-There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over every Vermont village in December.

Snow muffles the world.

The light from the fireplace goes long and low, and we settle in for what often becomes the year's most memorable gatherings with friends around a table.

In Vermont, by the time the solstice turns the year around, the whole valley is glowing.

At Yuletide, the table is the whole year made edible.

Every trip, every conversation, every handful of something wild prepared on a plate and passed to somebody you love.

This season on "Wild Foods," we traveled the country in search of people reimagining what we put on our plates.

We rode the open range in Montana.

We hauled traps in the Gulf of Maine.

We knelt in the soil with indigenous farmers bringing ancestral seeds back to life.

And now, after all those miles, there's nothing I want more than to come home for the holidays and share that experience.

I'm really excited to eat these.

Tonight, I'm bringing the whole season home in one table.

I've invited two of my favorite chefs from back home to help me cook a holiday feast at the historic Dorset Inn, all to celebrate the inspiring leaders and innovators who shared their place in the world with us.

This is like taking a whole trip through both field and forest, all in one dish.

My name is Kevin Chap, and for me, wild foods aren't just a luxury.

They're a way of life.

As an environmentalist, educator, and professional forager, I know the best ingredients are still waiting to be discovered.

You just need to know where to look.

-"Wild Foods" is made possible by generous support from... And with support from... ♪♪ -Today we're going to be cooking up some of my favorite wild foods from the season.

So I'm here with my buddy Chef Zach from the Barrow House, and we're going to start off with one of the first ingredients that I ever interacted with as a kid.

And that's wild rainbow trout.

Chef Zach, you grew up here in Vermont fishing the streams and rivers.

-I rode my bike to the pond and caught trout.

We'd be riding home with a line of chow on the front of our bicycles.

This is one of the first things that I also prepared, and we're going to keep it as simple as that.

We're going to let the trout speak for itself.

-Fishing for trout in the Stony Brook was my gateway to all of this.

A boy with a fishing rod, a stream that knew his name, a silver flash like lightning under a stone.

It's the moment a kid realizes that rivers can be a grocery store.

And nature will feed you if you know where to look.

-This is now readily available, and it's a great protein to use, but also an activity, you know, gets you outside and experience the wildlife that we have in Vermont.

I actually had a chance last night to smoke some of this trout.

-So how are we going to debone this?

-Yeah.

So it's quite simple.

You're going to work across the rib line and you're going to pull the bones away from the meat.

Everything's pretty intact.

-Yeah.

-So we're not pulling out singular bones.

-That's nice with the way that the smoke has kind of given you a glaze and held the bones together to all come off in one strip, right?

Mm.

Oh, you can taste the hickory in there.

-And you can see how easy you can take this meat off the skin.

-Yeah.

That's beautiful.

Look at that.

You've got farm raised.

It's like a really pale color.

Right?

But with wild, you get that really nice pinkish protein look, right?

Rainbow trout actually isn't native to Vermont.

It's native to the Pacific Northwest.

It was introduced here in the 1800s after pollution and overfishing wiped out our brook trout.

It's absolutely flourished.

So it's a conservation success story, a wild resource everyone can go out and enjoy.

-So now we have our picked meat.

We have our whipped cream cheese.

I like to whip this because we've all tried to spread cold cream cheese, and it gets a little too dense.

By whipping the air into it and letting it come to room temperature, it's going to be easier to work with.

So first we're going to mix our cream cheese with our grainy mustard.

A little goes a long ways with this.

This will also add some depth to it.

So we'll do a little horseradish.

Then we're going to take our lemon and just the zest.

When zesting a lemon, twist.

-I think a lot of people don't realize that the zest is sweet.

It's the rind that's sour.

-Mm-hmm.

Fresh dill.

I'm going to fold this.

It's good to work this prior to putting the fish in.

That way, you don't end up mashing the fish.

-You'd lose the fish in that if you stirred it all at the same time, right?

-Yeah.

Slide a bunch in.

Let's see how that looks when we fold it.

