Wild Harvest: Northwest Wildfoods Company

Washington State is justly famous for many things — among them, it’s beautiful landscape, including luxuriant woodlands and the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. Within these thickly-wooded regions grows a bounty of beautiful berries, including mountain blackberries and red and blue huckleberries. It is these berries (and related products) that form the very core of Northwest Wildfoods Company.

This small business likes to refer to their berries as being “naturally organic.” What does that mean? These berries are wild-growing, not cultivated. They are not treated with any kind of pesticides or fertilizers as they grow and ripen. In fact, there’s no human interference with their growth cycle at all until the moment they are harvested. So, although the berries are not certified organic, they are de facto organic. Make sense? Incidentally, if you’re looking for a job as a picker, you’d better be both hardy and brave. Not only are all the berries picked by hand, sometimes in challenging terrain, but Northwest Wildfoods Company reports that their pickers occasionally find themselves competing with indigenous critters for berries — including bears!

Wild hand-picked huckleberries are a big seller. Photo by Ben Amstutz, Creative Commons.

The berries may be flash-frozen and are available to consumers that way (frozen huckleberries are their best seller, in fact), but some are turned into deeply-hued syrups and jams. I have not tried the syrups, but the jams are truly special. It would be easy to lump these preserves in with other berry jams, but you shouldn’t make that mistake. Because these berries grow wild, they tend to be less sweet and more intensely flavored than their cultivated counterparts. And the organic sugar used to sweeten these jams is added with a careful hand, so that the berries retain their unique taste and there’s an overall “not too sweet” flavor.

Wild blue huckleberries & Wild Blue Huckleberry Syrup.

Wild red Huckleberries & Hoh River Red Wild Huckleberry Syrup.

But there’s more. Northwest Wildfoods Company also sells honeys in the same varieties as its jams and syrups (mountain blackberry and red and blue huckleberry). Unlike most honey sold today, these honeys are aged for at least one year. There’s a curious reason behind that. Pure honey crystallizes naturally over time. It’s not bad or spoiled when it crystallizes; you merely heat it gently for the honey to revert to a thick liquid. For centuries, unscrupulous honey sellers have adulterated their honey with sugar water or corn syrup, which increases the volume of what they have to sell and can therefore bring them more money. It can be difficult, even impossible, for home consumers to detect such adulterated honey. But honey doctored in this way won’t crystallize. By offering only crystallized honey, Founder Rick LaMonte, whose knowledge about honey and preserves seems encyclopedic, can guarantee that his honey contains solely what the bees and Mother Nature have put into it.

Wild Blackberries & Wild Mountain Blackberry Syrup.

Wild Olympic Blue Huckleberry Honey & Wild Mountain Blackberry Honey.

Obtaining these frozen berries, jams, syrups, and honeys is as easy as falling off the proverbial log (but much less painful!). Check the website for a full selection of wild things (don’t forget the gift packs!). Berries are great powerhouses of nutrition and fiber, and these products are a fine way to start off the New Year.