Foraging Arizona with Chef Brett Vibber — WildFed Podcast #143

WildFed Podcast — Hunt Fish Forage Food

Arizona is one of Daniel's favorite places on earth. He first started going while he was in his 20’s visiting a hot spring there several times a year, which was once the healing grounds for Geronimo and the Apache who rode and raided with him. Over the years he's gone often, from the Mexican border up to the Grand Canyon, from the high-altitude, forest canopies of the Sky Islands to the arid low-lying Sonoran desert. He's even spent a couple of winters in Sedona, which has to be one of the prettiest places in North America.

All the while, he's been passionate about wild foods — foraging there and experimenting with the unique ingredients found on that landscape. Yet somehow had never met Chef Brett Vibber of Wild Arizona Cuisine.

While we've known many casual foragers in Arizona, none of them have been professional chefs — so this interview was a treat, getting to talk with someone who not only forages these desert ingredients, but also cooks with them for a dining room full of guests. You learn a lot from folks who have to think about ingredients at scale, and in particular, efficient ways to harvest and process these foods. As well as ways of using them you just wouldn’t normally consider.

Though on different career paths, Brett and Daniel have a lot of overlap in their food philosophy, and this interview sounds a bit like two friends excitedly conversing about a hobby they both share.

Next time we're on that desert landscape, we'll be visiting with Brett. Learning about what’s in season and how he uses it. Far from the empty landscape that many people assume it is, he’s carved out a wild food niche in a place where water is the limiting factor, where the summer sun can rob you of your body's moisture, and where the dry nighttime air can kill you with hypothermia. In other words, Brett’s cuisine is forged in the fires of Arizona’s extreme climate. And that makes it all the more exciting.

It’s a place of sharp spines and venomous animals, of strongly psychedelic plants and even amphibians, a place where, not long ago, battles were waged to defend territory from invaders and to establish nation-states. Historic and also harsh in the extreme but also incredibly beautiful, giving rise to flavors found nowhere else.

This is foraging Arizona!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/143