FORAGING: wild asparagus

As you may know by now if you have been reading this blog, foraging is very popular in Le Marche region of Italy.
At Valle Nuova we collect all sorts of wild herbs, flowers, berries, sprouts and, last but surely not least, the amazing white truffle. One of the most popular plants that is easy to find in our countryside and that actually opens the foraging season after the long winter is wild asparagus. It looks and tastes similar to its cultivated varieties, only very thin and with a sharper deeper taste. It’s perfect for frittata or to eat with pasta (I specially like home-made tagliatelle with a sauce of evo, just a bit of onion if you like it, wild asparagus and parmesan cheese).
To be able to find wild asparagus you need to know the plant and then, once you have located it, look for the young shoots that are the bit you’re going to collect.
This is how the wild asparagus plant looks like (sorry it’s not a great photo!). Here you can see more scientific data about the wild asparagus (but actually there are asparagus plants a lot bigger than 70 cm… so do not be put off by size if you collect asparagus).

A couple of weeks ago I went wild asparagus hunting with some friends (a bit nearer the sea, since it was too early up here in the hills), this is the first one that we found… yes… they are usually bigger!

And these are some of the wild asparagus that we found: sorry no photo of the pasta they ended up with… too hungry after the walk to take a picture!