These baguettes we're actually going to be cutting and making our crostinis.

This is from Earth Sky Time.

-And they're right down the road, right?

This bakery is... -Right in Manchester.

-Yeah.

Amazing.

Your fish came from a stream you can walk to.

Your bread came from an oven five miles away.

A supply chain short enough that you can shake everyone's hand.

That's not nostalgia.

That is a working food system.

Well, should we at least taste one?

Let's see how you've mixed it.

-Sure.

Yeah.

Alright.

-And put a little shallot on that.

Cheers.

♪♪ Mmm.

Having the shallot on top -- You first get that, right?

But then you've got that really nice creaminess of the cream cheese.

You got the lemon.

Then it follows through with the flavor of the fish and the hickory smoke there.

Really complex, but a pretty easy dish to make.

-Oh, yeah.

-Texture is half the meal.

People remember what their teeth did before they remember what their tongue did.

200 years of conservation comeback in a single bite.

On to the next one.

♪♪ Earlier this season, we had a chance to visit Maine and enjoy some of the amazing seafood that state has to offer.

We drove the long, ragged coast of Maine, where the fishermen still talk to the tide and treat the ocean the way you treat a family member.

You can tell when these mussels are okay because they're still attached to the stony bottom, so you actually have to tear their beards, and that's how you can tell they're good.

-We have laws that no other state has that catches lobsters.

I credit the fishermen in the state of Maine for being good stewards, and I credit the state of Maine just in general for doing such a good job.

-While we were there, we foraged for mussels, clams, and even went out on Linda Greenlaw's lobster boat.

Based on that adventure, we have a dish inspired by Chef Julie from curATE.

So what are we going to be cooking today, Chef?

-So, today we're going to make a classic seafood chowder.

It's going to have our mussels, littleneck clams, lobster, and our U10 scallops.

-All of this is going to go into a pot along with obviously I see some potatoes and some celery.

-Yeah.

These are sort of the very like staples of chowder.

So we're actually going to start with a roux base.

That's flour and butter.

We're going to sauté up our onions and celery.

All of our shellfish and finish off with some lemon, hot sauce, and some parsley.

To be able to go out and like harvest these on the beach had to have been an incredible experience.

-Yeah.

-Really.

-You walk out on the beach in Maine and there's just, I mean, millions of mussels laying there.

Can you talk about the difference between littleneck and longneck?

-It's -- Apparently it's just the size.

These are littlenecks.

These are really beautiful.

I like to soak them overnight just to make sure that if there is a little bit of salt or sand in there, that they have a chance to spit that out so it doesn't end up in our food.

-There's a reason chowder belongs to the cold months.

It's a one-pot argument for slowing down.

The roux thickens, the cream pulls everything together, and the shellfish tells you exactly which beach it came from.

You can't fake that.

You have to go and get it.

Tonight that somebody was me and that somebody before me was a fisherman in a slicker who hasn't taken a real day off in 15 years.

So when this lands on the table, it lands with intention.

If we're going to reinvent our food system, we have to listen to the people who had it right from the start.

This season we worked with some amazing indigenous farmers from the Rocky Boy Reservation in Montana to the Passamaquoddy in Maine, from Michael Kotutwa and the Hopi people in Arizona to the Abenaki here in Vermont, and so many others.

So much shared wisdom around food.

-These particular varieties, they're are about 10 times more mineral-dense and nutrient-dense than anything that we produce on the supermarket.

-10 times.

-Some of these seed lines have been refined for 10,000 years by people who simply worked with nature.

The supermarket version is maybe about 70 years old, and it's already showing its age.

-Nature doesn't grow in monocrops.

It's polyculture.

It's diversity.

They are being cultivated in traditional Three Sisters mound system and that is supporting the plants.

But it's also supporting community and tradition and history and heritage.

-Corn for the trellis, beans to fix the nitrogen, squash to shade the soil.

We spent the 20th century inventing complicated solutions to a problem that First Peoples had already solved with three seeds and a hill of soil and the lion's mane came out of the woods just down the road.

