recipe for bacon, there's a, a big composite image where I show six different types of bacon from different animals that you can make that have a com that use a comparable muscle.
Tiffany Bader: Cool.
Alan Bergo: Okay.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: So we have beef, bacon, there's jowl, bacon, venison, and lamb. Bacon that I make from the breast, not the belly, because it has a big piece of CNU that runs through it. Uh, shoulder bacon. Okay. It's also called buckboard bacon. And then there's multiple different ways that you can fabricate that either there, if it's from a copa eye or I even take the fat cap, uh, and, and make it from.
So there's a lot of kind of. Uh, there's a lot of parallels that I didn't expect to find. Just thinking about the [00:15:00] methodology that I use to research plants and mushrooms applied to meat.
Tiffany Bader: The meat you're using, it sounds like it's not strictly wild game. It's No,
Alan Bergo: no.
Tiffany Bader: It's runs a gamut.
Alan Bergo: No. Yeah, it's, it's organized by beef and bison, chicken, pork, Venice, and lemon and goat.
Venice and lemon and goat are all compressed together because all of these animals, they're interchangeable.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah, it's amazing when you, when you, like I, I hunt. When you butcher an animal, when it's on your table, how similar. So many of these animals look to each other like it's yeah, a pig's different from a lamb, but really there's, there's not that much difference.
They have four legs. They're just smaller. Yeah. They have four. Yeah. Fattier.
Alan Bergo: And, and even, even though a pig is not a ruminant, uh, another thing that I talk about in the book, one of the things I'm most excited about, like in Flora, there was a, a long form essay. About flavor profiles, like the true definition of flavors is called plant families and the flavors they share.
I turned it into a keynote speech I gave to a thousand chefs in Vegas. Like after [00:16:00] that it was, it was so much fun to teach chefs about how they can incorporate, like, how botany can be useful and understanding flavors.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: And with this one of the, the parallels, I wanted to have some of these like outta the box thinking creative, uh, essays, like just one or two that can really.
Help people think like I do. And I was working with pork shoulders so much, taking 'em apart in all kinds of different ways. And I dream about things when I'm working with them intensely. And I had to dream about a pork shoulder and I dreamt that I was cutting it up, but I was not cutting it up in a regular way.
And I was cutting it into, like I talked about shoulder bacon before I was taking the fat cap and just, I was thinking about it from an instinctual perspective. Like what do I think? What could I do with this if I don't follow American butchery techniques, may I take, I borrow a lot from the, yes. Oh yeah.
Uh, I borrow a lot from Spanish butchery techniques, but I cut [00:17:00] this pork shoulder up into a bunch of different ways and then getting back to the anatomical perspective, I started thinking. I was eating a Copa steak and I was like, man, this is the same muscle on a cow that a chuck eye steak comes from, which is the continuation of the muscle from a rib eye.
And there's a couple steaks you can get that are the same rib eye muscles from a shoulder.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah,
Alan Bergo: like the, the, like these, the, the box that American butchery puts things in, it doesn't really take that into account. So the next thing I do is now I'm on the phone with a butcher and I'm asking him, Hey, what would happen if we took a pork shoulder and we cut it up like a cow?
Tiffany Bader: Oh,
Alan Bergo: and we keep going down the rabbit hole.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: And lo and behold, you can cut most of the cuts, uh, of like steak shoulder cuts from a beef chuck. Most of these can be taken from a pig too. And they're all interesting and unique with their own little, uh, their own little [00:18:00] differences. There's a, a terrorist major.
It's small. It's one of my favorite cuts, uh, from a, a beef chuck. Yeah. And where's It's just a little bit smaller.
Tiffany Bader: Where's that?
Alan Bergo: Oh, the terrace major? Yeah, it's, it's in the shoulder. Okay. Uh, another, another, uh, probably a better example is a Denver steak.
Tiffany Bader: Yep.
Alan Bergo: So a Denver steak is like the whole big muscle, and you can cut a bunch of stakes from it.
On a pig, it is absolutely worth cutting. Some of these other ones are more, they're more novelties, but still, if you were to go to a restaurant and try to order that first, no one's doing that. And butchers aren't even gonna know, gonna know what it is. So you can't even buy it. But you can take, uh, I did a yield test on a, a pork shoulder.
