Winter Menu Planning with Preserved Michigan Wild Ingredients

Winter is the one season with essentially no fresh wild harvest in Michigan — the forest goes dormant, and foraging activity drops to nearly nothing until spring. That doesn't mean a wild-ingredient menu program has to pause for three months, though; it just shifts entirely to preserved and dried product.

What's available in winter

Dried mushrooms — morels, chanterelles, black trumpets — carry a kitchen's wild-mushroom program through winter without any fresh product involved, along with shelf-stable items like dried teas and herbs that were harvested earlier in the year and stored for exactly this purpose.

Planning ahead during the growing season

Since nothing new is coming in during winter, restaurants relying on wild ingredients through the colder months need to have secured dried and preserved product during the prior year's harvest seasons — another reason a standing, season-ahead ordering relationship with a supplier matters more than a reactive, order-when-needed approach.

A natural point to plan the year ahead

Winter's slower pace also makes it a practical time for a kitchen to sit down with a supplier and plan out the coming year's seasonal requests — spring morels, summer chanterelles, fall's rarer items — all at once, rather than reaching out fresh before each individual season.