Mushrooms are nature's digestive system.

They eat the dead and decaying and hand it back as something that's rich and strange and absolutely delicious.

Today with Chef Julie, we're going to be cooking an indigenous-inspired dish from Abenaki -- flint corn and squash.

-We're going to be doing a creamy corn polenta.

With the indigenous corn, it's a little bit nuttier than like traditional polenta.

It does take a little bit longer to cook.

It's absolutely gorgeous with the reds and the oranges.

I mean it's super nutrient dense and very delicious.

-These foods would have been used hundreds of years ago.

These would have been commonplace.

But now they've been displaced and we're just starting to bring them back.

This is what it looks like when it comes out of the field and after it's dried, right?

-Mm-hmm.

-But that's not how you get it to this stage.

So what do we do to make that?

-Right.

So you're going to want to mill.

It gets stone-ground and you end up with this beautiful product right here.

-Yeah.

Again, which is just absolutely beautiful.

We're also going to be using some wild mushrooms here.

And then of course we've got our squash, which again is another indigenous product.

-Right.

Absolutely.

In traditional planting they do a Three Sisters method.

So I thought it would be fun to bring two of the sisters to dinner.

-Amazing.

Great.

-I love a squash with an edible rind.

-And this is an acorn squash, right?

-An acorn squash.

Yeah.

So it's really mild in flavor.

It's very accessible.

After we cut it in half, I'm just going to go ahead and scoop out the seeds and we'll get it ready for roasting.

Do you want to start working on the mushrooms?

-Yeah.

I'm assuming you want to keep these kind of grouped up.

Right?

I'll just pull them apart into separate groups.

-Little bundles.

I love that.

Yeah.

That's great.

-I'm really excited to eat these.

And you can actually grill that whole thing, right?

-Absolutely.

-We don't need to skin it.

You just right into the pan.

-Yeah.

Same thing with the Delicata squash.

It's also another edible rind.

Today, we're going to actually fry some.

We're going to do a tempura batter and fry the delicatas.

And then we're gonna sear off the acorn squash.

-Nutrients are flavor, right?

There's complexity of flavors that happen in wild foods.

And Mother Nature does that all on her own.

Right?

-Right.

Absolutely.

If it grows together, it goes together.

Right?

Being able to, like, forge these ingredients in their own environment.

These plants have to, like, really sort of like struggle to survive.

And we're able to go in and harvest them at their peak.

Like, we end up, you know, also getting that.

-If it grows together, it goes together.

Write that on your kitchen wall.

It's the single most useful sentence I've ever heard a chef say.

Mushrooms and oak, trout and watercress, venison and juniper.

Nature has been pairing these flavors for tens of thousands of years.

You don't have to be a sommelier.

You just have to pay attention to nature.

-It's funny with like a lot of these indigenous varieties that you end up with funky-shaped kernels.

It's so nice to see that uniqueness back in food, right?

-That's such a good point.

We're so used to this homogenized look of all of our food looking the same, and that's not how nature does it, right?

Like, they're all beautiful, but they're all unique, just like with the mushrooms, right?

They're so distinct.

So we're going to be making a salsa macha you mentioned as well?

-Yeah.

Kind of like a condiment or sauce that originates from South America.

And it typically has pepitas, squash, garlic, Guajillo chilies and Ancho chilies, olive oil.

We kind of cook all of that together, bloom all those flavors and then puree it.

And that'll be our sauce.

I like to start with a pretty hot pan, oil.

And we're going to go ahead and press the mushrooms in.

We really want to create like that great caramelization.

♪♪ And then we're gonna add in our squash.

So as far as like cleaning the dish, I really think the polenta is so gorgeous, but that's going to be like the backbone of the dish.

So that'll go in first.

And then we'll be able to garnish with our seared mushrooms, our squash.

And then we'll finish it off with the salsa macha just on top.

-I love that.

This is like taking a whole trip through both field and forest all in one dish.

-Yeah.

That's great.

-Look at that plate.

The polenta is the baseline.