So instead of just like taking it and putting it into a smoker, I cut it into all kinds of different things. And I show you how you can cut 11 different individual things, including grind and sausage, roasts and steaks from, and bacon from a pork shoulder.
Tiffany Bader: Wow. And this isn't, this [00:19:00] is what you're exploring in the new book.
Alan Bergo: Yes.
Tiffany Bader: Very cool. Yeah,
Alan Bergo: that's like one, that's one of many, many things besides taking over 10,000 images and doing all my own instructional images that I'm also making into composite images with black backgrounds. Just so we have another option so I can include, you know, 15 images instead of six.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah, I think it, I think that's such a cool, like, you, you just don't see that.
People being empowered to recognize, look at a piece of meat and not know where it's from, but looking at the grain of it or, you know, the appearance of the, the meat itself and being able to make an educated decision on the best way to cook it or how to, you know, take that next step and how they're gonna prepare this meat.
Um, people rely on, well, the sticker said it's a New York steak, or, you know, it's a, it's a blade or whatever it is. Um, so few people have that confidence to be able to look at a piece of meat and just know what to do with it. [00:20:00] So I, uh, that's it. Sounds exciting.
Alan Bergo: Yeah. Or like the top, the top cereal in a cow, you cook this exactly the same way as goat.
Lamb, venison or pork? At Heartland, we had a daily changing tasting menu using only ingredients from within 200 miles in Minnesota. And I was, uh, I did the meat tasting menu and a host of other things. I think there's like 14 items on my menu. When we opened that restaurant. It was insane. Uh, if I would run out, we did roasts a lot because we only got whole animals.
Let's, if I had goat, goat would be, they're smaller. Yeah. And let's say I ran out. We would simply take a beef roast or a bison roast and plug it in with the same preparation. We, we just looked at it, what is the muscle that we're using and we just plug and play interchangeably. I mean, sometimes you're not gonna do that with everything.
If you have like a, a flavor profile of a dish that's specifically geared for lamb, but. Generally speaking, you can just [00:21:00] plug and play any of those similar muscles from different animals into this a recipe want.
Tiffany Bader: So how do you navigate a, a restaurant like that in Minnesota, in the wintertime,
Alan Bergo: if you want vinegar, you will make it out of old beer.
If you want pasta, you will make it. Uh, there's no citrus, there's no olive oil. We, uh, we're using preserves, fermentation, uh, in the winter. I learned. Anything and everything, and more than I ever thought possible about cooking with root vegetables. You know, do, do you, do we know the difference? How many different types of beets are there?
What are the different color variations and how does the sugar concentration vary between each one? Uh, you know, what's a, for ANOVA beet compared to a regular one, is developed for canning and has a higher sugar content, and they are cylindrical so they can fit in a jar.
Tiffany Bader: Oh my god. Yeah. Those, those long cylindrical beets are the best for canning.
They're, they're awesome. Wow. So, [00:22:00] so the book isn't, isn't quite done. Very, very close. Yeah.
Alan Bergo: I missed my first deadline. Uh, I started with like a, a creative goal as opposed to, like, I had, I had a template and an outline, but I really started this first. Books don't make money. So I took this on as a creative project.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: Uh, I spent $10,000 on new camera equipment and I've spent about $20,000 on food this year. Writing it. I just cleared my schedule and said, I'm gonna take this year and I'm going to grow interesting plants. I'm going to forage wild mushrooms, herbs, and fruit and nuts. And the whole time all of these things that I'm picking are going to be seasoning for the main course of the book, which is a.
A study and exploration of how meat appears in my life and what I do with it. Um, I got to November. I, my first book did well and I had [00:23:00] more. Bargaining power, you know, won a bunch of awards, did a bunch of cool stuff. So I have over doubled the image placements. I, yeah, I bit off way more than I could chew.
And November came around and I was like, oh my God, I haven't done recipe testing. It took me 30 days working night and day to do the art log where I organized all the images in a folder and then have correlating, uh, numerical things with captions in the manuscript. Took me 30 days to do that for Flora.
