Eating Stinging Nettles

The limitations put up forces you to go hunt for smaller, and sometimes fringe restaurants, located off the beaten path run by passionate people.

I don't have the time to cook and ready-to-eat or frozen vegetarian meals just aren't a thing around here. I think if I went full veganism I'd starve.

A lot of the more recent examples of Polish cuisine are dishes originally invented out of poverty and made largely out of cheap ingredients and which now took a new form using stuff unheard of at the time because the real recipe is not to contemporary taste.

My favourite example of that would be cold cheesecake - originally made largely from cottage cheese, nowadays has mascarpone as the main ingredient.

Mascarpone! Hardly anyone knew what mascarpone even was in the 70s.

Most superfoods are what we ate when we were poor growing up. Nettles, collards, mustard greens, kale...

My opinion, the word superfood, gets people to pay a premium for cheap and easily commercially grown plants.

I have nettle tea every morning and now thinking about the standard black tea, I see that as "bland/boring". I admit it didn't appeal at first, but now I love the earthy taste, so maybe it's slightly acquired taste?

About every part is edible too: new leaves are sweet, old leaves are bitter, buds can be pickled, roots you can make teas and coffee substitute.

A few related plants are also good (e.g. wild chicory), and it's one of the easiest plants to identify.

I haven't tried nettles yet, mostly because people say it's bland and there's so much else to choose from. In particular, nettle season is also meadowsweet season, and that is incredibly good. It's in the same taste family as vanilla, almond and cinnamon but it's its own unique thing.

The problem is all the thin skin (ankles, wrists, lower leg/arm) that you are very likely to graze them with.

Apparently it's possible to make nettle rennet for coagulating milk into cheese, though it's not recommended for making aged cheeses.

I got spoilt for teas when I was contracting in Germany. Nettle was very common along with some other traditional teas, including one that was good for flu/fever that I can never remember.

- Harvest the younger leaves, remove the stems.

- Harvest before they go to seed, or remove all seeds.

- Make a tea from the leaves by soaking in hot water. Do not let the water boil or simmer with the leaves!

- Add a healthy portion of lemon juice. I'll use 1/2 to 1 cup for a 20L batch.

- Use brewing sugar, or invert your sugar.

- Choose a yeast that doesn't impart too much of its own flavour (I like ale yeasts, like for ciders).

  For me, the choice of yeast was key.

The real key though is stinging nettles just simply grow like crazy in your backyard (at least in Ireland) so it's a two birds with the one stone kind of deal, you're gardening as well as cooking. There is also the 'badass' feeling of eating something that previously was dangerous. The heat will denature any stingers in the soup.

Risking your throat closing up seems Darwinian.

People don't usually have an Epipen within reach?

His videos are incredibly interesting and fascinating

Also works as a pesto ingredient

Every time I go out for hotpot, I get as many greens as possible; I love boiling them down in a tasty broth and chowing down on an entire football field of vegetables, sometimes wrapped around a piece of meat. I could see adding them in here easily.

There are also a lot of dishes you can add a big handful of chopped, frozen spinach to for some additional nutrition. These would be another incredible option in scenarios like that.

Blending it down to add a more herby flavor to a puree, or to bulk up a pesto, or something along those lines could work well.

I've heard this before but I've never seen reliable evidence for it. I searched PubMed for "Urtica dioica oxalate" and found this study:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23009884/

The full text is paywalled, but from the abstract:

"Four examples of typical wild edible plants were evaluated (stinging nettle, sorrel, chickweed and common lambsquarters), and based on substantial equivalence with known food plants the majority of the bioactive components reported were within the range experienced when eating or drinking typical food stuffs. For most compounds the hazards could be evaluated as minor. The only precaution found was for common lambsquarters because of its presumed high level of oxalic acid."

There are also several animal studies suggesting a potential protective effect of stinging nettles against kidney stone.

Oxalic acid is a component of the toxin injected by the stinging hairs, but this is removed by cooking.

It's possible that there's confusion because older stinging nettle leaves grow cystoliths (hard mineral deposits in the leaves). Cystoliths are usually calcium carbonate. I'm not aware of any plant that produces oxalate salt cystoliths. If anybody has some hard evidence for the composition of stinging nettle cystoliths I'd like to see it, even though I personally only pick stinging nettles when they're in season and the leaves are still young.