The mushrooms are the rhythm, the squash is the melody, and the salsa macha is the horn line that lifts the whole thing off the table.

This is what dinner looked like on this continent for thousands of years.

No holiday feast in my Vermont is complete without something that came off an honest piece of land with a little hard work.

Earlier this season, I had the distinct honor of going out to ride the range with some great cowboys that are stewarding the land in Montana.

Raising cattle the old way on grass, on open range.

-I think nature needs us.

-Yeah.

-And I believe that we can help facilitate a much healthier world.

All we have to do is listen to what she's telling us.

-Ruminants weren't designed to eat grain.

They were designed to eat grass.

Putting a cow on grain is like running diesel through a gasoline engine.

Grass is what these animals were built for, and the meat tastes like the country it grew up on.

Earthiness, minerality, and honesty.

♪♪ So what I brought back here is a strip loin for Chef Zach.

So, Chef, what are you going to be doing for us today?

-Today we're going to go over a classic grilled strip steak.

With wild game meat and things that naturally just have little to no intermuscular fat, the addition of bone marrow compound butter is going to help get that rich, fatty taste you're looking for in a steak.

The way that these things are raised and lived their life is way better.

And we want to promote this a lot more than factory farming.

-I mean, this is actually what steak is supposed to taste like.

And the flavor is so much different, right?

It's so much earthier.

-I think it goes back to what meat was always meant to be in its natural form.

I like to cook it in a thicker side of steak, so that way we can have a good sear on the outside, nice medium rare on the inside.

Don't dry it out.

In this case we're going to be searing it and then finishing in the oven.

My opinion -- will give you the best finished product.

-Yeah.

-A lot of people wouldn't recognize this in its whole format.

But this is New York strip right?

-On the strip, you got the center part of the loin.

That's where all your meat is.

And then you have your fat cap.

I like to trim just a little off this.

-Okay.

-You won't have anything left on the plate after you've eaten the whole meal.

Everything's going to be consumable.

You just want to take just enough fat off.

With a piece like this, that's about as much as I'll go on it.

So it's pretty straightforward.

♪♪ -Sear hard, finish slow.

A hot pan caramelizes the surface.

The oven carries the inside up to temperature without bullying the outside.

That's how you honor a steak this good.

♪♪ You're also going to be adding a couple of other things, right?

I see romanesco here and fingerling potatoes.

So we're going to be putting that all together on one plate, right?

-Yeah.

And we're going to finish it with a wild blueberry balsamic gastrique.

That acidity is going to help cleanse the palate and also would be a good complement for that fattiness.

-It's really fun seeing this in this final stage where I was just riding with them a couple of months ago, out on the open range.

Even as a wild animal or as wild as we get a domesticated ruminant, you still see the marbling running through.

Those blueberries came from the same Maine coast as the mussels in the chowder.

So in two of tonight's five courses, you're tasting the same shoreline.

That's not a coincidence.

Everything on this plate is connected to a place, including dessert.

♪♪ I was down here a couple of weeks ago and enjoyed your chocolate budino, but we've been talking about how we might make that a little bit more wild.

And what we decided to do was to use some wild hawthorn, which grows prevalently around here.

Obviously not this time of year.

So what are we going to be doing today, Julie?

-We're going to be using the hawthorn as part of a jam that's going to go and complement the dish.

We're also using 70% dark chocolate from a really great co-op in Peru.

-And this certified fair trade?

-Yes.

-Wonderful.

We love that.

-Absolutely.

-Great.

-So we'll be melting that down with a little bit of cream.

Then we have some cookie crumbs that'll be the base of the budino with a little bit of butter.

And then we'll be doing a really fun chicory anglaise.

We usually use coffee at the restaurant.

So chicory was such a great wild substitution.

Why don't you start breaking up the chocolate and I'll start cracking some eggs?

-Wonderful.

No problem working with chocolate.

I'm kind of excited to taste this.

-Yeah, this one's really fun.

I get a lot of, like, banana notes.

Almost like a juicy sort of tart plum.