Just double the image placements. Wow. What have I done? So I had a, I actually had a photographer volunteer. She's been editing my images. Uh, we're doing it collaboratively while she's in Portugal on holiday. We're just about done with that. I got the last ones back. But then the recipe testing that took a month and.
I was like, I, there were a couple days where I was like, I don't know how I will ever do this. What have I done? And I said, at December 1st, everything has to stop. And I have not left the [00:24:00] house except to go get groceries since December 1st. It's now January 12th, and I'll turn the book in on the 19th. But I was also working on it basically every day since I signed the contract last winter.
Tiffany Bader: Wow.
Alan Bergo: Right. So like people don't understand the amount of work that goes into something like this for the return for me. It would probably take me two or three years to make back what I've put into the book already. So this is more of a creative, like vision of something I said. I would do it and I will do it.
And I'm going to write the book. I want to read Come Hell or High Water. Yeah, I'm al I'm, I'm getting close. I will turn it in on the 19th. I'm just getting to the point of editing out the copy and kind of. It's hard to kill your darlings. And I'm like, uh, what's the, uh, I don't wanna lose that sausage. I love them all.
I can't take that out. Oh, I gotta put this other thing in. Oh, I forgot about this recipe. Like flora. Flora was very explorational. Um. [00:25:00] Interestingly, after that book came out, I, a lot of people asked me if I, they would assume I was vegan because I wrote a book on plants. Yeah. And I kinda wanna say, like, I guys, I feel bad, like I'm, I'm showing you sections of my life backward because before I ever picked my first nettle, I'd, you know, been in restaurants with whole animal butchery, cooking every single piece of awful that I could for 10 years.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: Right. So my knowledge here is a lot deeper. And where I, where I shared in flora. Recipes that were, a lot of them were examples of how wild plants are cooked around the world. That it was kind of outside research. Mm-hmm. This, one of the reasons it's taken me so long to finish Fauna is because these recipes, not only are they, you know, seasonally inspired, interesting things that you can make, but they are person, they're deeply personal and many of the recipes in the headers, you will see this recipe.
Was from a night when I was bringing ramp leaves into the restaurant, and my [00:26:00] cooks from Ecuador said, they laughed at me and said, chef, why are you bringing food for kui Guinea pigs, uh, into the restaurant. We feed this to Guinea pigs, and then we eat the Guinea pigs for Christmas. That was another story.
Uh, so then we, they showed me that we, they make them into a green mole. So there's the green, there's a green mole in the book that I make with all wild plants, or a sausage that a guy from Oaxaca showed me to make where I use three different cultivars of cilantro related herbs like Cuattro, Vietnamese coriander, and cilantro and tomatillos into this green chorizo.
Tiffany Bader: So why the transition to more personal note? Because I, it was one of the things I did notice about your book is that like. You jump all over the place. Like there's HOA from Greece and, and then there's like greens from Italy and like
Alan Bergo: Yeah. That was by necessity.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: So a lot of the, a lot of the recipes you, we can't just open up a book and find a recipe for purse lane.
We need, I needed to go to places where the, these ingredients were traditionally [00:27:00] used.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: And they may not have been part of my culinary tradition. Um. But with the, with these things, many of these dishes, I mean, there's gonna be pastas that I have cooked a thousand times, uh, standing against a cooler in a kitchen after service.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: That may use a little homemade bacon. Or, my favorite variation of panada that I ate, like every day is a little bit of pant. And some wild mushrooms, but now it's homemade panchetta flavored with wild herbs and whatever wild mushrooms that I have. So a lot of these recipes, I didn't have to go out and research them.
It made it more difficult because I had to really dig, dig deep into my, I. Files and my personal experience, years of restaurant work, uh, to find what were the best examples of things that I wanted to share. So a lot of these recipes are if I could take them and arrange them in like a timeline from when I was a line cook to my, uh.
Progression to [00:28:00] running my own kitchens and like these, it's like little, you know, blips and information points along the way that informed me that, uh, you know, steered my career. People that I met and their stories. My sous chef from Argentina, that's where Chimichurri comes from, is I learned from a guy from Argentina or a traditional Argentinian sausage that I show you how to make dry cured in your fridge at home, but it's flavored with wild bee balm instead of oregano.
