Bread & Butter Pickled Poke
pickling recipe from Myrtle Molly Zimmerman, Chef Ouita Michel’s great grandmother. photos by Talitha Schroeder
Holly Hill founder and chef Ouita Michel inherited this recipe from her great grandmother, Myrtle Molly Zimmmerman. Myrtle and her husband Rufus Zimmerman (namesake of our Zim’s Café) moved to Wyoming during the Great Depression to rebuild their lives. Like so many others of their generation, they relied on pluck and resourcefulness to get through. Anything that could be used was, including plants like pokeweed, and nothing went to waste. And please see our tips at the bottom before picking and pickling your own.
Ready to start? Gather a hearty bowl full of poke shoots, picked from only the most tender plants. Mid-spring is the best time to pick, while the berries are still white and the stems still green.
Soak in cold water and mix around to get the crawlies out. You may need to do this a few times. Bring a pot of water up to boil, plop your poke in, let it simmer for ~1 minute. Pull poke out and dump it into a colander. Discard cooking water and refill pot with fresh water, bring to boil and blanch 2 more times, using fresh water each time. After the final blanch, rinse under cold water, gather shoots by the stem and cut into 1” pieces.
While waiting for your water to boil, get together the pickling liquid as follows:
2 cups sugar
2 cups apple cider vinegar
2 teaspoons whole mustard seed
1 teaspoon turmeric
2 teaspoons salt
4-5 whole cloves
1 bay leaf (we used a fresh one from the garden but dried works great!)
Combine all pickling ingredients in a pot, bring to boil and stir to dissolve salt and sugar. Remove from heat and let cool til safe to touch.
Pour liquid over the cut and blanched poke, put in the refrigerator and let sit for at least 24 hours before enjoying!
When preparing poke, proceed with caution and take heed of the following warnings:
Poke that is too mature to eat
All parts of the pokeweed plant are toxic, from roots to leaves.
Only harvest the smallest leaves from young plants (no more than two feet tall) in early to mid-spring; wearing gloves is advisable as the chemicals can be absorbed through skin contact.
Do not harvest if the berries or stems have started to change color from white (berries) or green (stems.)
Avoid plants growing along the roadside or near commercial or industrial sites.
Do not skip the blanching steps and refill the pot with fresh water each time.
Poke should not be consumed by the very young or old, pregnant people, or anyone with an underlying health condition.
Foraging Fools
Forager Storey Slone explores a local wildlife area with us, looking for edible wild plants and fungi. Along the way, she shows us that collecting and preparing wild-harvested products is a labor of love. A connection to the natural world and a reminder to be thankful for those things that are often invisible and yet bountiful in our daily lives.
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