Yeah, it's really fun.

-Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Now that you just mentioned it, I get that.

-Isn't that wild?

-Get that plum.

Okay, I'm gonna shave a little bit of hawthorn while you're cracking some eggs here, Chef.

Hawthorn is one of the few wild citrus relatives we've got in the northeast.

It's actually in the apple family.

A cousin to the apple.

Bright, almost cranberry-like tang.

We've harvested these earlier in the season at the Marble House, shaking branches and cooking on an open fire.

Chicory grows like a ditch weed all over the country.

Most people walk past those blue flowers without realizing they're standing next to one of the best coffee substitutes nature ever invented.

The French have been using it for centuries.

New Orleans built a whole coffee culture on it.

-I'm just going to go ahead and add some sugar to my yolks.

Mix together, and then we'll slowly incorporate our chicory-infused cream.

-Oh, beautiful.

-So this is going to go back in the pot.

And then we're just going to pop this on the stove for another couple of minutes to thicken this up.

-Great.

I really love that this hawthorn was freeze-dried.

I mean, they can be actually kind of a hassle to work with, you know, fresh out of the field.

In this case, we usually peel an apple and then core it.

Leaving the peel on this actually is where a lot of the flavor is.

-This also has like a really nice acidity to it.

It really brightens up and cuts through some of the richness of the budino.

Our next step before these go in the oven -- what we're going to do is we're going to spoon these in, and then we'll just pack them down.

So as they bake, the butter will melt again and sort of firm up our crust.

-Now, are you gonna pour in some liquid chocolate to firm that all together?

-Yeah.

So that's the -- that's the actual budino part.

It's kind of a -- like a ganache mix.

It's very, very rich and decadent.

One of my favorite desserts to make.

-Yeah.

Beautiful.

I'm actually not familiar with -- Is budino your own invention or is that a classic?

-Oh, no, that's a -- that's a classic Italian dessert.

-Okay.

-Yeah.

-I've never had it before.

It was the first time.

♪♪ And there it is.

Five courses, five places, one table waiting in the next room.

And now we feed our friends and family.

There's a reason we gather around the table in the darkest part of the year.

It's the oldest story we tell ourselves -- that the cold can't reach us here, that the people we love are still within arm's reach, that winter is survivable if we survive it together.

Five courses, five places, one table.

The trout from a Vermont stream.

The chowder from a Maine cove.

The polenta from the seeds the Abenaki and Hopi people refuse to let die.

The steak from a Montana ranch where the cattle still walk where the buffalo used to roam.

And a desert built on a wild berry I shook from a tree and a chicory root I dug from a Vermont dish.

♪♪ What you're going to be eating tonight is a bunch of food that I foraged throughout the season.

One of the things that I wanted to talk about is why Vermont is so special.

As a state that has the most local, the most organic, and the most wild foods in the food system right now, we really are leading the way for the rest of the country.

And that word is getting out.

And so as part of this community, I just want to thank you all for continuing to support people that are doing it the right way.

Thank you, everyone, for being here.

I hope you enjoy dinner.

Alright.

Cheers.

-Cheers.

[ Glasses clink ] [ Indistinct conversations ] Every bite tonight is a thank-you note -- to a fisherman in Maine, to a cowboy in Montana, an Abenaki farmer in northern Vermont, a chef who said yes when I called.

This was season 1.

We met people quietly, stubbornly, beautifully refusing to let the old wisdom go, people who believe nature isn't something to be managed.

It's something to be listened to.

♪♪ The future of food in this country is going to look a lot like the past, only better, wilder, closer to home.

If we can combine all this ancient wisdom with modern ingenuity and technology, we not only have a chance to reinvent our food system, but to change the very course of humanity.

Because if we start caring about our food and the people who grow it, we not only take care of ourselves and our local communities, but we return to our rightful place as stewards of nature.

♪♪ From all of us at "Wild Foods," happy holidays, and we'll see you in the wild.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -"Wild Foods" is made possible by generous support from... And with support from... ♪♪ ♪♪