So a lot. It's a, it is a mashup. Uh, it's, but very much more personal recipes from my history as opposed to examples of how people might cook with wild plants and herbs and mushrooms and nuts from around the world.
Tiffany Bader: Is it more casual food or is it, is it like a restaurant style that you're, that you're Oh,
Alan Bergo: so just, just like Flora.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: My audience is wide and deep and comprises, you know. Vegetarians, [00:29:00] gardeners, home cooks, professional chefs, hunters for it. There's such a wide variety. I, there's a little bit of everything for people. There is one of my favorite, uh, examples of kind of that dichotomy there is. A walkthrough of how to cook a boneless skinless chicken breast.
And then there's also instructions on my favorite way to cook testicles and a sausage that I first made from the neck of a peacock.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah, most people, most people don't have a favorite testicle recipe. That's, uh, that's a different,
Alan Bergo: I got two. I got two.
Tiffany Bader: Really?
Alan Bergo: Yeah.
Tiffany Bader: Really? Few different testicle recipes.
That's interesting. I'm looking forward
Alan Bergo: to, yeah, so awful. Awful is a, a big part of this. 'cause I cook nose to tail.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah,
Alan Bergo: right. So it has one of the more robust, awful sections that I have come across.
Tiffany Bader: Well, I'm looking forward to. So do you, do you hunt yourself or, um,
Alan Bergo: great question.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: And, and I talk, I talk about this in the book, in the small, in the small game chapter.
[00:30:00] So. I devoted my life to kitchens. I have an uncle who, um, has worked at Shields for many years and fly fishing to big game elk hunting lives out in Montana. Those skills would've been available to me if I had chosen a different career. Yeah. But hunting, I don't even own a, the bottom line is I don't even own a firearm.
I have a pellet rifle, but my butchery skills are something I have no shortage of. Friends that hunt. Deer and all kinds of animals.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: But when it comes time to cut these things up, guess who comes? You knew the guy. So I get invited to every deer camp as a guest of honor. Yeah. And I will cut things up, uh, you know.
Much faster than anyone else, much more precise. And I'll take my cut and go home and I'll eat a couple hundred pounds of venison and wild game a year. And I sit in a hot tub when they're out in the deer stand.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah. See that? That sounds like a good deal to me. It's, it's funny you say that though, 'cause the way I've seen you talk about [00:31:00] why you enjoy being outside and foraging.
It just like, it struck me. It, it's, it's how I describe why I love hunting so much. I mean, I, I go forge and all, all the rest, but like, I love being outside. I love that being in the moment like you're forced to be in the moment. You're forced to, like, if you wanna be good or successful at, at finding things, you kind of have to shut up and just sort of be part of the environment and, and it, it is really like a treasure hunt as well.
It kind of surprises me that, that you haven't, um, you haven't hit up Hank to be like, Hey, let's go, let's go shoot, shoot some birds. And I may,
Alan Bergo: and I, and I may, you know, once, once I get this done, I'm gonna have a lot more free time. But, uh, one thing I do take myself is nuisance animals.
Tiffany Bader: Oh, cool.
Alan Bergo: And, and it's really just by necessity.
So I was living on a 400 acre farm while I wrote Flora and. I'd, [00:32:00] I had the butcher experience from restaurants, but then I lived on a farm. It was actually an old family compound commune. It was an old commune from the sixties, but the whole family moved back there. But they raised beef. Uh, there was, uh, there's pigs when I first got there, rabbits, chickens, and I, my contribution, I didn't manage the gardens, I didn't manage the animals.
I was. The butcher and I would cook for everyone, but sometimes we'd have problem animals in the garden. Like, oh, the geese are tifying the pond, and they attack the dog. Like, sorry buddy, you gotta go, uh, the woodchuck that is, you know, terrorizing us and taking the squash plant. So I'm gonna escort you to your new home in the freezer.
More so by necessity and not now in town. Uh, the first thing that happened when I moved back to the Twin Cities was I brought a lage plant that I grew from seed. First thing that happened is a squirrel ripped it right outta the ground, so squirrel goes to [00:33:00] his new home in the freezer. So that's more of like by necessity.
And I, uh, pigeons are another good example, and I actually shot a whole show on shooting cooking pigeons for the outdoor channel with my buddy Daniel Vitalis. But I, I'll focus, uh, because I don't have a rifle, I'll focus on animals that, uh. That are nuisance animals that don't have regulations, uh, to kind of get by that.
But it's more of like, are they causing issues? Okay, now I will cook with you. I'm not like going out and be like, okay, today's woodchuck day.
Tiffany Bader: So how does woodchuck taste?
Alan Bergo: Oh, it's great.
Tiffany Bader: Is
Alan Bergo: it, it's just kinda like, uh, like rabbit with, uh, dark meat. Uh, another thing that I talk about is the difference between omnivores and herbivores.
So it's, Hank's got a great article, uh, about drawing your own lines too. I don't really like to eat, uh, carnivores. Hmm. So possums, I mean, there's reasons. If we look at old southern recipes for cooking small game like possums and raccoon, what are they gonna do? They don't just cut it up and eat it on the [00:34:00] spot.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: They trap it live and they put it into a cage and they feed it persimmon and cornbread for two weeks.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: And then you cook it. So with a woodchuck, woodchuck is an herbivore. What have they been eating? They have been eating squash from the garden. Little grains, pieces of corn. They probably don't need any help at all.
Uh, younger animals are gonna be better just like deer. Uh, I'll take a, you know, a fat female woodchuck over a old musky male any day. Uh, but they, they're very good. And my woodchuck stew in the book is, uh, one of my favorite, probably my favorite thing to make with them. And you can use it for all kinds of smoking.
Tiffany Bader: Well, I, I find it really funny in like, in the exploring different foods to eat and different plants and, you know. Realizing that the hos is in my garden are edible or, or the purse lane and bittercress and chickweed, like all these weeds that I've spent years just yanking in my garden is, is you know, bane of my existence.
And then realizing you [00:35:00] can eat them and they're delicious and it's like free food. And how exciting is this? I've kind of gone through the same thing with food too, is like a friend of mine raises animals and went to her farm where she's got all these pigs. We went there to go get a pig and the pig. Um, had reached through the fence, grabbed a duck and killed it and ate it.
We're like, oh, she's talking about this. Oh, the pigs were on this like acorn diet and blah, blah, blah. All this, all this amazing food. It's eating. You're like, your pig just ate a duck. She's like, oh my God. It ate another duck again. Dammit. You're like, okay. Okay. Well, and I've seen, I've seen deer, um, videos of deer eating rabbits too.
Not common, but you know, it's
Alan Bergo: opportunistic.
Tiffany Bader: Oh yeah. If, if necessary opportunistic in the same way that like, I, I used to say I'd never eat a carnivore and then I had Cougar and I was like, and I'd never eat cat either. And then I had Cougar and I was like, that's one of the tastiest things I've ever eaten.
It was unbelievable. [00:36:00] And I think there's a hard line on certain things, but surprises me. Yeah. Dog, dogs and
Alan Bergo: cats. For me,
Tiffany Bader: yeah. Any, anything that's a pet of mine, I, I wouldn't. I honestly wouldn't eat. But yeah, it always surprises me the things that are, that we don't consider food, especially in North America, we're quite squeamish about a lot of things.
Right. But,
Alan Bergo: yeah, one thing I really wanted to, I had it all planned out. I was gonna go up to Montreal. I wanted to have, uh, a big section on horse, uh, because that, that is, uh. It's, you know, a, a touchy subject for, for equestrians, obviously, but around the world. I mean, it is just another meat chabal in France.
Uh, I mean, in Japan they cure the Maine like prosciutto and there's a lot of, uh, there's a lot of wild horses that just get shot from a helicopter in, you know, the Southwest, and they get trucked up to Canada and. [00:37:00] Down to Mexico because they're actually gonna gonna eat them. Um, and I think there was supposed to be a processing facility in New Mexico, but Peter got it shut down.
Yeah. That, that didn't make it into the manuscript, but I'd really hoped to talk about some things like that. It's just, it's only so much room. Right.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah. And I, like you said, there's a. Emotional response to eating certain animals. I do know that horse horses is one of them. There's a sushi restaurant near me that has horse sashimi in it, and I've never had the, I've never had the, uh, the guts to, to actually order it.
But I don't know. I feel like this is inspiring me. Next time I go there, I'm gonna check. I had
Alan Bergo: some in Finland.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: This, this was terrific. Yeah.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah. Sort of like, um, tartar sort of thing,
Alan Bergo: maybe?
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: Hmm. No steak.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah. Well then I gotta try it. So. So the cookbook you're working on now is meat focused. You said there's three in the [00:38:00] series.
The last one's gonna be mushrooms. Yeah.
Alan Bergo: Yes. And that will be kind of a standalone, like separate thing. Flora and fauna will be, you know, more intertwined and more like siblings. And the mushroom book will be different. Uh, there's little, I I finally, I, I tried to not put. Intentionally not put too much mushroom content in, into flora in fauna, I'm, it's been so many years now 'cause books don't make money.
Uh, I had, I had to like include some mushroom content. So there's a, there's a little section all on indigenous North American truffles. Uh oh, okay. Partly because I am the owner of the first and oldest truffle inoculated orchard in Minnesota. Really? Which has yet to produce fruit. And a lot of people, you know, we think of truffles like, oh, they're from the Pacific Northwest, or maybe, yeah.
Uh, they just come from Europe. We thought forever. Or maybe they're in North Carolina where they've planted inoculated trees. Well, I have, uh, a number of friends [00:39:00] in the truffle world now, and one of them. With a group of people picked a brand new species in Wisconsin this year, and then he picked natural pecan truffles in hour west of the Twin cities in Minnesota.
So,
Tiffany Bader: so talk me through, uh, a new species, like one no one's ever seen before or just new for your
Alan Bergo: area. Yes. There's four, four new species in like the last, uh, two years have been introduced to science with a range from Kentucky North to Quebec.
Tiffany Bader: And are they like
Alan Bergo: all of commercial value potentially? Yes, all of them.
And there are more and where people didn't think that truffles grow here, uh, in reality what's happening is that people just didn't go out with dogs. Yeah. And there could be truffles of, you know, commercial value in every single state park in Minnesota or in Wisconsin. But we're just not going out with dogs.
Yeah. So they've been here all along.
Tiffany Bader: Very cool. And, and so inoculating a tree, is that, does that have to be done when the tree's just a little seedling or you, can [00:40:00] you do it once it's established Big tree, or how does that work?
Alan Bergo: I need to be careful. Uh,
Tiffany Bader: okay.
Alan Bergo: Here a little bit.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: It's gonna be done when they're young.
Okay.
Tiffany Bader: Huh.
Alan Bergo: Very cool. Uh, to NDAs.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah. That's super cool. Wow. I'll have to check that out.
Alan Bergo: Yeah, so there's, there's a, a, a wide range of content in Fauna and I was a little more playful and creative with how I put things together. Uh, but it's, a lot of it is stuff that I've never seen in a book before. And I don't know another book that is focused on meat, where after, you know, the first recipe in the book, which is a steak that I made, you know, hundreds of times, I update it by.
It's showing you a composite image of three different wild greens and also the plants. There are plants in the book too, but I went out of my way to not use the same plants that I did in Flora so that they are more of a [00:41:00] complete hole and they compliment each other in that way. So there's stuff that I talk about in Flora that are like new species of things that I have found.
Um. In fauna, new things that I've, I've found or worked with since Flora came out, or, uh, as for like Ramps, like I love Ramps that will be in every book. There's a whole bunch of things that didn't fit into Flora or that I worked on after Flora came out right at the end and I was like, dang, I wish I could have gone into the book.
Uh, so I had a, I had a lot of fun with it too.
Tiffany Bader: Cool. Um, I, it's one thing I did notice about your book is that it's not, it's not like. Cleavers and chickweed and dandelions. It's, you go like way beyond what I've ever seen before on, on the ingredients. And like if you're talking about like cow parsnip, you talk about like the seed from cow parsnip, and I'm not getting confused here, am I?
Like you're, like you.
Alan Bergo: No, I talk about the seed. And the seed is also, it's, uh, it's a great plant to talk about [00:42:00] because people have this prejudice against anything with the, that's wild. And that's the word parsnip in it. But you can actually buy the seeds grounded into a spice on Amazon. It's called gold par.
It's used in Persian cooking.
Tiffany Bader: So, yeah. And it's, it's related to Angelica. Is that right?
Alan Bergo: Yes.
Tiffany Bader: Okay.
Alan Bergo: I grow both of them in my yard. Another big difference is now I have my own property and I have, uh, I have over a hundred edible species of plants in my yard on a third acre in St. Paul, so I'm not having to go out to.
All kinds of places. I've brought seeds. Many of the things that I worked with in Flora, I just brought all the seeds and rare plants, and anything I, anything and everything that I can grow is now directly on my property.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah, I've try, I've done that with Wild Mint, which was probably a stupid thing to do, but it's taking over at the corner of my yard, and I've tried to do it with elderberries, but I find that with wild plants sometimes, um, like the microclimates are to maybe [00:43:00] I've, there's.
Too much variation of where I've picked them and tried to transplant them, but I haven't had much success. You've, you've figured it out. I guess
Alan Bergo: I just try to listen to the plants and if they don't like an area that I put them in, I keep putting them in other areas until they die or survive.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah. There you go.
Yeah. I maybe I just gave up on the elder very too quick. We've got a, a red elderberry that grows like crazy where I live and, uh Oh, the osa? Yeah. It's not like. To my knowledge, there's not a whole ton of use for it. It's more of a No. The make salmon. Yeah. Um, but the blue and black ones are grow, they grow in our interior where it's hotter.
But I, I haven't been able to get it one established in my yard, but I don't know. Gotta keep trying. Guess.
Alan Bergo: Yeah. Each, each, you know, each species is like a little research project.
Tiffany Bader: You talking about, um, burnout and burnout in the restaurant and how do you prevent that? It sounds like it, it might be a little bit of a personality trait with you.
You seem [00:44:00] like you, you push yourself really, really hard.
Alan Bergo: I do. To the break, to the breaking point repeatedly.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's tough when you're passionate about something like, I mean, like you said, books, cookbooks don't make money. You're pushing yourself to do this because obviously it's important to you and it's a passion project for you.
But like, how do you keep yourself from writing a book with an eye patch and a oxygen mask? Earplugs again.
Alan Bergo: Well, having, you know, like I said, having not really left the house since December 1st, working on this, uh, that's a, it's a good question 'cause I'm kind of nearing that point. And a couple weeks ago it was, it was pretty hard and I would not have wanted to talk to anyone about it.
Uh, at that point, you know, there's kind of like a.
I wanna write the book that I wanna read. Uh, I'm also a perfectionist and I hate every recipe and image I've ever made except for the one that I'm making right [00:45:00] now. Mm-hmm. Um. It just kind of comes a time where you gotta say, we're done and you gotta turn something in. And at, at one level, one of the most successful books is the one that gets published.
Uh, but it's putting together the art log was helpful because then you can kind of see, okay, here's the images, here's how things are going to go together. Uh, you can see the pieces finally kind of come into place. Like I, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now and. And it's, it's really great.
It's really satisfying.
Tiffany Bader: Do you, do you find like my, my husband is a very passionate guy. Lots of ideas we work together in, in business and, and kind of everything we do, we're, we're partners for a lot of things. He. He, he goes off on tangents and he really, really benefits from, um, it's called doubling. So people with a DHD really benefit from having [00:46:00] someone basically standing beside you, helping keep you on track, just to constantly bounce ideas off, off of each other.
Um, it's, it's challenging for me, uh, but the benefits are there, like when we work together, it's. Like night and day, we can bang off a million different things. Do you, do you work solo or do you, do you find you've got like a, a crew of people that can help keep you focused and, you know? No,
Alan Bergo: I do everything
Tiffany Bader: really.
Alan Bergo: So I did well. I did everything until I couldn't and I was, it was November and I was like, there, there is no way, it's hard to describe the feeling of like looking into the abyss, understanding that you could work. To your breaking point, you know, 12, 13, 14 hours a day for the foreseeable future with no end in sight and not be done.
And at [00:47:00] that point I said, okay, I could have what? How can I take something off my plate and. I found someone that could help edit the images. 'cause that was the biggest thing. Yeah. Uh, but I do everything myself. I don't really have anyone that could help me, uh, do things day to day. I'm single. Uh, I have a cat.
Like, that's, that's it. I live, eat, breathe, sleep, my work, everything I do. And there's, there's pluses and minuses to that, but. It is much better than waking up on Sunday at 8:00 AM getting a phone call saying that the dishwasher is drunk and you have to come in and wash plates. Okay. So, yeah. And scheme of things.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: You know, I can sit and type in my boxers with a cat on my lap. Yeah. And try to, you know, rack my brain about what's the final squirrel recipe that's gonna go into the book and net net. Not a bad way to live.
Tiffany Bader: It's nice to remind yourself of where you are every, you know, I get asked sometimes if I miss, miss a kitchen environment and there [00:48:00] was something with like that, that rush of working a busy shift.
It's the end of the night. Like you just like, ah, you feel like you've accomplished something. There's like a, a beginning and an end to it, which, which is nice that I feel like I don't have anymore, but. I don't miss the kitchen, I don't miss the, the chaos of it. Um, do you look back on, on that environment and ever, like is there, are there things that you miss from the kitchen?
Alan Bergo: I miss the people.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah.
Alan Bergo: And my coworkers, uh. The biggest thing that I miss is probably the creativity and the creation of having all these resources at my disposal and writing a brand new menu every day, or taking the menu at some place where it didn't change every, every single day, but still making all kinds of little tweaks depending on what is coming into the season.
Or just taking a clipboard, walking into the cooler, writing a brand new menu, and then boom, just executing it.
Tiffany Bader: Wow.
Alan Bergo: Uh, that's, yeah, [00:49:00] that's it. That's a, a special, a special thing.
Tiffany Bader: Yeah. Not, not many restaurants, uh, are able to do that.
Alan Bergo: Yeah. So I recreated that for some of the things in my, in the book. Yeah. One weekend I just said, I'm gonna go rents a cabin, this gorgeous, huge, obnoxiously expensive cabin in the Driftless area just for a change of pace.
And instead of having a list of recipes, I just brought a cooler full of ingredients and I just cooked. I just cooked, I just sat down. I took, I spread everything out and I wrote a menu and then I cooked, and then those recipes are in the book and I just let them make themselves.
Tiffany Bader: It's so cool when you kind of push yourself out of that regular box and, and kind of force yourself into like a, a black box competition for yourself.
It's what, what sort of bubbles up to the surface and.
Alan Bergo: And then what is, uh, what is in the landscape too. Like the first thing I did was, oh, I'm, let's make something, let's make some props. So I went [00:50:00] around and picked all the edible wildflowers I could, and then used different greens that I could find. It's like, oh, there's some grape leaves.
Cool. We're making something with grape leaves. And I kind of let that inform what I was doing too. It's great. It's a good exercise.
Tiffany Bader: It it is. It's funny, I, I was on a, a fishing trip with my family and, uh, we were in this remote little cabin, no roads. It was like a fly in. So float plane drops us off, got pilot waves to s KC in a week, power goes out in the cabin, so refrigerator's dead.
We're like, oh shit. So walk around in the woods trying to find stuff and it was like, it was in the mountains. So we had like. Just the tiniest little green on, on salmon berries in the odd like blueberry huckleberry plant popping up and it, it was like, okay, I feel pretty comfortable foraging, but this is like super limited on what, what we can do.
We started catching fish and anyways, it all worked out. But like having that, okay, my family needs to eat this week [00:51:00] is a. A special kind of motivation for are we digging grubs? What are we doing here? It's been awesome chatting with you. I really look forward to your, uh, your next book. And for anyone listening, uh.
Pick up this book. It's awesome. I'll put links in the, um, links in the transcripts for people to, to pick it up as well to your website that, you know, we, I don't, we didn't really talk about, but it's awesome resource for all sorts of stuff. YouTube, uh, anywhere else they should, they should look to check out your stuff.
Alan Bergo: I mean, I've been, I'm on Instagram too and all of that. Everything social has been quiet for like six weeks. Uh, but it, it'll pick back up once after the 19th, after I turn it in, like I'm back. Awesome.
Tiffany Bader: I'm
Alan Bergo: back baby.